Winalytics is a funny name. But it captures perfectly what makes a top sales team different.
Top teams find and act on their “win” or success patterns a lot faster than middling teams. And, they use playbooks to make these win patterns repeatable.
We all live in competitive and ever-changing markets with new competitors, new technologies, and new disruptive trends.
Top teams understand sales acceleration is a process. They use playbooks to win faster by capturing, sharing, and continually iterating their understanding of:
> Target buyers, both their most likely Champion and decision groups
> Goals and value positioning that create engagement with different buyers
> Discovery questions that guide them to a buyer’s goals, pain, and desired outcomes
> Customer stories with the strongest peer social proof
> Competitive positioning against new and existing alternatives
Playbooks are not scripts. They offer a framework that balances a teamwide shared approach with each sales team member’s individual style and voice.
Think of playbooks as a never-ending story. To win faster, the playbook framework needs to be continually updated with new information on your buyers and markets:
- What goals and discovery questions are bringing energy into the conversation?
- What positioning talk tracks are differentiating and converting?
- What stories and social proof are landing?
There are three sources of information you can use to update your playbooks:
- Buyer and customer stories from the field – It’s the on-going buyer and customer conversations that usually offer the best insight into what is working and not working. Shared playbooks create an easy framework to capture new learnings out of your on-going sales conversations.
- Within team learning – Without written down plays, it’s really “everyone for themselves” the old heroic model of selling. Playbooks move a sales team beyond a cacophony of individual voices. They turn each sales team member’s styles and language into a natural set of A/B tests that can help refine discovery and positioning strategies.
- Cross team learning – Finally, it’s not just sales, but also marketing and customer success teams that are in constant engagement with buyers and customers. There should be regular opportunities for marketing and sales to review personas, goals, and discovery strategies that turn more MQLs into SQLs.
Every company has a different market and buyer environment. But, we all are operating in market environments that have become a lot more competitive.
Playbooks can help your whole sales team learn the positioning and competitive strategies that make it possible to win more and win faster.
