Revenue Playbook

Design

Your challenge:

Your sales team is growing, but everyone is doing something different, it takes longer to ramp new starters and quota attainment is dropping.

When your team was small you were involved in every deal. Your deep experience of your customer’s industry and the reason your company was founded meant every sales call felt like a partnership.

Now the sales team is scaling and your new reps don’t have that depth of experience. It feels like they are burning through great accounts and sitting on opportunities you’d have qualified out.

You know who your ideal customer profile is, and you have a list of target buyer personas - but what should your sellers do next?

If you don’t give them a clear revenue playbook to follow you will not be able to scale the sales team, achieve your revenue targets or reach the next funding milestone as planned.

Your outcome:

By the end of this 12 week engagement you will have a revenue playbook for your sellers to follow.

Your playbook will include two discreet plays that drive seller behaviour. These might be:

  • Industry focused

  • Geographical focused

  • Product focused

  • Competitor swap-out focused

  • SDR focused

  • AE focused

You will also have a “playbook of playbooks” that guides your internal team in creating future playbooks.

Your playbooks will be embedded in your sales enablement platform and targeted at opportunities based on CRM data to enable your sellers in the flow of their work.

Your sellers will have the guidance and coaching they need to be successful.

You will have a predictable and repeatable process to enable new starters on.

You’ll achieve your bookings goals and can focus on other areas of the business.

Who is this for?

This engagement is suitable for companies at Series A-D that are struggling scale up their sales process from founder, to single team, to multiple teams.

You are a founder, or revenue leader with overall revenue responsibility across marketing, sales and customer success.

If you don’t have overall revenue responsibility then introduce that person to me, as they will need to be the sponsor for this program - you can’t be successful trying to deliver it as a siloed function.

How long does it take?

12 weeks to have a playbook that books deals.

  • 4 weeks - Analysis of the current sales process, your content, your ideal customer profile and buyer personas.

  • 4 weeks - Define and prioritise play goals and agree subject matter experts, content, training and schedule.

  • 6 weeks - Create and publish content into the sales enablement platform, train and enable sellers, launch and run the initial play.

What is the process?

Diagnose the problem

  • Qualitative assessment (surveys and interviews across execs, individual contributors, customers, prospects, partners)

  • Quantitive assessment (metrics, targets, history, conversion rates, values)

  • Segmented results (region, team, channel, product, customer size)

  • Playback session

    • What is the situation?

    • What has changed and why?

    • Where is the main challenge?

    • What is the goal?

    • How will we know when we’ve got there?

Prioritise the options

  • Assess top opportunities for revenue plays that close deals

  • Typical options

    • Industry plays

    • Annual cycle plays

    • Buyer persona plays

    • Deal hygiene plays

    • Competive swap-out plays

    • Customer segment plays

    • Geographic plays

    • Upsell/Cross-sell plays

    • SDR/AE/AM focused plays

  • Prioritise with ICE framework

    • Impact

    • Confidence

    • Ease of implementation

Build the solution

  • Select 2-3 options to test

  • Customer Success and Support interviews

  • Customer and partner interviews

  • Subject matter expert interviews

  • Build required tools

    • Written content

    • Video recordings

    • Discovery questions

    • What Good Looks Like

    • External hooks/events

    • Enablement content

    • Training and coaching

    • Incentives/SPIFFs

    • Calling days

  • Publish

  • Enable the GTM team

  • Measure success and iterate

Who needs to be involved?

Sales plays are not a sales problem.

They are a company problem and need an aligned cross-functional team to fix it.

A common mistake is to think of a sales play as in inside out exercise - this is what we want sellers to say - so let’s just tell them what do to and leave them to get on with it.

But a successful revenue play provides external hooks and events grounded in the customer’s specific problems to give your sellers a warm market to call into.

You can only create these with the collaboration of your marketing and customer success teams.

 FAQs

  • The common term is a sales playbook - but I choose to use revenue playbook because this is not solely a sales challenge.

    A great playbook engages our entire revenue team, from marketing to sales and customer success.

  • There is no such thing as a single revenue playbook for a company.

    You need one for every unique buyer/seller combination.

    What an SDR needs to know, say, show and do to open up a first conversation in a healthcare company is totally different to what an AE needs to know, say, show and do to negotiate and close a deal in the same company.

    You’ll create many playbooks, and these will be targeted at your sellers directly based on their CRM data.

  • You need to be specific on what you want the seller to do with each play.

    You may create reactive sales kits, which are collections of information about a specific topic or role - ie. a competitor or product sales kit.

    You will also have proactive sales plays which are launched and run at specific times, “this week we are all focusing on our retail supply chain play”.

    These plays are most effective at impacting behaviour and revenue - but require much more effort to land well with your sales teams.

Is this right for you?

Wondering if the Revenue Playbook Design is suitable for your business?

  • How confident are you that your sellers are consistent in what they say to their prospects and seeing the same results as when your team was smaller?

  • How confident are you that your sellers can find the right content and guidance when they need it in the flow of their work?

If you are not confident, get in contact and we can discuss your current concerns and agree a suitable path forward.

Not ready to chat yet?

Download the sales playbook template