Create Your Ultimate Sales Performance Playbook

After hiring and coaching over 1000 sales leaders and account executives, I have learned and refined how to achieve consistent sales performance and results. Typically, I collaborate with the CEO, CRO or the VP of Sales to create and execute their best practices focused Playbook.

If you want extraordinary sales performance, there are eight essentials that need to be developed. Next, competency is built and reinforced every week with your sales team.

Let’s first discuss the eight essentials and then how they are put into practice every day.

1. Acquire Talent  – Hire the Best

Most sales organizations have A, B and C performers. If you want extraordinary sales results, it starts with hiring the right talent. Most executives need a better way to recruit, filter and judge talent so that they end up with A performers. A great primer for hiring sales talent is a book by Bradford Smart titled Topgrading for Sales. I have applied these best practices to ensure I set the evaluation process instead of the recruiter or candidate.  For every position,  create a position scorecard so that you can assess the 10 competencies that will be required to execute this role.  We all look at resumes and prior track records of sales achievement. There are two addition filters that really help you make the right choice. First is to role play – have the candidate present to you as a prospective buyer. Next conduct a DISC assessment or equivalent to understand the candidate’s behavior tendencies such as drive, empathy and passion. It is often harder to assess sales talent because they are good at selling themselves – so you need a great talent acquisition process.

2. Develop Your Talent – Establish Your Foundation

Most sales executives focus their attention on understanding their solution or service. While this is excellent, it is better to start with understanding your buyer – their domain, challenges, motivations and how they want to evaluate and buy your service. Your sales process and steps in the sales process should enable and accelerate the buying process for your buyer. Great sales  executives are business consultants that guide their buyer through the buyer process.

Whether you use Salesforce, HubSpot or another solution as your CRM you want it to enforce the rigor and discipline with your sales process and help move every buyer smoothly from one step to the next. Each sales step should be tied to buyer accomplishment instead of sales activity and help you accurately forecast the sales opportunities that will close.  When the buyer says you have demonstrated your solution to them and it addresses all of their needs, you can move forward. Often, a sales executive demonstrates the solution and checks off the sales activity box without gaining agreement from the buyer to proceed.

As part of your sales playbook, you want to equip your sales team with messaging and positioning that resonates with your target decision makers. To get from tactical to strategic messaging I often create this messaging with a management team workshop and then validate it with the target audience through a rigorous survey. It helps eliminate guesswork and focuses your sales team’s engagement on what is important to decision makers in your target audience.

3. Win with Buyer Discovery – Win with MEDDICC

I do believe that every sales opportunity is won or lost in the discovery stage of your sales cycle. When you talk with a prospective buyer you need to uncover their pain and business challenges that you can solve. Most prospective buyers have a number of  pains or business challenges that you can help them address and it is extremely important that your discovery process uncovers all of them and the associated solution or service that you provide to address each. Once you have pain and solution you can close the loop by monetizing the value of addressing their issue.

An excellent structured way to conduct your buyer discovery is through the application of MEDDICC published by Andy Whyte. Each letter has meaning. M is for Metrics. E is for Economic Buyer. D is for Decision Criteria. D is for Decision Process. P is for the Process. I is for Implicate the Pain. C is for Champion. C is for Competition. R is for Risks.

For instance, if your solution helps them automate the collection and consolidation of their financial records across 200 locations this helps your buyer address a monthly manual headache that they experience every month. If it takes them 250 hours to perform this manual work every month with one of more accountants valued at $100/hour, you are saving them $25,000 every month with you solution. We have identified the pain, coupled it with your solution that automates the process and placed a value on it based on time saved of $25,000/month. If your solution costs $50,000 you offer a payback in 2 months.

4. Make Your Champion the  Hero – Get Emotional Attachment

Most sellers try to position and sell their solution or service based on the benefits that are logically delivered to the buyer. In other words, we are using the left brain to present the logical argument and rationale. However, there is something that trumps logic and that the right brain – emotion.

One of the most compelling and persuasive arguments that your sales execute can make to your buyer is to help make them the hero.  Everyone has a career and personal agenda. When your buyer understands that your solution or service will help them advance their career and personal agenda it becomes a powerful catalyst to advance your sale.

One of my clients sells planetariums. As I worked together with client, it became evident that their buyers had a passion or calling to share and educate their audiences on the wonder of  astronomy and space exploration.  We called their best clients, planetarium leaders and initiated a program to recognize every leader for their outreach and education to their communities. This resonated with the entire market and elevated the reputation, brand and status of every planetarium leader in this market. By making their client the hero, we recognized the achievement of their top clients and created a powerful magnet for their company within the planetarium community.

5. Expand Customer Investment – Add Value and Revenue

At every company, someone needs to “own” the customer. At smaller companies that may be the sales executives. At larger companies that may be an account manager.  Through my experience working with every company, there is an incredible revenue growth opportunity within your customer base. The solution or service that your customer needs to always larger than what they have already invested in with you.

