Preface

The sales landscape has changed

It’s no longer a seller’s market. Instead, due to the
growth of content marketing, social media and the
wealth of free information that’s readily available,
buyers have control. What’s more, due to the change
in the way people seek information to help inform
their buying decisions, the role of sales reps have
changed too.

You may have discovered that traditional sales techniques such as cold calling are
no longer as effective as they used to be. In the past, sales teams played a key role
in educating and informing prospects to help them make their buying decisions –
often right at the start of the sales funnel. This scenario is now rare.

Instead, in today’s buyer’s market, it’s not unusual for a prospect to be a long way
down their buying journey when they first make contact with you. That’s because
consumers can (and do) educate themselves using the huge amount of eBooks,
webinars and blogs available for free. In addition, social search allows prospects
to instantly get feedback, opinions and recommendations from other users.

It means sales reps have to work differently...

Instead of “pure” selling, they need to focus on adding value (you could say that
helping is the quickest route to selling).

In addition, the inherent entrepreneurial spirit of sales reps needs to be sup-

ported and encouraged. It’s the best way to ensure sales reps have the flexibility
to proactively seek out and nurture opportunities when they arise. Organisations

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 How to Win in Sales

can do this by supplying sales teams with robust processes and best practice tools
and techniques that are proven to work in the field.

Empower sales teams to succeed

A good starting point is to define your sales process or sales pipeline. This essen-
tial tool provides the foundation for effective sales performance by defining the
various stages prospects need to move through before becoming your customer.

But to really maximise the effectiveness of your pipeline, you need to align it with
your buyers’ cycle. That way, your selling process is closely informed by the way
buyers make their decisions. The easiest way to achieve this is to create a buyers
persona so sales teams are clear on exactly who they should be targeting. You
can also empower sales teams by collecting and sharing best practice. A sales
playbook is an effective way to do this.

Finally, take advantage of the new generation of customisable, easy-to-use CRM

software. It’s an effective way to gain increased visibility of your pipeline and pur-
posely drive sales.

Embrace change to succeed

For sure the new sales landscape presents challenges - but there are also fresh
opportunities for those organisations and sales teams that readily adapt. In fact,
for those organisations that embrace new media and inbound marketing, and take
advantage of smart CRM software, the future looks bright.

In this eBook you’ll discover:

Why you need a sales process and how to define your pipeline

The importance of aligning your buyers’ cycle with your sale process

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Why you need a sales playbook and how to create one

How to enhance the efficiency of your sales teams by creating a buyer persona

How smart CRM software can improve your sales pipeline and enhance the
efficiency of your sales team

As you know, the ability to generate fresh leads and nudge them to a close is the
lifeblood of any organisation, and your sales team are an essential asset to help
you achieve this.

So read on and discover some proven tools and techniques that will help your
sales reps succeed in today’s economy.

Richard Young

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 Content
How To Define Your B2B Sales Process 6

Why You Need To Define Your

B2B Sales Process 11

Enhance Your Sales Success

With A Buyer Persona 15

Why smart sales reps identify their

B2B buyers’ cycle 20

How To Identify And Work The Triggers

In Your B2B Buyers’ Cycle 25

How To Create A Sales Playbook

For Your Business 30

How to use smart CRM software to drive

your sales pipeline 35

Contact 38
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HOW TO DEFINE YOUR B2B
SALES PROCESS

1
 How to Win in Sales

A sales process is a systematic, repeatable series of steps that map out and track
interaction with prospects from their first point of engagement with your business
through to a close.

Or to put it a different way – it’s your sales pipeline.

A typical sales process has the following five unique stages:

Stage Overview of the stage

Lead generation: Sales reps use lead bait and other outbound tools

1 PROSPECTING/
ENGAGE
and techniques to identify decision makers who meet the buyer
persona.

Qualify leads: Sales reps and prospects decide if they’re a good fit.
In particular, they’ll want to assess criteria such as:

2 QUALIFY
Does the prospect have the budget to invest in your business?
Is the prospect willing to spend time with the sales rep?
Is the prospect committed and willing to start a trial?
Can the sales rep convince the prospect their solution is appropriate?

Demonstrate solution: Once a sales rep has confirmed a prospect

3 PROPOSAL
is a qualified lead, the next step is to demonstrate, in detail, the
solution they can provide and then explain how it will benefit the
prospect.

