Sales playbooks are guides that contain information on and detail experiences regarding the most successful methods for selling your product. They aren’t static documents or online sites/tools; they are ever-growing repositories of tactics, experiences, strategies and whatever other content you think can help to improve sales effectiveness.
These tools ensure that mistakes that are made by sales staff early on are not repeated time and time again.
They also make sure that everybody in your inside sales team is reading from the same hymn sheet when approaching a prospect.
Best Practices
Having the information that is contained within an SaaS sales playbook to hand keeps your inside sales team on track with your company’s best practices. It enables them to see what has worked and to learn from previous successes.
Ideally, an SaaS sales playbook should aid in the identification of impediments to success and help your sales staff to focus upon the most profitable opportunities. Most best practices around sales palybooks include:
• Defining clearly “What you Sell”
• Defining clearly “Who you Sell to”
• Defining clearly “How you Sell”
“What you Sell” includes, definitions, value propositions, business pains-benefits and bold claims. It includes positioning, objection handling, story telling, references and white papers to name a few.
“Who you Sell to” includes, buyer and decision maker profiles and personnas, qualification and lead scoring tools, buying and decision process, market and competitive information and data and many more.
“How you Sell”, is a clearly defined Sales Process mapped to the buyer with sales tools, key activity metrics, close plans, how to handle a face to face meeting, online demos and many more.
Bring New Sales Staff Up To Speed
An SaaS sales playbook can reinforce a business’s sales process and improve an inside sales team’s effectiveness and productivity.
It can also ensure that new sales staff are brought up to speed as quickly as possible.
Not having tools like this causes more lost deals, inconsistency within the sales organization and poor sales forecasting to name a few. Remember time that is spent familiarizing staff with the best sales practices is time that could be spent generating profit. Therefore by completing an SaaS sales playbook, you will be saving your company money.
SaaS sales playbooks can increase the expertise of your sales staff, put in place practices that generate more income for your business and help you to avoid methods that have been proven to be unsuccessful. They are valuable assets that should not be ignored. Proper training and certification ensures the success of the investment. sales playbook is a critical toolset for successful SaaS Sales Teams.
Do you have a view on sales playbooks that you would like to share? If so then feel free to do so in the comments.
