“Nobody cares about your products except for you. They care about themselves” is how David Meerman Scott explains the key reason product pitching fails sales and marketing teams.
In a recent conversation with David, I had the opportunity to explore why go-to-market playbooks are such a powerful and different approach to revenue growth.
At their core, playbooks provide a team-based approach for managing all your buyer and customer interactions around how your product or service creates value, not your product itself.
They are not prescriptive “scripts” that can only be done one way. Instead, they provide frameworks that help go-to-market teams guide buyer conversations back to value and away from product pitching.
The go-to-market journey cuts across every aspect of the customer experience: the website, content, prospecting, sales/deal velocity, closing and expansion, customer success, and renewals.
Every phase of the buyer and customer journey needs to be holistic. It is anchoring, re-anchoring, or further exploring what your buyer values the most. It needs to be continuous across your internal teams.
Playbooks provide frameworks for:
> Authentic prospecting plays that invite a value-added conversation
> Discovery plays that surface a buyer’s goals, pains, and desired success
> Qualification plays that use “last 10 minutes” of each sales call to confirm buyer actions
> Stakeholder call plays that help a buying group prioritize and build a business case
> Sales to success plays that keep buyer value forefront as a new customer transitions to implementation
There are more than three dozen plays in a complete Revenue Acceleration Playbook – you probably won’t be able to implement all of them! So you’ve got to figure out which one or two revenue outcomes matter to you and organization and develop your own custom playbooks.