Deal or no deal: If the sale is to close, the sales rep must anticipate

4 DECISION and handle the prospect’s objections. The end of the decision stage
is marked by a purchase or a rejection.

Deliver: The sales process doesn’t end after closure. The final

5 REPEAT
BUSINESS
stage is to deliver the customer promise and lay the foundations to
encourage repeat buying.
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 How to Win in Sales

A prospect must open the “gate” to progress

along the sales pipeline.

In order to close a sale, a prospect must progress Weighted Target

$ 2.034 588,90

through each of the above stages.

It’s helpful to imagine this journey through your

sales pipeline as a series of “gates”. The prospect
needs to do something to unlock each gate so
they can progress closer to closure.

This means the role of the sales team is to provide prospects with the information,
answers and reassurance they need to unlock each gate. They can do that by using
the various sales activities they have access to. It’s likely these will be outlined and
described in your sales playbook (see chapter seven).

How to create your sales process

This generic pipeline is a useful starting point, however, to make it work for your
business you’ll want to identify how each stage plays out with your prospects. In
particular, you’ll want to define the trigger that opens each gate, and pinpoint the
various sales activities that can help influence entry to the next stage.

A good starting point to achieving this is to meet with your sales teams so you can
understand what happens on the ground. Here are some powerful questions to
help guide those conversations:

1. What are the typical points of contact between your business and your
prospects?

2. What is the trigger that signifies a prospect has moved to the next stage?
3. What’s needed to encourage a prospect to open each of your pipeline gates?
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4. Overall, what needs to happen to close a deal?

5. What best practice sales tools are currently being used?
Once you have this information, you can start to plan and identify the sales
activities and administrative jobs your sales staff need to do at each stage of the
pipeline. Here’s an example...

Example: Prospect moves from stage 1 (prospecting) to stage 2

(qualification)

Trigger that opens the “gate”: Customer confirms they’re genuinely

interested in finding out more about your solution by showing a commit-
ment to taking the next step (e.g. sign up for a free trial).

Sales activities: 1:1 webinar / face-to-face meeting

Ask questions to qualify the lead

Provide more detail about your organisation

Explain how your product / service meets the prospects needs

Confirm the next step e.g. organise a free trial

Administrative jobs:

Book date and time for the webinar / meeting with the prospect

Set up GoToMeeting or similar tool (if using a webinar)

Conduct research to find out about the customer and their industry so you can
tailor the webinar / meeting

Plan / review questions to ask the customer during the webinar / meeting
to help qualify the prospect and confirm if they’re an ideal customer. For
example:

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Get clear on their pains so you can assess if your solution is a good fit

Confirm they are a decision maker

Get clear on their requirements

Update CRM with the outcome of the 1:1 interaction

The final stage is to publish your sales pipeline in a format that’s easy to follow,
understand and proactively drives the sales process. CRM software can help you
to do that.

But what are the advantages of outlining your sales process?

We’ll explore the answers in chapter 2.

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WHY YOU NEED TO DEFINE
YOUR B2B SALES PROCESS

2
 How to Win in Sales

As you know, your sales process (or sales pipeline) is the journey sales teams take
prospects on to encourage them to become a customer.

To recap, a typical sales process has the following five stages:

1. Prospecting stage: This stage uses lead generation strategies to find

suitable prospects.

2. Qualify: Once a lead has been found, it needs to be qualified (i.e. does a
prospect have genuine potential to progress down the pipeline?)

3. Proposal: Once a lead has been qualified, the next step is to outline a
proposal and show a prospect, in detail, specifically how you can help.

4. Decision: Next the prospect will decide whether or not to buy.

5. Repeat business: Finally, lay the foundations for the customer to
become a regular buyer and convince them they made a sound buying
decision.

A well-defined sales process is a valuable asset

for your business
A robust sales process will help you
maximise the performance of your
sales team, encourage growth and
attract more qualified leads. That’s
because your sales process is uniquely
positioned to outline and describe best
practice tools and techniques to suc-
cessfully guide a prospect through the
journey to becoming a customer.

