Weekly Sales Tips: How to Create a Sales Playbook

If you play in the National Football League or in most other professional sports, you’re going to find a playbook. 

When you join a team, you have to study that playbook and you have to study it diligently. The playbook shows you what to do with every play, but it does something even more important. It shows you how to respond to various situations.

I’ll share some ideas about how to create a sales playbook.

Let me ask you this. If I were to request that you describe your sales process in detail, could you do it? I mean, if I gave you enough time, could you write out your sales process step by step? Could you show me precisely what sales excellence looks like in written form? And then could you define what each specific part of the sales presentation looks like when it’s executed properly, including how you stick the landing?

That’s what a sales playbook is all about. Having a sales playbook causes you to both understand the flow of the sale, and also how to understand each individual component of the sale.

Planning for Adversity

Some of you might be saying right now. Yeah, but this selling situation, its fluid. Buyers are unpredictable. How can I possibly plan for that? Well, here’s my counter to that argument. You don’t think a professional football team defense is unpredictable? In fact, if you play football, there’s a term that defenses use called disguising the blitz.

Blitzes are unexpected and they can drive coaches crazy. So you may have a play that you want to be ready to run on offense. You’ve got it all lined up. You know exactly what you want to do. And suddenly here comes the blitz.

There are more people coming at you than you even know how to handle. How do you know what to do when the other team blitzes? Guess what? That adjustment to the blitz is also in the playbook.

Here’s a different analogy. How about the military? In the military, there’s always a battle plan. There’s always a plan of attack, but is the enemy predictable? No way. In fact, a strong and valiant enemy will be anything but predictable. And so there are contingency plans in the military. But there’s also extensive training for the execution of those plans.

One last analogy here, think about airline pilots. For airline pilots, 99% of the time, everything goes precisely as planned, but they get extensive training on what? They get extensive training on the 1% of the time that things are going to go wrong. Every possible situation that a pilot has to face is written down in a playbook.

Create Your Own Sales Playbook

Buyers are not as unpredictable as we sometimes fear that they might be. So maybe it’s time to create your own sales playbook. And if you want to do that, let me lay out a few simple steps.

Step 1: Write out the ideal buying path. Note that I didn’t say write out the ideal selling path. Write out the way that a buyer wants to buy. What does their journey look like?

Step 2: Identify those points where the buyers tend to wander. You need to anticipate the variables, the blitzes if you will.

Step 3: Write out the key techniques necessary for each step along the way, and to be able to handle each variable that you’re going to face.

Step 4: Start honing your skills to help you through each of those individual steps.

This might sound like a lot of work and I admit it is, but here’s the question. How good do you want to be? You see, most salespeople learn the basics that they need to learn, and then they stop right there. But you, my friend, are not most salespeople. You want to outperform everyone around you, right?

Document the process and ask yourself which specific steps, which plays do I need to prepare for so that I can be the best that I can be.

Best of luck in creating your own sales playbook, and until next time, learn more to earn more!