4 Best Practices for Building Sales Playbooks

[0:04] This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom.

[0:21] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, I will share with you ideas and insights around building out playbooks for your sales team that will create full funnel freedom. The Full Funnel Freedom Podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary. Be part of our group at the 2023 Sandler Summit in Orlando, March 16 and 17. Go to hamish.sandler.com slash Orlando for more details. Before we get to today's content, I want to give a shout out to those of you who have supported the podcast since the very beginning, and specifically those of you who have written reviews. I'm going to read one from a user, V Pearson. Headline was brilliant, enduring, succinct. This podcast is so easy to digest. Hamish delivers vital knowledge, training, and wisdom without any filler. His content is relevant and concise based on years of sales and leadership experience. I worked with Hamish in the early days of our sales careers, and there is no one I would trust more for guidance. So thank you, V. Pearson, for your kind words. I very much appreciate it.

[1:36] All of the reviews that have been written so far, and we'll be reading more on future episodes. If you would like to have a shout out on a future episode, do write us a review and it will be read on a future podcast. Getting into the meat of our content today, playbooks. Playbooks are a hot topic, especially with sales leaders, because it has been recognized that all successful teams teams have playbooks. And in addition to supporting the existing team in becoming more effective and creating full funnel freedom in your organization, playbooks also support onboarding and reducing time to self-sufficiency.

[2:22] And one of our key goals as leaders is to reduce the time to self-sufficiency for all of our new hires. Now, self-sufficiency means that that new hire can go out and execute their role on their own. They don't need us sitting over their shoulder or joining into their video calls to make sure that they're following our process because we know that they've got a solid playbook locked down. Now, playbooks can also sound very daunting. I've had lots of conversations with sales leaders who, when I bring up the idea of playbooks, they kind of look like Chief Brody in Jaws when he first sees the shark and the camera zooms in on his face and his eyes are all wide. And I am not a mind reader, but it seems to me that they are thinking, how the heck do I do that? That sounds like a gigantic task. And it could be, but my good friend Karen Miracle said at the recent Sandler Summit in 2022, 22, the place that's where you create a playbook from is, is one thing. So create one document or create one video or create one audio file and you've got a playbook and then you can build from there. Building a playbook is about taking baby steps. It's not about going off for a three day offsite and coming down from the top of the mountain with your playbook carved on tablets. it. It is a living document. And I'm going to touch on more about that later.

[3:51] So what we teach our clients is there are four best practices for creating a playbook. First best practice, checklists are better than scripts.

[4:03] We feel really good when we write out a really awesome script that we give it to our salespeople, but they're not giving it to the prospect. And in a previous role before I got into the Sandler Network, we had a new hire inside sales rep who was given the script and given the training on the script. And their first day on the, on making phone calls, they were over overheard to say, good morning, name.

[4:30] Obviously didn't create a lot of rapport with the prospect who answered the phone. So giving our people checklists gives them freedom to get to checking the box in their own way, but they have at least guidance as to what boxes need to be checked. And as leaders, one of our other priorities is to create clarity with our people in terms of what information we We need them to gather in order to effectively qualify. Second best practice, video and audio are better than text. This is also where the overwhelm of creating a playbook can come in because we think we have to create this giant tome of information, which is probably out of date as we are even writing it. Well, also, most human beings are visual communicators. And even if you do a video and someone is auditory, well, they can listen to the audio and not actually watch the video, which is what one of my former colleagues does. And I quite frankly do as well, because I don't necessarily need to see someone talking.

[5:34] I just need to hear the words that they're using. So using video and audio way more effective at building a playbook. And it also allows us to capture best practices, which gives a stroke to the person who we record the video of, you know, hey Hamish, I see that, you know, you've got a really awesome introduction when you're making a prospecting call. Can we record that and put it in our playbook for our best practices? Also, it reduces the time to self-sufficiency for our new hires because they can literally get the best practices. They don't have to go out and make it up on their own. They can see what's come before and then iterate on it and make it their own, but at least they have a starting point to go from. Best practice number three, I mentioned this earlier, let the playbook live, especially anything that got created.

[6:28] Pre-pandemic is potentially out of date. And even if it's not out of date, we probably need to adjust it in some way. You know, this happened with events, you know, conferences and things like that, that got shut down because we weren't able to meet in the same physical space, but we shifted online, except the conference was essentially an online skin over what was done in physical space, which ended up not working out very well. And I've noticed conference organizers are starting to adjust and making real virtual conferences instead of trying to copy paste a in-person conference into a virtual space. So we want to regularly ask our team members, especially our newer ones, if the examples in our playbook are current. And if not, But we can respectfully challenge them to create updated examples. We don't have to be creating the examples. We have a team to do that. And so if someone says, well, I don't think this is very good anymore, this doesn't necessarily resonate anymore with our clients or our prospects, we can say, hey, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. When can I see an example of what you think would be a more effective example of that.

[7:48] Hitting this specific checkbox and then letting them handle that conversation from there. The last best practice, which is going to sound kind of like no duh Hamish, but it's make the information easy to find. A playbook is meant to be a quick reference guide. It is not meant to be a dictionary that our team members are going to pour through for hours and hours. When they're looking for a resource, they need boom, where is that information? What does it sound like? How can I action it? Because maybe they're going to go into a conversation with a client in the next five minutes, and they want some sort of guidance as to how to have that conversation, and so they're going to turn to the playbook. So things like creating a naming scheme that clearly identifies what the team member could learn from either that section or that resource. For example, when we have objections, we might label all of our objections with objection, hyphen, and then whatever the objection is. So it could sound, it could look like Like, objection, prospect already has supplier. And then our team member who looks at that goes, oh, I know that my prospect has a supplier. Let me listen to this audio, watch this video, and see how someone else did it from a best practice standpoint so I feel better supported going into my session. So to circle back on the four best practices, number one, checklists are better than scripts. Video and audio are better than text. Next, let the playbook live.

[9:16] So regularly ask team members, especially newer ones, what they would change or add to the playbook. And lastly, make the information easy to find. If it's not easy to find, the playbook, becomes another make work project for us. And it becomes something that our team is never going to implement, which means what they're probably doing is going and chatting with each other offline and not necessarily getting the best practices. They're just getting that person's practices, which may not actually be what we want them to do in order to follow our system and our process for creating full funnel freedom. This has been the full funnel freedom podcast. I've been your host, Hamish Knox, today sharing ideas and insights around creating playbooks for your sales team to create full funnel freedom. Thank you, V Pearson, again, for your review. Connect with us on Instagram at SandlerNYYC. Let us know what your key takeaways were and what you'd like to hear about on future episodes. And if you'd like to be highlighted on a future episode, write us a review and you'll get read out in a future episode.

[10:27] The Full Funnel Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary. Get a head start on your 2023 professional development by being a part of our group at the 2023 Sandler Summit, March 16 and 17 in Orlando. Go to hamish.sandler.com slash Orlando for more details. And until we connect with you on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[10:52] Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.

[11:02] Music.