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One of the key benefits of a sales process is it introduces structures and systems
into your business. When managing a team of sales reps, a clearly defined sales
pipeline can help you:

Standardise the process

Ensure all staff replicate best practice

Ensure everyone has access to the tools and

techniques known to deliver the best results
and the highest conversion rates

Without a sales process, you risk your team

operating inconsistently. In turn, this leads to
confusion, inefficiency and bad practice. In
addition, without a clearly defined process to
follow, it’s possible inexperienced (or poor performing) sales reps could skip
crucial stages of the pipeline leading to leaks and lost sales.

Benefits of a robust sales process

Here are some further benefits of embedding a robust sales process into your
organisation:

1. You have a process to manage and analyse: With a defined system in place,
coupled with the expectation that everyone is following the same process,
your pipeline instantly becomes easier to measure and monitor. People can
be given specific targets, and key metrics can be identified and analysed.

2. You can identify opportunities for improvement. Your sales process shouldn’t
be static. Instead it should be a flexible system that’s continuously being
improved as a result of feedback and testing by your sales team on the
ground. That way you can tweak and amend to:

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a) Shorten the length of the pipeline or accelerate the rate at which prospects
move through the various stages. This increased efficiency will save money
and time – leaving your staff free to actively pursue more leads and nurture
more sales.

b) You’ll also be able to identify any persistent leaks in your sales process. For
example, you may discover a number of highly qualified leads drop out at a
certain point. If you know where this is and why it’s happening, you can imple-
ment a fix and therefore increase the overall performance of your pipeline.

3. You can integrate new staff quickly: Once your pipeline is clearly defined, the
task of bringing on new sales reps will be far easier. Forget the ad hoc, disor-
ganised learning process, instead they’ll have a clearly defined system to get
them up to speed quickly.

4. You can predict your revenue: If your sales process is repeatable, it follows
that there must be an element of predictability at each stage. This predict-
ability is invaluable as it can help you improve your forecasting accuracy and
even predict your revenue based on the number of solid leads you generate.

As you can see, having a robust sales process in place that’s understood and
embraced by your sales team is a proven way to increase the efficiently of your
sales reps and ultimately close more leads.

But how do you know you’re attracting the right prospects in the first
place? The easiest way to get that right is by creating a buyer persona.
You’ll find out how to do that in Chapter 3.

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ENHANCE YOUR SALES
SUCCESS WITH A BUYER
PERSONA

3
 How to Win in Sales

The single biggest thing you can do to enhance the effectiveness and performance
of your sales pipeline is to create a buyer persona.

It’s a bold statement; so let me tell you why...

A buyer persona is a fictional avatar that best describes your ideal prospect. (And
don’t be restricted by having just one. Most organisations will have a collection).

The most useful buyer personas will capture an understanding of the ideal
prospect on all levels – not just their job role, demographics or industry sector.
Instead, they also develop a deep aware-
ness of their day-to-day routine, challenges,
goals and other insights into the type of
person they are.

The main advantage of defining your buyer

persona is you get a grasp of your pros-
pect’s buying behaviour. In turn, you can
align your sales process accordingly, and
communicate with prospects on a more
meaningful level. And in doing so, your
conversations with prospects become more
relevant, which in turn increases the likeli-
hood of you closing a deal.

And there are further benefits:

Once you know exactly who you wish to target, you can tightly hone your sales
approach

You’ll cut the time and money you spend on prospects who aren’t a good fit

You can proactively prune the unqualified leads from your sales pipeline

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 How to Win in Sales

It all adds up to increased performance and efficiency – and that’s good news
for your bottom line.

In addition, a buyer persona will give you the information you need to have more
impact at the bottom of your sales funnel. And this can help you generate more
leads. Here’s how...

The dynamics of the buyer-seller relationship have

changed
You’ve no doubt noticed that the environment in which you do business has
changed significantly. Sellers no longer drive it. Instead buyers have the control
and it’s not unusual for a prospect to be very well informed at their first contact
with a sales rep. This quote from the Harvard Business Review puts the change
into perspective:

A recent Corporate Executive Board study of

more than 1,400 B2B customers found that those
customers completed, on average, nearly 60% of
a typical purchasing decision – researching solutions,
ranking options, setting requirements, benchmarking
pricing, and so on – before even having
a conversation with a supplier.

