Training & Development
It is vital to the organization that you look at how your company provides ongoing training and development. These should be two separate activities, and your playbook should manage these separately
Training is meant for your Reps, it is reactive and should focus on, Your Product, The Buyers Journey, The Customer Journey, Your Market Landscape and Your Competitor. It should be designed to develop added skills in your Reps and meet the present needs of the team. Your training should leverage your Sales Portal, and help your team learn new information, new methodology and refresh their existing knowledge and skills.
Your playbook should have a list of the need-to-know modules broken into ‘bite-sized’ chunks. Do not make these training sessions long and tedious. Create and curate short 10-15-minute videos on how-to; prospect, discovery call, objection-handling, and closing. If you use PowerPoint slides, then keep them short less than 30 seconds per slide.
Development is meant to support a career path for your Sales Rep(s). This is a pro-active process and is meant to develop the total personality. This is a continuous process, and it will support and meet the future need of an employee and the company. This is the development of soft-skills should focus on Communication, Teamwork, Problem Solving, Time Management, Attitude, and Work Ethic and Adaptability/Flexibility
Talent Management Tools
- Quarterly Review /annual review
- Development Planning
- Skills assessment
- Sales Portal
- 9 Box
Ongoing Training Calendar
- Objectives, Events, Frequency
- Example: Annual all-hands training, Biannual industry training, quarterly manager training, weekly lunch and learns, etc.)
Sales Tools
In the playbook you will describe your Selling Tools (Organized by sales stage), Demand Creation, Qualification, Discovery, Develop Solution, Proposal, Negotiations, Selected, Closed. Remember your tools should improve your team’s performance metrics and automate tedious tasks.
Description of Sales Tools
Account-based Sales & Marketing: also known as ABM or key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing based on account awareness in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. Account-based marketing is typically employed in enterprise-level sales organizations.
Analytics: This is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics.[ It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns towards effective decision making. It can be valuable in areas rich with recorded information; analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming, and operations research to quantify performance.
Buyer Enablement: This is the provisioning of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary to make a purchase.
Communication/Conferencing: Are the tools for Connecting and communicating with prospects and customers and is a critical part of sales enablement, engaging customers on their own term.
Content Sharing and Management: Content management (CM) is the process for collection, delivery, retrieval, governance, and overall management of information in any format. The term is typically used in reference to the administration of the digital content lifecycle, from creation to permanent storage or deletion. The content involved may be images, video, audio, and multimedia as well as text.
Contract Lifecycle Management: It is the way to centralize contract storage, strengthen compliance, and automate the creation, execution, and management of any type of contractual agreement. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) automates and streamlines contract processes during key stages.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: This is the process of managing interactions with existing as well as past and potential customers. It is one of the many different approaches that allow a company to manage and analyze its own interactions with its past, current, and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers’ history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and driving sales growth.
Data Networks Contact Enrichment: Contact data enrichment brings publicly available data together to build a richer profile of your customers. With several data-points feeding into your CRM and prospecting efforts, you can better qualify leads, tailor more personalized messaging, and supply a better experience to your customers.
Email Management: A sales engagement platform that offers email automation, for Prospects and customers.
Performance Management: This is the process of ensuring that a set of activities and outputs meets an organization’s goals in an effective and efficient manner. Your Performance management tool is often used in collaboration with training and recognition as well as commission tools.
Sales Engagement: Sales engagement can be defined as the interactions that take place between a buyer and seller and can be measured in time and touchpoints. For example, a buyer’s view time on a presentation or webinar, or whether he or she viewed or clicked on an email. These are measurements of sales engagement.
Lead Generation, Productivity, Prospecting: Supports sales performance and lead pipeline growth, accelerates prospecting activities and could provide identification of buyer personas most likely to engage your company.
Sales and Market Intelligence: At its core, market intelligence uses multiple sources of information to create a broad picture of the company’s existing market, customers, problems, competition, and growth potential for new products and services. Sources of raw data for that analysis include sales logs, surveys, and social media, among many others.
Recognition
Description of Program(s)
In your playbook, you should have a method to recognize your top sales performers in a way that keeps them motivated and eager to do even better in the future? You need to set up the qualification rules, the timing of the program, and then incentives awarded. You can leverage things such as; Presidents Club, Rookie of the Year, Rep of the Quarter, Top performer, the Biggest increase in sales, Expansion into a new market, Number of sales of a new product line, Largest Upsell in the Quarter, etc.
The Mini Playbooks
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this post, your Sales Operations Playbook is your “Primary Playbook”. As part of your Sales Operations processes, you should create and maintain “mini playbooks” for your organization. Let us take a moment to look at the A2A or Awareness to Advocacy and how Sales Operations supports the teams.
Thank you for stopping by, I look forward to your comments.
Mark
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