Increase your sales success with playbooks

The quickest way to increase sales bookings is to improve your win rate and conversion metrics. Each has a multiplier effect on your company’s sales bookings. Let’s run some numbers. A software company running at a 25% win rate, where 30% of their ‘leads’ get through marketing and create opportunities from these leads 30% of the time.

Simply increasing the win rate from a not horrible 22% to really decent 30% impacts the sales bookings by a significant 36%. Adding more focus to your lead generation and outbound efforts could increase your bookings by a whopping 180%.

Look at the impact sales bookings have on tweaks to conversion and win rate.

How can you make this impact on your business?

1) Improve deal execution and velocity by running plays

Buyers are human and make emotional decisions.  The relationship buyers have with your company is highly influenced by the quality of interaction, and timely response.  Too often, inattentive reps lose deals to their competitors.  On top of this, each rep in your team cultivates their own selling motion.  (Old habits: “This is what works for me”). The result is that the buyer has varying experiences with your company depending on who they are working with.  On-boarding new reps also become difficult because the best selling process isn’t a documented playbook that is kept up to date. So, it’s really hard to create scale, and really difficult to manage a team as a team.

You can change all of this by simply running playbooks to guide selling motions. Playbooks automatically set up a series of activities that a rep should complete at the right time and the right step. They create consistency and are very helpful to reps that lose track of the next steps. Your reps are probably working 20-40 opportunities at any given point, probably double that number of nurtures.  Give them a helping hand with playbooks.

The example below shows a playbook that is running on an opportunity, though of course, you can run plays at any stage in the buying process including ‘Prioritization’ and ‘Qualification’ stages (That’s Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall language).

2) Keep track of the plays by using playbooks

Inevitably your sales leader is focusing too much of their time and energy at the bottom of the funnel, the stuff that’s about to close. Why? Well, I’ve become convinced it’s because it’s the only time in the buying journey that they have data they can see and can half-trust. It’s really hard for sales leaders to get leading indicator data from their teams.

Score another point for running playbooks

Playbooks create selling motions that automatically create activities. You can easily keep track of things the team is or is not doing. It creates great coaching moments if you see the necessary steps not being performed, or the quality of those completed tasks not being up to snuff.

By focusing at the top of the funnel; on things like activities, lead conversion, opportunity creation, and opportunity velocity, you’ll be in a better place for next quarter’s targets.

3) Focus where you win!

Makes sense right? Sales need to sell the inventory that is in stock. It’s the only way to scale. Losing 85% of your new logo deals in the Distribution industry? Get out of there. Is distribution a strategic focus for the business? You need to pass your data to the product team and fix it.  Winning 40% in the Services industry? Double down! This is a pretty simple example, but most organizations I see are not analyzing their win rate by industry, cohort, region, rep, or product.  You need to. The reason you aren’t analyzing this information is most likely because you aren’t collecting the data or being able to report on it.

Conclusion

Sales can’t win alone, the team needs help from the rest of the company. They need help from marketing, product, and services to ensure they have the right product, the right pricing, the right tools to win, and happy customers to carry the flag. However, the thing that sales can control is conversion and win rate. Making small improvements will have a big impact even when you can’t double your sales team, marketing budget, or build the next great feature.

Need Help?

TekStack’s software improves sales operations. We can help your business drive the right sales motions, build playbooks, and give you the reporting you need to increase results. If you are interested in learning more, contact us.