In practice, this means if you want to increase leads and sales, you need to make
an impact much earlier in the buying cycle. Prospects are now more likely to
educate themselves by reading blogs, white papers and special reports or by
seeking recommendations and reviews via social media. Your buyer persona will

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 How to Win in Sales

help tackle this challenge too. If you know specifically whom you wish to target,
you can tightly hone your inbound marketing efforts. In turn, your sales collateral
can be proactively attracting your ideal customer right at the point when they’re
starting to independently explore solutions to the problem you can solve for them.

How to create a buyer persona

e
ionnair
Quest any
Now that we’ve explored the benefits of a buyer
Comp
persona, the next step is to consider how to

l Stat
istics create one. The first point to make is it’s not an
Annua
easy five-minute task. The truth is it takes a lot
of work, research and thought. That probably
explains why a lot of companies either don’t
have a buyer persona, or have an ineffective one
that’s based on hunches and guesswork.

To get real value from your buyer persona it needs to be grounded in well-
researched data. A good starting point is to interview your key clients on a 1:1
basis. You’ll want to start with the basics such as their demographics, industry
sector and job title. But then go deeper and uncover details including:

1. What is your buyer trying to achieve?

2. How do they make their buying decisions?
3. What challenges are they facing?
4. How do they think and what could they object to?
5. What will trigger them to take action?
6. Where do they go for information?

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 How to Win in Sales

Once you’ve gleaned these details, the final stage is to translate your insights into
an avatar story. Even better, attach a photograph of a fictional character to
make the persona more real. Here’s a fictional example of an avatar story to
give you some ideas:

Sales Simon is 45 years old. He’s married with two teenage children who
live at home. He enjoys golf, caravan holidays and eating out with his
wife. He’s degree educated and heads up a busy 50 strong sales team at
an IT company in the UK. He worries about meeting his sales targets, and
his biggest challenge is keeping his sales reps motivated and properly
equipped with the tools they need to do their job effectively. Success
means promotion, more money and more time with his family (he often
works late). Simon is active on LinkedIn and Google+ and regularly reads
industry magazines and business blogs to stay in touch. If he’s planning to
buy something he’ll research on the internet and will make a final decision
only when he’s totally convinced it’s the right choice.

Without a detailed, up-to-date buyer persona, your sales team will struggle to
operate efficiently and to their full potential.

But there’s a further piece to the jigsaw. To really power your sales
process to succeed, you need to understand the way your buyers make
their buying decisions. That’s why an understanding of your buyers’ cycle
is so important – and that’s the subject for chapter 4.

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WHY SMART SALES REPS
IDENTIFY THEIR
B2B BUYERS’ CYCLE

4
 How to Win in Sales

An understanding of your sales pipeline alone is not enough to succeed in this

age of social selling and content marketing. If you want to secure more leads and
close more sales, you also need to understand your buyers’ cycle - and then inter-
link the two.

Let me explain why…

As you know, your sales pipeline is critical. It will help organize, control and
analyse your sales and that’s key for performance. But because it’s created
from the viewpoint of your organisation, its focus is on selling, not buying - and
this subtle difference can have a significant impact when interacting with your
customers.

That’s where an understanding of your buyers’ cycle can be valuable. The buyers’
cycle maps out the thought processes and decision-making stages your prospects
experience as they make the choice of what and when to buy. Once you under-
stand how this process plays out for your customers, you can then tailor your
inbound and outbound marketing efforts to match the buyer and sales cycles.

In short, interlink the two and your effectiveness

will increase - hugely. That’s because you
can tweak your sales approach to
match the stage your customer has
reached and maximise your con-
pipelinersales
version rates.
Business
But to achieve these advantages,
you must first understand what CRM Software
a typical buyers’ cycle
looks like. So lets
analyse one:

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 How to Win in Sales

How to adapt your sales process to your customers’

buying cycle
A typical buyers’ cycle has five stages. As a sales rep, your strategy will vary at
each stage.

1 During the sleeping stage your customer is oblivious to the fact they
have an issue at all. This is a tricky stage in terms of sales because you
can’t sell a solution to a problem the customer doesn’t know they have.
Instead, you must work to bring that hidden issue to their conscious
awareness. From here you can generate leads.

2 When your prospect becomes aware they have a problem they enter
the realisation stage. At this point, they don’t know what to do and will
become motivated to seek out a solution. As a sales rep, you can engage
in conversations that enhance the pain they feel to kick-start the justifica-
tion stage.

