The One Mistake with Sales Playbooks
Does your playbook reflect wishful thinking or the reality of sales outcomes?
Check out this awesome Chrome extension to find the best LinkedIn hashtags for your social selling LinkedIn posts! Download now and let me know what you think 😁
Do great teams achieve greatness because of the talent or the system? It’s a trick question, because the there is no right answer.
Watching Super Bowl LV, you might think the answer is talent. Tom Brady won an unprecedented seventh Super Bowl and fifth Super Bowl MVP. Many said that without Bill Belichick at the helm, Brady would falter. That was clearly not the case, as he and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went all the way to win the championship.
Then again, you can have a team of superstars, yet still fail to produce, as the USA basketball team did during the 2004 Athens Olympics. This version of the Dream Team had all-stars such as LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Tim Duncan, and Allen Iverson. Yet they racked up losses to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and eventual winner Argentina. What won the day was a better system and tighter teamwork.
The original Dream Team trounced opponents back in 1992. The group of elite professional NBA players from the US were no match for talent assembled by other countries. Sixteen years later, the talent was stronger and other countries elevated their approach, learning from the US and probing for ways to exploit their weaknesses. The US game on the other hand never adapted to more talented and prepared opponents.
I am not sure if you watched the halftime show. I am more of a metal guy, but I appreciated the artistry and entertainment value The Weeknd brought. Regardless of what you thought of his performance, he absolutely owned meme of the Super Bowl award:
Yeah, I know, that was a sharp dig at startup sales VP’s. It’s a hard job. They are tasked with scaling the team and revenue to impossible growth rates, all with a product that is constantly in flux and stressed founders under the gun from investors. That is why the average tenure is 18 months and many don’t even last half a year.
Some of the blame for VP of Sales being such a short tenured role does fall on the shoulders of sales leaders. Having observed many heads of sales over the past decade, it is clear that many are relying on the one playbook that made them super successful in a previous role. Whether it was a few hacks that kickstarted growth or just great timing, this rising star eventually takes that playbook to the next role and every role following.
I am a big proponent of having a playbook. For some, it has defined their success. In the book The Hard Thing about Hard Things, Ben Horowitz describes the VP he eventually hired that saved his company Opsware as a sales savant. That VP was Mark Cranney, someone that could actually write a book on sales that would not be complete bullshit. The only other level of depth I have seen in playbooks that could rival Mark’s would be the sales blueprints book I got from Jacco van der Kooij a few years back.
The drawback of most playbooks however is that they tend to become stale over time. What worked in the 90’s heyday of solution selling does not work so well in 2021. Even more recent books like 2011’s Predictable Revenue are a bit long in the tooth. For one, the data available to sellers and the tools and channels to connect with prospects have changed. More importantly, how buyers buy has evolved quite a bit over the course of a decade. Incidentally, this is often why sales coaches and consultants become less effective over time. They never adapt their teaching to account for the changes in sales.
We can agree then that playbooks have value, but only if they adapt as the situation changes. That does not just mean from one company to the next. A thriving sale team that consistently overachieves is one that is constantly learning from conversations, outcomes, and data to make adjustment to the sales process and tactics that benefits everyone.
Though I am beating up on heads of sales, the fact is that we all have playbooks that guide our selling activities. Often these are not written down, but are the things in our heads that consist of strategies and tactics we collect over time and tend to work for us. It can be small things like ways to open cold calls or dependable messaging templates to strategies such as opening a new territory or coaching an internal champion.
The problem is when the plays that we have so much confidence in let us down unexpectedly. As I was gearing up outbound prospecting at Stack Overflow, I pulled together a list of CTO’s and engineering leaders in the Denver area as my first campaign. I did all the things I was familiar with from past startups to do high velocity prospecting, reaching out to over 300 contacts. It was an epic failure, resulting in exactly one call that cancelled last minute and one in-person meeting.
Two things I learned in that exercise. The first was that the messaging was too low-level and addressed the wrong needs. The second epiphany was that it was critically important to personalize and tailor the messaging to a greater degree. I therefore changed the playbook and as I learned more about the sales motion, I made constant refinements to tailor every aspect of the sales process. The results of this effort was much better results for campaigns in Toronto, London, and as far away as Hong Kong and Singapore.
Why do we get stuck in a rut? Because it’s easier to just go with what we know. There are two different cognitive biases at work that cause us to dig in, ignore obvious signs of the need to change, and make us overconfident in the absence of evidence.
The Law of the Instrument is also known as the Law of the Hammer. Besides being an awesome name for anything (like the name of a metal band), it is also one that we are pretty familiar with from the saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.”
The bias came from an observation by Abraham Maslow, famous for the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He mused about automated washing machines for cars being only useful for cars and that anything that fell into the machine would also be treated like a car. In the world of sales, this bias leads us to using the same tactics and tools regardless of the situation. For example, when we just stick with one demo flow or the VP of Sales insists on using the same sales tools in every new gig.
The second bias is Confirmation Bias. This is the tendency to listen more to information that confirms our actions and beliefs. Conversely, it also leads us to reject information, feedback, and evidence that counters our beliefs no matter how accurate the information is in exposing the flaw in our beliefs.
Confirmation Bias sometimes leads us to fall deeper into the echo chamber of our mind. The result is career freefall, unable to break the habits that had worked so well in the past. Over the years, I had seen many successful, long-time enterprise salespeople come to the Enterprise Sales Forum looking to retool their approach. They finally accepted that the sales game had changed, and they needed to change as well if they were going to remain relevant and employed.
Be brutally honest about what is and is not working in your sales toolkit. If you are not getting results with what you are doing, the only thing that is in your power to change is you. Experiment with new tactics and strategies, then ruthlessly measure the results. Also find peers or a community that can provide guidance and feedback. Having feedback from others can give you a gut check on progress.
If you are a sales leader, use your playbook as a starting point, not the Bible. One area that every VP of Sales can improve upon for example is hiring, which is fraught with biases. Let’s face it, we tend to hire people that are like us. Get started on fighting the confirmation bias in hiring this month, Black History Month, to dive deeper on permanently removing bias and bringing more diversity to your sales team.
Let me know if you want to hear more about cognitive biases and sales. There is a lot of material to explore that can help unravel your internal complexities. And till next week, happy selling!
Mark Birch, Founder of the Enterprise Sales Forum
If you found this essay personally helpful, I encourage you to sign up for the weekly Enterprise Sales Forum Newsletter where I share my thoughts on the state of B2B sales, practical tips for improving your sales acumen, and upcoming sales talks across the global Enterprise Sales Forum community.