There may be a few excellent ways to sell and service your product or solution but there are definitely not 10, 20 and certainly not 50.
If you do not have a Sales Playbook, chances are that your sales reps are each figuring out their own “best way” to sell your product. The likelihood of them sharing this information is low as is the chance that each has found the optimal process for each of your key selling steps. How do you get everyone on the same page?
One suggestion I have is to create a Sales Playbook with and for the team. Jack Daly has written a helpful book to this end – The Sales Playbook for Hyper Sales Growth if you would like to go into more depth than this high level step.
For those who want to dive right in, I have provided a template based on Daly’s guidance to get you started on the Resources page on my site. Look for Execution #4 under Business Resources. It is not the ultimate and universal playbook so feel free to add to/subtract from it as is makes sense for your sales process.
IMPORTANT: This Playbook should be designed to sell primarily to your core customer – not every customer – so consistency is useful and beneficial.
How to get started
- You can write a first draft and ask the team to clarify and improve it with their experience, or
- You can assign parts to each sales person that you feel/know has the highest chance of providing the best possible information to start with.
Either way, the goal is to get the first draft written, have each sales person use it and update it as a group to keep improving it. Once it is to a point where it cannot be improved much further, you can incorporate it into your new sales rep training.
I have also created a similar playbook (Customer Advocate Playbook) for what to do after you earn the customer to help turn them into raving fans. I leverage some content from Joey Coleman’s book Never Lose a Customer Again. as well as my own experience.
The same guidance applies but you will likely want to involve your customer success team as well as any “farmers” on the sales team.
You will find a link to this document in the same section as the Sales Playbook.
Please contact me should you have any questions or if you want to recommend some improvements to either document.
Bill – Multi-certified Growth Coach, Certified in NeuroLeadership, Predictive Index Certified Partner
(bill@catalystgrowthadvisors.com; www.catalystgrowthadvisors.com)
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