3 In the justification stage, your prospect begins to investigate the options

available to resolve their pain. They want help to clarify the issue and are
seeking ideas to tackle it. There’s no guarantee at this point they’ll buy.
The status quo has not yet shifted, and they may decide to do nothing. But
as a sales rep, you can influence the process by being helpful, answering
their pressing questions and initiating the right conversations to drive the
desire for change.

4 As customers actively assess the options and ideas available, the decision
/ change stage kicks in. This is when a prospect has the go-ahead to
choose one option over all others. Sales reps can have a significant
influence at this stage by positioning their solution as the best option

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 How to Win in Sales

available. Here, the features of your product / service will be key as cus-
tomers look to justify their choice and get confident their preferred option
will deliver.

5 Once the customer has selected a product or service, the next step is
purchase. However, the buyers’ cycle doesn’t end just because the
contract has been signed. Firstly, you want to remind the customer what
a great buying decision they made. Secondly, you need to ensure you
deliver as this lays the foundation for repeat purchasing and word of
mouth referrals.

The benefits of identifying your Buyers’ cycle

When you understand your customer’s buying
cycle, you can approach sales with far more
sophistication. That’s because you will:
Many n
Be more tuned in to where your prove ss
e
customers are at busin
d
neede
Increase your relevance by entering
the conversations your customers are
already having

Ensure you’re perceived as helpful

– not pushy

You’ll also increase the efficiency and performance of your sales pipeline because
you can:

Accelerate the speed prospects convert by creating unique triggers to nudge

people along your sales funnel

Create unique marketing collateral for specific stages of the buying process

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 How to Win in Sales

Proactively follow up leads by linking your sales process to marketing automa-

tion software such as HubSpot

Fix the weakness in your sales pipeline by trying new approaches to plug the
leaks

How will the buyers’ cycle improve your sales skills?

If you don’t understand how your customers buy, you’re missing a big
opportunity.

In chapter 5 you’ll discover how to create a buyers’ cycle for your

business.

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HOW TO IDENTIFY AND
WORK THE TRIGGERS IN
YOUR B2B BUYERS’ CYCLE

5
 How to Win in Sales

Your Buyers’ Cycle maps out the thought processes and decision-making stages
your prospects experience as they make the choice of what and when to buy.
Typically there are five stages:

1. Sleeping: Here prospects don’t know they have an issue to solve.

2. Realisation: Now prospects are aware of an issue and feel motivated to
seek out a solution.

3. Justification: Here prospects actively investigate and explore the various

solutions available to them.

4. Decision / Change: Finally, prospects are ready to decide which

option to purchase.

5. Purchase: Now they want to be reminded they made a sound buying

decision and wait to see that promise being delivered.

How an understanding of your buyers’ cycle can

accelerate your pipeline
It’s important to know how these five stages
show up and align with your sales process. That’s
because this information allows you to pinpoint the
best sales techniques and tools to help nudge pros-
pects efficiently to the next stage of your pipeline.

A prospect will move from one stage to the next

following a trigger – i.e. an event that causes a
buyer to have a clear need or to have made a
clear decision which takes them a step closer to
becoming a customer.

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 How to Win in Sales

If you can identify and define the various triggers in your customer’s buying
journey, your sales reps can respond quicker when a trigger occurs. Or even
better, they can proactively create the situation needed to cause such a trigger.
As you can see, this proactive approach to selling can accelerate the movement of
prospects along your sales pipeline.

Here’s a fictional example to explain what I mean…

Your prospect is blissfully unaware that their IT servers have an under-

lying security issue (sleeping stage), but then their system gets hacked.
The hacking creates the trigger that shifts the buyer from sleep mode into
“realisation” – and that marks the start of a buying cycle.

The trigger to move into the justification stage occurs when the prospect realises
the detrimental impact being hacked has on his business – and he’ll want to
prevent it happening again. He’s now into the justification stage and will actively
seek out and research solutions. He may talk with a number of IT suppliers and
request demos. He may compare service specs and prices. He may also turn to
social media for feedback on his short-list. When he’s finished his research, he’ll
be ready to make a choice – this is the trigger to
enter the decision stage. Inevitably one service
provider will stand out as the preferred supplier
triggering a purchase and closure.

How to apply this to your own

sales process
To locate the triggers in your own
pipeline, you can look for patterns
or interview customers and your
sales staff to understand the thought

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 How to Win in Sales

process and the events that trigger a change of behaviour.

