Sales is a contact sport so prepare for battle

Sales is a contact sport so prepare for battle.

The biggest step change in sales performance I’ve experienced came with adoption of competitor playbooks.

It’s easy to find books, articles, webinars or threads that will tell you the one thing you need to do to ‘crush it’ every single day in sales. Luck and hard work rarely get a mention, but I guess you can’t sell those as a service!

The playbooks I first encountered were built and maintained with such intelligence, creativity and rigor, the sales team quickly saw improvements in qualification and speed of decision making, internally and by the prospect, all of which triggered an improved win rate. This was particularly true with key or strategic accounts where named competitors were active and often incumbent.

Reflecting on the lessons learned from that experience, here are 5 key factors in the success of the competitor playbooks.

Structuring the competitor playbook

Decide if the playbook will address a competitor generically or if there is merit in segmentation by capability, vertical or geography. The right answer should reflect the ideal prospect profile and the business issues you are proposing to solve.

The objective of the playbook is to create competitive advantage by arming the sales force with references, evidence and insights enabling them to coach a prospect how and why they embrace solutions only you can deliver.

Keep the playbook headings simple to understand:

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As prospecting becomes increasingly digital and arm’s length it is easy to forget that sales is a contact sport and there are many competitors and obstacles to overcome for each project spend. Forcing the best brains to focus on content and resources to address these headings is a smart way to add rocket fuel to a prospecting or sales plan.

Building the content

Having established the structure of the playbook, the nextstep is to create the inventory. This is a significant job which will need the activesponsorship of a senior company figure and a Project Manager to ensuresystematic and diligent roll out, adoption and maintenance.

The content should not simply be a list of ‘stuff’ the salesteam search through to fill a gap in a prospect meeting agenda. After initialcompliance they will revert to their old ways. The content should clearlyaddress some or all of a four-point agenda:

• Create reasons to call
• Enable the company, product and salesperson to be distinctive
• Evidence how you solve a valuable problem
• Make it easier for the prospect to buy

There are 3 primary sources of content:

Existing materials

It’s likely that large amounts of content, built over time, already exists but is spread across multiple physical locations, cloud and local drives, notebooks and in the heads of your tribal influencers – the engineers, product and marketing managers and, of course, salespeople who are most involved in sales campaigns.

It’s inevitable you will find lots of duplication. This isan opportunity to rationalise the inventory and, after an initial amnesty, thesedecisions should be ruthless.

Experience and lessons learned in the field

Survey and then interview salespeople and other customerfacing colleagues to understand pipeline themes for evidence of where, how andwhy... 1) deals are won or lost against named competitors 2) deals get stuck 3)deals are qualified out or 4) deals end with ‘no decision’.

This exercise will be enhanced with a review of current andhistorical CRM data and reporting.

Other great sources of content, insights and ideas includetechnical authorities and colleagues hired from competitors, partners orcustomers. Win / Loss reviews are significant sources of learning and, if theyare not already part of the sales operating model, this is a great opportunityto embed them.

Live materials from the marketplace

There are numerous channels, people and industry sources who create and share content for their own purposes which can add to and update existing materials and give the salespeople new ‘reasons to call’.

Great sources include internal or external PR people, tame journalists, industry or financial analysts, investors or the finance team who will have access to sources of key business data about the competitor.

General news sources from the web can be useful but should be treated with caution. They are often curated and distributed by parties with vested interests, including the competitor themselves, and so much content is syndicated that care must be taken to qualify what is credible and what is not.Remember an active buyer will be seeing and hearing the same content.

Ensuring impact

Including all customer facing colleagues in the build exercise establishes a team wide focus on competitive strategy and encourages the development of intelligent questioning and listening. The high-quality content inventory being created will encourage salespeople to pursue competitive differentiation at a product and personal level in the eyes of the prospect and create a platform to influence their thinking at different stages of the sales cycle and this is a topic that can be challenged and supported in sales meetings and deal reviews.

Consideration should be given to how the inventory addresses the perceptual preferences of the sales team and their prospects. A mix of resources that are visual (slide decks, videos, info graphics and reports), auditory(recordings, podcasts) and more kinaesthetic (workshops, handouts, testimonials) will create an engaging and influential body of work.

The ultimate measure of performance is, of course, sales results. Competitor playbooks will impact a number of performance levers that deliver results including...

·      Reduced time spent onboarding new hires

·      Reduced ramp time for new sales reps 

·      Demonstrable alignment of sales and marketing

·      Accelerated learning across disparate territories(geographic or vertical)

The biggest impact on the front line will come in deal and account planning activities where efforts to challenge and refine a prospecting or sales action plan based on market and competitor insight will be rewarded.

Driving adoption?

Support for the creation and maintenance of competitor playbooks should not be regarded as voluntary. The project should have a clear mandate from the top, even having the CEO make calls to leading contributors, especially those whose support is influential in specific disciplines or social groups.

There should be no exceptions! High performing sales reps may claim relief due to their commitment to the sales effort, but the objective of the exercise is to enable high performance by all salespeople which makes the contributions of high performers the highest priority. This is a cultural challenge, not just a ‘sales’ challenge, and appointing an owner does not remove the obligation of the leadership team to make their support explicit.

Don’t allow ignorance to hinder progress. Some will claim there are no clear competitors (in which case let’s challenge if there is a market for the product or service!), be tempted to ignore or deny bad news and avoid learning lessons or assume a couple wins against a named competitor is evidence the team can relax. These blind spots will often be the shadows where the greatest insights will be found.

To encourage adoption, ensure the role of the competitor playbook in successful sales campaigns is prominently voiced in town halls, sales comms channels and trainings.

Maintaining the playbooks

Competitor playbooks should be part of the sales operating model. New content is likely to appear on a regular basis and shared in realtime. The curated elements of the playbook (win/loss reviews, market analysis, customer facing interviews) should be updated on a quarterly cycle and included in sales kick off events.

The playbook should live where your salespeople do including the ability to access and use the content on any device in any location. That might mean CRM functionality, an app from your CRM ‘app store’, dedicated playbook tools such as Veelo, Seesmic or Qvidian or content management tools like Atlassian’s Confluence or Google Sites. Collaboration tools could also be put to use and there is nothing wrong with well organised folders on a shared drive! Review the utility of existing tools and platforms as a first step and focus the smartest people on content creation.

Identify and agree key metrics against which you can relate the impact of the playbooks. Many factors influence sales success but sales cycle length, win rates, and new-hire ramp time can all be associated with great competitive sales materials and help identify places where more work is needed.

Margin notes...

There is no barrier to getting a competitor playbook in place. Productivity gains will quickly offset the effort being invested. Start with a rapid summary of recent and forecasted results and pipeline to decide the highest priority and have the project team join pipeline and deal reviews to better understand the challenges, the gaps and the fastest opportunities to make a difference.