Optimising Sales Playbooks in 2024: Steps for Success

According to a report from Insightly, one of the most significant GTM (Go-to-Market) challenges companies face today, stems from the fact that they’re relying on exceptional people, rather than exceptional strategies (sales plays). 

In other words, business leaders are placing endless pressure on their sales specialists to increase revenue, without providing them with the guidance and support they need to thrive. They’re giving their sales teams the same “playbooks” and strategies they’ve used for decades, without actually adapting to the changing nature of the market, and their target audience. 

Even if exceptional salespeople can innovate and adapt prior plays to achieve success, they’re not documenting their results, leading to inconsistency throughout the GTM team. 

To stay ahead in this complex landscape, business leaders need a different approach. They need a more dynamic, agile, and ever-evolving set of sales playbooks that don’t just guide salespeople, but empower them to discover new opportunities for growth.

How to Create Progressive Sales Playbooks in 2024

It’s easy to see sales playbooks as old-fashioned in today’s world. Most of the top sellers don’t rely exclusively on following step-by-step guidance on how to close a deal. They need to adapt and evolve to different customer personas, and buyer preferences. 

However, playbooks still have value, when used correctly. According to one report, playbook users achieve 15% higher win rates than non-playbook users. A playbook that provides sales reps with insights into your business and products, guidance on customer personas, and insights into how they can manage the sales cycle can support your business in numerous ways. 

The key to success in 2024, is ensuring that there’s “room for movement” in these playbooks. Rather than seeing the documents as a set of rules for selling, look at them as guidelines that employees can work with, and build from. 

The core purpose of a sales playbook should be to provide sales professionals with the information they need to excel in their roles. While some of that information will change over time, others will remain relatively consistent. Identify the core components you’ll need in a sales playbook for your GTM strategy, and how frequently they’ll need to be updated. 

Business and Product Details

When it comes to outlining business and product details in your sales playbook, your mission, vision, and founding story are likely to remain consistent over time. The only reason your mission or vision should change is if your target audience evolves or expands. 

On the other hand, your product and service details will constantly evolve, as you invest in new solutions, discover new potential use cases for your products, and experiment with different pricing strategies and structures. Every time you “discover” something new about your brand’s positioning in the market, price requirements, or use cases, update this part of your playbook.

Target Customer Profiles 

Many companies assume their target customer profiles will remain the same consistently. However, the reality is that even if you’re targeting the same “broad” audience with your products and services, their goals, pain points, and decision-making criteria will constantly change. 

You should be frequently updating your ideal customer profiles with information you gather from market research, competitor analysis, and customer feedback. Look at things like:

• Changes to pain points, goals, and motivations for each buyer persona. 
• The stages of the buyer journey and how it changes over time. For instance, your customers in 2024 may spend more time researching products online, and less time speaking to sales reps. 
• Evolutions to your ideal customer profile, based on the insights you gather about your most valuable accounts, their average order, and customer lifetime values. 

Sales Methodologies and Strategies 

The “if it’s broke don’t fix it” mindset for sales strategies simply doesn’t work in today’s world. Inbound and outbound aren’t enough to generate growth in 2024. Sales teams and GTM experts need to be constantly experimenting with new ways to reach and engage customers. 

Business leaders should be constantly encouraging their employees to explore different strategies, using events and webinars to capture leads, leveraging AI for prospecting strategies, working with partners to increase conversion rates, and more. 

As you learn from each experiment, update your sales playbook with:

• Different variations of sales systems, methodologies, and processes. 
• Various ideas for enhancing prospecting, and lead qualification strategies.
• Methods for assessing customer needs and overcoming objections or challenges.
• Strategies for closing the deal with negotiation and partnerships.

Boosting the Success of Playbooks in 2024

Once you’ve outlined the key details your sales playbooks should include, and how often they need to be updated, there are two key steps to ensuring your documents actually empower and enable your GTM teams. 

Step 1: Experimentation

The first step is cultivating a culture of constant experimentation and exploration.

Encourage sales teams to not only use the guidance provided in your sales playbook but build on it with their own ideas and insights. Ask them to experiment with different approaches to driving sales, such as hosting in-person conversations with a buyer committee, rather than communicating over email, or phone calls exclusively. 

Ask them to track the results of their experiments, with metrics that align with your overall business growth. For instance, if like many SaaS B2B companies, you’re focusing on net revenue retention, ask sales teams to monitor how different sales strategies increase adoption rates, improve the onboarding process, and boost overall customer lifetime value. 

Step 2: Creating Alignment 

The second step is unifying all of the groups in your GTM strategy to ensure that you’re tracking this data correctly. To gather insights into which of your sales playbooks are working, you need to know not just which methods are driving revenue for sales professionals, but which marketing strategies are generating the most qualified leads, and which customer success efforts are increasing retention.

If your latest sales strategy isn’t delivering the results you expected, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t working. It could be a result of marketing teams targeting the wrong audiences, or failing to educate customers correctly before they reach the sales team. 

If your customers aren’t staying with your organisation for long periods of time, this could indicate an issue with your lead qualification strategy, rather than your approach to customer success. A unified view of how every part of your team is working together will help you to create more effective playbooks. 

Step 3: Constantly Look for Ways to Improve

Finally, remember with any playbook, no matter how successful it appears to be, there’s always room for improvement. There’s no one-size-fits-all guide to ensuring continuous success within your GTM strategy. The only way to ensure you’re constantly growing, rather than falling behind and simply “reacting” to lost market share, is with a proactive approach. 

Pay attention to the feedback you get from your customers and your GTM teams. Conduct regular market and competitor analysis, to track potential opportunities for strategic changes. Encourage regular communication and brainstorming between different groups, and make sure everyone has a clear insight into how to collect and share data for sales playbook improvements.

The more you commit to updating, refining, and enhancing your playbooks over time, the more likely they are to have a significant impact on your company’s success.