The following questions may help you.

1. What gets your prospect into a serious buying mode?

2. What can you do to show a prospect that a trigger has occurred?
3. What objections must your prospect overcome before deciding to buy?
4. How can you create marketing collateral and sales tools to help your sales
reps create a trigger and nudge prospects further along the sales funnel?

How can sales reps respond proactively

to each stage of the buyers’ cycle?

ERS
Once you’ve defined the triggers in your own buying

OM
Pipelinersales

UST
cycle, the final step is to match up this knowledge

RC NE
RT 2012ELI
with sales tools and techniques designed to proac-

L REPO PIP
tively influence your prospect’s journey through your
pipeline. Your sales playbook will come in handy
ANNUA

for that, and to get you thinking, here are some

examples of how this works in practice.

During the sleeping stage when prospects are unaware they have a problem,
sales activity should focus on education and interruption techniques that describe
the problem, press the pain points and wake the customer up to the fact that
there’s something they need to deal with. Content including blog posts, eBooks
and white papers are an effective way to achieve this.

Once a prospect enters the realisation stage, their behaviour changes. Now they
know there’s a problem, the need for a solution emerges. Your organisation can fulfil
this need by providing lead bait that introduces and explains possible solutions.

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 How to Win in Sales

In the justification stage, your prospects will explore the options available
to them in more detail. They’ll also start to explore various service providers and
may even make contact with you. In response, you can provide printed material,
demonstrations and 1:1 consultations to explain how your organisation can
service their need.

By the decision / change stage the prospect is ready to make their choice. To
help them decide and to increase their confidence in you, provide evidence of
the results you can deliver with case studies, testimonials and customer success
stories.

Finally, if they do decide to make a purchase with you, ensure you follow up and
remind them what a sound buying decision they made. For example, send a stick
letter to give your buyer post-purchase reassurance or make a follow up call and
invite questions.

As you can see, the key to maximising the efficiency of your sales pipeline is to
identify the triggers that influence a buying cycle – and proactively encourage
them.

Once you’ve outlined your sales process and defined how your buyers buy, the
final stage is to ensure your sales reps have access to the best practice sales
tools and techniques that are known to work in the field. The easiest way to draw
together the wealth of information and experience that exists in your sales team is
by collaborating together to create a sales playbook.

You can discover how to create a sales playbook for your business in
chapter 6.

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HOW TO CREATE A SALES
PLAYBOOK FOR YOUR
BUSINESS

6
 How to Win in Sales

Do you want more success from your sales pipeline? If so, you need to equip your
sales reps with a sales playbook. It’s a proven way to enhance the performance
of your sales process and attract more leads, make more sales and increase your
profits.

A serious tool for a challenging job

As you know, it’s tough for sales reps out there on the ground. Times are chal-
lenging and competition is fierce. In addition, the environment has changed.
It’s now a buyer’s market, meaning your sales force requires more sophisti-
cated tools if they’re to thrive and succeed.

A sales playbook can help you achieve just that. Create a quality playbook,
and you’ll package up the tools, guidance and techniques sales reps
need to engage in meaningful conversations with customers, and suc-
cessfully nudge them further down the sales funnel towards closure.
Even better, align it to your buyers’ cycle and sales process, and you’ll
provide a valuable tool your sales reps can rely on to help them deal with
any given situation.

Interested? Then read on and you’ll discover some simple steps to help you
create a sales playbook for your business:

1 Collaborate, research and prepare:

For a sales playbook to be useful, it needs to support a sales rep’s working
practices. Therefore preparation is key – after all, you don’t want to create
something that proves to be a hindrance instead of a help.

It’s crucial to actively involve sales teams in the development process.

Don’t allow the marketing department to create your playbook in

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 How to Win in Sales

isolation, and don’t be rushed by deadlines that lead to cutting corners.

These are sure-fire ways to a playbook that never gets used. Instead, col-
laboration between sales and marketing is the key.

You’ll want to identify best practice. So take the time to get clear on the
challenges faced by your sales team, and then pinpoint best practice tools
and techniques that are making an impact on the ground. Do this and
you’ll create a tool that will work in practice and not just in theory.

2 Create
Now comes the fun part. Take all the information you collected during the
preparation stage and put your resource pack together.

