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The world for sellers is constantly evolving. Changes in buyer purchasing behaviours, trends, competitors, and economic conditions mean the “best practices” your teams should follow need to adapt over time. This means your sales playbook should also evolve year after year.
In 2024, upgrading your sales playbook will be crucial to overcoming a host of challenges, from the economic downturn to content saturation in the digital world. While the methodologies you implement may vary depending on a range of factors, there are some key steps virtually every business will need to take to enhance its playbook in 2024.
Here are our top tips for updating your sales playbook this year.
It’s easy to assume that if you want to thrive in 2024, you need to invest in collecting as many new leads and opportunities as possible. It’s this thought process that has prompted countless sales companies to take a problematic approach to driving sales teams in the past.
Sales managers are often tempted to reward sellers based on the number of leads they reach, or the amount of contacts they complete a day. However, the reality is that in today’s competitive landscape, quality matters a lot more than quantity.
Encouraging your teams to reach out to 1000s of prospects a day won’t deliver results if only a tiny fraction of those prospects are a good “fit” for your product or service. It just means you’re wasting time and resources on leads that will never convert.
Instead, in 2024, focus on making sales scalable, by rewarding employees based on the right metrics. Focus on things like the number of deals closed, rather than the number of contacts customers reach. Give sellers bonuses when they take the time to qualify each lead and look at offering unique benefits to sellers who bring stronger relationships with their prospects.
Going hand-in-hand with the “quality over quantity” approach, in 2024, it will be crucial for businesses to take a more personalised approach to selling. Cold-calling millions of consumers in the hope that you’ll eventually get a hit is a waste of time and resources. Similarly, cold emails sent on masse to consumers with no personalised edge rarely drive results.
On the other hand, studies show that 76% of consumers were more likely to consider a purchase if they received a personal message from a company. 78% of customers also said they’re more likely to re-purchase from a company that offers a personal experience, and 78% said they would recommend that company to a friend or colleague.
Delivering a personalised sales strategy starts with data. For your 2024 playbook, focus on helping sellers collect the information they need to gain deeper insights into the prospects they’re reaching. You might use customer data platforms and CRM tools to help collect and store information about customers and segments. You can also use AI tools to conduct market research at scale.
Empowering teams with customer profiles and similar data-driven insights can lead to a 6.4% higher win rate and a better chance of building longer-term relationships with consumers.
Old-fashioned sales strategies tend to focus heavily on capturing customer attention and making a sale, but they ignore the other aspects of the buyer journey. In today’s world, you need to engage and delight your customers throughout the entire journey, to increase potential gains.
Start by switching from the “sales funnel” approach to the “sales flywheel”. This means looking at not just how you acquire leads, but how you help customers adopt the solution you offer, and encourage retention by delivering consistent value. When creating sales enablement content, think about each stage of your consumer’s journey, and how you can remove friction points.
For instance, can you help them compare products with more comprehensive videos and demonstrations? Can you show them how to leverage immediate value from your solutions with webinars and training sessions? Could you boost your chances of advocacy by creating a community environment, or loyalty program?
Concentrate less on pushy sales tactics, and more on building long-term relationships with your customers, by delivering constant value.
Speaking of the importance of enhancing the buyer journey in 2024, the focus for all sellers today should be on long-term relationships. Today’s customers are sick of pushy and inauthentic sales tactics, where sellers treat them like a number. They want real relationships with companies, based on shared values and mutual respect.
This means companies need to take a new approach to selling, where they focus on actually delivering what’s best for the customer, even if that means making less money in the short term. If sellers can position themselves as trusted advisors, coaches, and enablers to their customers, the results for your business will be better in the long term.
After all, 46% of sales professionals get a huge portion of their leads from existing customers, and 33% say their highest-quality leads come from these referrals. In 2024, encourage your sellers to put the relationship with your customers first, and go all-in on customer retention.
Part of the process for achieving this will involve bridging the gaps between your go-to-market teams. Bringing your sales, customer service, and marketing teams together to share data and insights will create a more aligned experience for customers, and make it easier to tailor your strategy to the specific needs of your buyer’s journey.
As mentioned above, bringing your different customer-facing teams together will be crucial for boosting retention rates and customer loyalty this year. However, there are other benefits to “bridging the gaps” too. For instance, aligning cross-departmental teams during your early playbook planning stages will help you look at the customer journey from different perspectives.
Insights from your sales team can show your marketing team what kind of key features they should be showcasing in content, or what benefits they need to highlight. They can also offer insight into the questions you need to answer for your customers before they’re ready to make a purchase.
Information from your marketing team can help your sellers to better understand what types of consumers and segments they should be focusing on, so they can rapidly validate leads. The data you gather from your customer service team can help you to identify unique ways of differentiating your brand, by offering better onboarding strategies, training, and support to consumers.
Finally, as we move into 2024, there’s a good chance many companies will be increasing their investment in artificial intelligence to support the go-to-market strategy. AI is a powerful tool for sales teams, making it easier to produce content at scale and learn about audience groups.
However, it’s important not to rely on this technology too heavily. The rise of generative AI has prompted many companies to produce huge volumes of generic content, which rarely resonates with consumers on a deeper level. Today’s customers are quickly becoming sick of AI-generated campaigns, and are looking instead for authenticity, and sincerity.
While you can use AI to empower your sales team, it’s important to ensure you still take a human approach to marketing, selling, and customer service in 2024.
While it’s difficult to predict what 2024 will bring to sales teams and growing businesses, we can assume plenty of challenges lay ahead. New technologies, complex economic environments and changing buyer behaviours will force businesses to rethink how they approach sales.
However, if you go into the new year with the tips above, you can set yourself up for success. Prioritise quality over quantity, take a personalised approach, optimise engagement, and enhance relationships with your buyers. Unify your teams, and remember to take a cautious approach to the implementation of AI.
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