The Ideal Industry Playbook: And Why You Need it More Now than Ever

It’s SKO season!

That means you’re likely kicking off a new fiscal calendar, with a long list of new strategic initiatives planned, and you have to execute quickly. 

Given the recent economic downturn, depending on your vertical, there’s a good chance one of those initiatives is related to building pipeline in new industries. 

The problem is, that downturn means it’s rough out there.

An increasing number of stakeholders in every deal, greater availability of information for them to research before ever talking to you and, now, a long-term economic downturn that is leading to their indecision out of fear of making a mistake. 

All of this is happening while revenue leaders pressure their reps to create an increasing amount of new business on their own, and it seems their top three priorities are “build pipe, build pipe and… you guessed it…. build pipe!”

There are a lot of important sales skills that go into generating new business effectively, like those related to prospecting, discovery and qualification. What those skills enable, however, is just as important: messaging that resonates and a deep understanding of the customer’s industry. 

You have to know your buyer’s market to share relevant insights, understand the personas you sell to so you can tie your solutions to their priorities and pains, and be able to articulate your use cases in a value-centric way that points to clear outcomes with customer proof.

What does all of this mean? Just like any other sales motion, your verticalization strategy demands documentation and training, ideally in the form of a “playbook,” and it’s a great time of year to roll it out as we hold our sales kickoffs. 

Before we get into the specifics of what makes industry enablement effective, let’s review some of the foundations of what makes a playbook effective in general. (For those with established enablement cadences who are already playbook black belts, feel free to skip ahead!)

The term “playbook” is broadly applied in enablement circles, so let’s start with one of our favorite definitions from Cory Bray, Co-Founder of CoachCRM:

“An effective sales playbook is the salesperson’s tool for strategically planning and tactically executing the many conversations and activities required in a sales process.” 

That means the playbook needs to include actions and contexts that define an engagement with buyers. Generally, those actions and contexts can fall into three camps, which include mindsets, actions and skills. Industry enablement, or how to sell effectively into a specific industry, would be an example of a skill.

Anytime a playbook is focused on enabling a new skill, we must acknowledge that it is the most challenging type of change management effort, and that’s because it is both addressing changes in behavior and developing new ways of working. 

That means, before you even build an outline of what will be in your playbook, you need to get feedback from your revenue leaders, cross-functional partners, top performers and even average performers to find out what is missing. You don’t need a lot of meetings if you need to move quickly, but you’ll need some way of aggregating their feedback and insights. That will ensure that the audience(s) you support are bought in and invested in this new way of working.

You also will need to acknowledge that this will likely be an incremental change, given the complexity, so bake into your project plan that will be crawl, walk and run phases to ensure quick wins and more scalable versions implemented over time.

Ok, now back to the nuances of industry enablement. Just like any good playbook, it has to be actionable! That means you need a good structure, which we recommend includes the following:

• Market Insights
• Messaging
• Personas
• Use Cases
• Customer Proof
• Sales Content

There is plenty to dive into with each of these but, before we do, a quick note on the last bullet. A good content management system will allow you to seamlessly integrate job aids, templates and sales content across all of these sections so that your reps get the right assets to use with context. We’ll illustrate what that looks like as we dig into each section. Below, for each section, here’s our recommendation for the questions you should make sure to answer:

Market Insights

• What is everyone talking about in the industry?
• What’s the terminology the entire team should know?
• Are there statistics that are unique to the industry that would be noteworthy to prospects?

Use Cases

• This is more than just product features, but in the customer’s words, what are they using your product for? For example, an investment banker’s use case for Seismic’s LiveDocs woudl be to build a pitch deck. Whereas a customer success manager would generate QBRs.

Messaging

For each use case, what problem does it solve? How does the solution work? What’s the value? And can you prove it with customer evidence?

These use cases do not have to be markedly different than they are for your core business, but each of the 4 categories should be adapted to your industry as necessary.

Personas

For the user, buyer, and influencers:

• What are the most common titles? (in industries, the titles can vary, so it’s important to have multiple examples of titles). Bonus points: drop in specific LinkedIn profiles.
• What are the industry nuances where their job may differ from your core industry(ies)?
• What does their day-to-day entail?
• What gets them promoted?
• What’s frustrating about their job?

Customer Proof

What are the most relevant case studies to your industry? Importantly, these don’t need to only be externally sharable case studies. Even for non-customers, it’s important to capture pain heard during calls, quotes from potential customers, and 

Sales Content

A laundry list of sales content is not sufficient. It’s critical to lay out the sales content that’s relevant to the industry and organized by sales stage, sub-vertical, or another important variable.

Once you’ve answered all of those questions, you’ll likely be thinking back to our earlier points about the complexity of change management and be wondering, “How do I operationalize all of this?” In other words, how do you make sure all of this work is actually acted upon by the field?

It’s a great question, which is why the next thing you need to consider is processes, tools and cadences to reinforce the new motion.

Process

Whenever you address personas in your sales process, which is often part of discovery prior to a first call, is also a good time to overlay the impact of specific industries on your messaging. That’s because, to have effective messaging, you’ll want a value prop that sits at the intersection of the role and vertical to which you’re selling.

With that in mind, make sure the stage of your sales process where research prior to first call sits reflects leveraging your industry playbook. 

Tools

Including the playbook in your sales process will be even more impactful if you can create a validation rule in your CRM that ensures some basic information is filled out in fields on the opportunity, prior to a deal moving to the next stage after this first call. If there is too much pushback on a validation rule, you should still offer the fields to capture the information when available but don’t expect great adoption to start.

You should also use your content management system to recommend the playbook for any deal that is in the stage you’ve selected in your sales process. This is the foundation of a sales content strategy, which ensures the field has the right information at the right time. If that’s not available to you, then you do your best to analyze usage of the playbook by specific reps working on specific deals, and try to identify how often/when the playbook is being used. Without those analytics, you can also always include questions about this in whatever regular surveying you do with the field.

Cadences

Finally, just as you held meetings to inform your approach with the playbook, you’ll want to integrate activating the playbook into all of your standing meetings with revenue leaders and cross-functional partners to keep it top of mind and iterate the approach over time based on feedback. You’ll also want to tie back to what is covered in new training with the field to reinforce the concepts you’ve introduced.

In conclusion, industry enablement is more important than ever before, as reps enter an uncertain market looking for new business. That means they need tactical, specific training on how to attack those industries, which makes a playbook the perfect asset to implement your strategy. It’s also the perfect time of year to roll out a new sales motion, with kickoffs either soon approaching or just behind you, and a whole new fiscal year of opportunity. Remember to include the right elements, socialize the playbook early and often, and be open to iterating the approach over time, and you’re sure to have success.