The Magic of Third Generation Sales Playbooks

Do you have any 8-Track or cassette tapes lying around?  What about CDs and DVDs?  CDs and DVDs are a generation old, cassettes are two generations old, and 8 tracks are three generations old.  While vinyl is four generations old, it is making a comeback with a niche audience of audiophiles.

Although we stream nearly all of our media now, movies, television series and music are stronger than ever.  It’s only the method of watching and listening that have changed.

Take sales playbooks.  At Kurlan & Associates, we used to spend months writing sales playbooks for clients and they had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the work product.  And the worst part was that unlike music, TV and movies, the playbooks would not be used.  They would sit on a shelf, collecting dust, and later, sit on a hard drive or in the cloud, with very few eyeballs paying attention.  What a waste!

Playbooks are an important part of the development of a sales team and have the potential to represent an organization’s legacy.  That happens when a system, process, methodology, strategy, plan or, in this case, a playbook, survives the people who began the initiative.

While playbooks remain important, getting the sales team to engage and adopt remains the challenge.  Simply going from generation one (binder) to generation two (digital file) doesn’t solve the ambivalence problem.

Kurlan was a very early adopter of https://Membrain.com/baseline-selling  which, when it was introduced around ten years ago, was the most innovative CRM application in existence.  The application focused first on opportunities, pipeline, and guiding salespeople through the company’s sales process.  It was easy to customize (I could do it), provided the most popular reports out of the box, and supported the complex sale.  Since its introduction, they added account growth, prospecting, content, playbooks and most recently, coaching.

While the built-ins are great, I believe the customizable playbooks are the most valuable of all.  Why go through the trouble of paying tens of thousands of dollars for a document nobody will use, when you can embed the playbook into CRM, and more specifically, directly into each milestone of the sales process?

One of the biggest challenges that companies have with their salespeople is their tendency to “wing it” instead of following the company’s sales process.  Built-in playbooks, by milestone, not only direct salespeople to the next milestone in their sales process, but playbooks also support their training and coaching by reminding them how to achieve the milestone.  The strategy and tactics are supported by content, which can include articles, white papers, videos, slides, and/or collateral, which can be consumed by the salesperson or provided to prospects.

Providing access to playbooks and content in this fashion is a game-changer as it completes the integration cycle.  Now, the training and coaching you pay for, playbooks (strategy and tactics), sales process (stages and milestones), sales methodology (how we execute the sales process), opportunities (sales process facing), pipeline (stage focused) and reporting (win/loss analyses, time in stage, forecasts by probability and/or scorecard, pipeline health, bottlenecks, etc.) are all integrated into the same application.

I’m not attempting to write a commercial promotion for Membrain but it’s beginning to read that way.  I won’t apologize for it though because this is where it’s all heading.  An application like this is a sales operations best-practice. 

The primary reason companies invest in CRM is to have access to accurate pipeline data in real time.  Now consider that most companies NEVER have the accurate, real-time data because their salespeople hate the big, clunky, difficult-to-navigate CRM the company purchased.  The data is only as good as salespeople living in their CRM, and if you must beg your salespeople to update the CRM every week, you’ve failed to achieve the stated goal.  Salespeople LOVE to use Membrain because THEY get value out of it and when your salespeople value it and use it, you finally have real time data you set out to get.

Case closed.