For many customers, I help them create and implement their customer reconnect program. This enables their sales team to perform an Executive Performance Review at least once a year with every customer. It realigns both companies strategically and creates new revenue opportunities. When I worked with a document management and AI company in Atlanta, I helped them create and implement their reconnect program with their 150 customers and this alone generates a boost of 20% revenue growth year over year. Check out another blog of mine to lean more about this program https://www.revenuegrowthstrategy.com/how-customer-reconnect-translates-into-more-revenue/

6. Deliver the Required Volume and Quality of Leads

Earlier in my career I was fortunate to build extraordinary B2B sales teams, but I quickly realized that to reach their potential, I needed to generate the right volume and quality of leads so they could be efficient and close all available business.  This sent me on a quest to identify and in many cases create the most effective demand generation best practices in the industry. I have built and delivered this demand generation engine to many B2B companies so that they can scale their revenue attainment and scale the sales distribution channel to exceed sales goals every year. I address how to build this engine in another blog https://www.revenuegrowthstrategy.com/more-leads-better-leads/.

In addition to marketing, it is the sales organization’s responsibility to create 5-20% of the sales opportunities through outbound campaigns. By creating and applying a focused Account Based Selling (ABS) program, you have the opportunity to quickly scale your sales team’s capacity to create exceptional leads and opportunities.

7. Equip the Sales Team for Success – Give Them the Tools they Need

Today there is the buying process and the sales process. Which is more important today?

I would say that it is the buying process. Today’s buyer is savvier and more sophisticated than ever before so they often have an idea on how they want to learn, evaluate and buy. If the seller superimposes their sales process on top of the buying process, they can create friction and resistance that slows down the buying process. Instead, when you understand the buying process and your buyer, you can guide them through the buying process and accelerate your sales cycle.

Below is the buying process for one of my clients. At each stage we determined what buyer offers would help the sales team address buyer need and accelerate the sales process.

You can think of these buyer offers also as sales tools because they represent the information, offers and tools that need to be exchanged and shared at each stage of the buying process. Once I create their tools for the sales team, the next step is to role play with them to present to a prospective buyer. This ensures full use and understanding of how to use every buyer offer. If you do not role play every week with the sales team about how to present and use for every buyer offer, they quickly become content that it is thrown into a repository that is seldom visited again.

8. Accelerate Your Sales Process

Many companies have adopted a subscription pricing model or one which has smaller or incremental commitments. In order to generate the same or more revenue contribution, it necessitates that your sales team must significantly increase their productivity and reduce their cost of sales. In addition, I help companies create sales accelerators that will help to significantly accelerate the sales process. Let’s look at 4 examples.

Your Sales Driven Website

Your website should perform all of the upfront education and preference setting with every visitor and prospective buyer. It should also convert visitors into prospects for your sales teams. I help companies migrate from an informational website to a sales driven website so that your buyer is guided through the buying process and your sales cycle is shortened. This innovation alone can help you reduce your sales cycle by up to 50%. Here is the blog post that covers this innovation in greater detail https://www.revenuegrowthstrategy.com/how-to-shorten-every-sales-cycle-by-50/

Buyer’s Guides

Most buyers do not know how to evaluate a proposed solution or service or know what capabilities they should focus on that will determine their success. A Buyer’s Guide helps your buyer learn how they should learn and evaluate your type of solution or service and how they should prioritize their criteria. It is easy for any buyer to get lost in a myriad of data or focus their attention on the wrong criteria. We also need guides and experts who can show us the way.

Many sales cycles also get stuck after the proposal and before the decision to buy. Often, the missing ingredient is a compelling business justification or ROI to buy. A ROI Guide and model will help your champion create their business case to invest in your solution of service. The ROI Guide outlines this process and presents client examples. Often the biggest competitor in the sales process is “do nothing” because there is not a strong and compelling business case to proceed forward.  One final point – most buyer’s will not know how to put together a business justification for your solution or service so you can help them build and deliver a realistic and validated business case.

Socialization

Often, when you are selling to a company or enterprise there are many individuals that are directly or tangentially involved in the buying process. You need to help you champion socialize the value of your solution or service to all of these influencers and decision makers.

There are a number of offers that I recommend and often I help them get these created and delivered. Explainer videos and recorded demonstrations are an excellent way to present value to everyone involved on the team. Most executives have time to watch a minute high impact video. The delivery of relevant customer or industry case studies will also help you accelerate your sales process. These case studies validate the value that you can deliver and reduce the risk associated to proceed forward and commit to this path. Executives look to their peers to understand how they too can leverage industry and solution best practices.

Closing Strategies

The key to effective closing strategies is helping your buyer envision the value and ROI that they will receive with your solution or service and mitigate the risk that can often occur with project or programs that don’t get implemented or delivered.

One of the innovations that can help you accelerate the close is a Quick Start Program. This program specifically spells out how you can demonstrate success for your customer in 30-90 days. Many customers have been burned by large upfront purchases or botched implementations, so they are cautious and want to walk before they run. A well-conceived Quick Start Program presents the outcomes or results that your buyer will receive in a short period of time; this is different than a proof of concept (POC) that may include criteria that cannot be met or addressed in a short period of time. You need to set yourself up for success.

Another innovation is to present a frictionless onboarding program so that your buyer understands how your customer success organization will implement or onboard your customer with your service or solution. This program will help mitigate risk, eliminate ambiguity and present a prescriptive process to value realization.

If you enjoy and benefit from this blog, let’s get together and discuss how you can achieve extraordinary sales performance through the application of these 8 essential competencies. You can set up a time to talk on my calendar https://calendly.com/rjurkowski/60min.