To do this in practice you’ll need to:

a) Lay the foundations: Outline the steps of your sales process and
identify the specific action that triggers movement of a prospect from one
stage to the next. To do this effectively, you’ll also need to consider your
buyers’ cycle.

b) Create tools: Align best practice tools and techniques with each
stage of your sales process (for example elevator pitches, lead generators,
telephone scripts, demonstrations, free trials, case studies etc.).

c) Focus on solution-based selling: Include tools that best

address the needs of your customers – not those that make life easier for
your sales reps and your business.

d) Ensure flexibility: Whilst you want to capture best practice, you

also need to leave scope for sales reps to respond intuitively to situations.
This freedom may lead to new opportunities that can be integrated into
future updates of your playbook.

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 How to Win in Sales

Here’s an example of a playbook tool that could be used to qualify

a prospect (i.e. nudge them from the engagement stage into qualification
stage of your pipeline).

Sales tool: 1:1 Webinar – this tool can work exceptionally well if you’re
selling a complex product with lots of functionality (e.g. business
software) – especially where the prospect needs to understand exactly
how the solution could be applied in their business.

Purpose: Hold a virtual meeting with a prospect via GoToMeeting

(or similar application) to qualify the prospect, explain spe-
cifically how your product could add value and deliver a live
demonstration.

Outcome: Answer the prospects questions, concerns and

objections so they can make a well-informed decision about
proceeding further (e.g. by signing up for a free trial).

Deploy
3 Once you’ve created your playbook, the next stage is to launch it.

To ensure a successful launch, you need the support and buy-in from
senior management. It’s stating the obvious but your organisation will
NOT benefit from the playbook unless it’s actively used in the field. In
addition, like all changes to processes and systems, there’s inevitably
going to be some resistance from the people who’ll be expected to use it
– especially if it marks a shift from their established working practices. So
ensure there’s lots of positive support and commentary around the tool
when it’s launched, and do consider any change management issues that
may crop up and address those – proactively wherever possible.

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 How to Win in Sales

In addition, you’ll need to ensure appropriate training and educational

materials are available. That way you can ensure people understand how
to get the most out of the playbook.

4 Improve
Once the playbook is out there and being used in the field, stay alert for
opportunities to improve and develop it. Get feedback from your sales
team, remove tools that prove inadequate and add new techniques that
are getting results.

How could a playbook work for you?

A playbook adds structure and process to your sales team and ensures they are
equipped with the best tools possible to do their job. What’s more, you’ll find that
some CRM systems (including Pipeliner) have the functionality to integrate your
playbook.

This is a useful function that will help your sales team

even further by providing a quick and easy method to
instantly access the best practice tools for a particular
stage of the sales process.

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HOW TO USE SMART CRM
SOFTWARE TO DRIVE YOUR
SALES PIPELINE

7
 How to Win in Sales

If you want to gain control over your sales pipeline and sales team, it’s essential
that you choose a customisable CRM system that works for you.

Could Pipeliner be the right choice?

Let me explain some of the ways this smart CRM system could benefit your
business…

Pipeliner is a flexible, logical, intuitive CRM tool that empowers sales people to
effectively manage the opportunities they generate and nudge prospects closer to
a close.

It offers an easy and efficient way to see your

deals end to end, and provides a real-time
view of exactly what’s happening within your
sales process.

Pipeliner has stacks of functionality. From

smart reporting to analytics to pipeline man-
agement, this user-friendly tool empowers
sales people and sales managers to track
leads, follow up prospects and close deals.

The tool is very visual and fun to use.

You can use it to see how many deals are at each stage of your pipeline

You can track the performance of individual reps or the entire company

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 How to Win in Sales

You can even identify the leaks in your pipeline so you can plan improvements
and enhance the overall efficiency of your sales operations

What’s more, Pipeliner can be customised for

your individual pipeline, and you can even
upload your playbook to give your sales reps
best practice sales tools at their fingertips.

Pipeliner has been designed to support

organisations attract more leads and close
more deals. You can discover for yourself how
Pipeliner could help your business by signing up
for a free trial. Simple CLICK HERE to get started.

We can’t wait to help you.

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Contact
Website: http://pipelinersales.com/
Email: info@pipelinersales.com

Phone: 1-888-843-6699

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© Pipelinersales Inc.