The Science of Sales Playbooks

The Science of Sales Playbooks

In our last blog post, we argued that we are long overdue for a sales playbook revolution. This time, we want to talk about why Sales Playbook 2.0 works.

To paraphrase a certain hit song from the 90s: it’s all about the learning science.

Learning, contrary to 18th century conceptions, isn’t just a matter of will. You can make it easier for your sellers to learn, remember and use the information in your playbooks—and you can definitely make it harder. The trick is knowing some basic learning processes.

Learning 1,2,3

There are four basic steps in learning information:

  1. Attention
  2. Encoding
  3. Storage
  4. Retrieval

Attention
Not only does the playbook need to successfully grab attention, it needs to keep that attention long enough for the sales rep to begin learning the information. A couple of quick tips:

  1. Keep each piece of content short—under 150 words is idea, as is keeping the entire module to about 2 or 3 minutes’ worth of content.
  2. Add points of interaction every 45 seconds, and weave in videos, audio, knowledge checks and interactive exercises, which not only help hold attention, but help write the information into memory. Speaking of which, the next step is:

Encoding
Gaining attention isn’t enough. It’s certainly easy to hear or read something, think, “OK, got it,” and then have the knowledge slip away it thirty minutes later. (Teachers and parents, in particular, know this problem all too well). The brain can only hold so much in the working memory, and it’s necessary for the playbook make it easier for sellers to encode information into long-term memory.

Delivering the module in the sales context, when the sellers actually need it most, also helps with encoding. It can take a few tries before information becomes properly written into longer-term memory, and making it easy for sellers to get the information they need, just when they need it, makes the process quicker and less frustrating. Using Guided Selling as a tool would be idea, since it can provide dynamic content recommendations based on prospect and transaction data.

Storage and Retrieval
We’re treating storage and retrieval in the same point because they go hand-in-hand. Once knowledge is encoded in long-term memory, it pretty much stays there. The real trick? Retrieving it when we need it, not just when it’s convenient to. It’s not just a question of memory storage, which is vast; it’s a question of quick and ready access.

We’ve all been there: we can reel off at the drop of a hat reams of stats for, say, baseball players who died before we were born, or all the different types of starfighters in Star Wars (Rebel, Imperial, Republic and Confederacy), but this prospect just asked a pointed question about a particular feature set and product marketing had run that training just last week and why can’t we remember something useful for once, dangit?

The good news is that you can improve memory retrieval with practice, and playbooks integrated with the CRM are perfect for exactly this use. Sellers have the opportunity to glance through refreshers right before calls, but the true meat and potatoes are the retrieval exercises that you can include: light games, interval knowledge checks, flashcards and quizzes.

We’ve also written, in some detail, on how to practice more effectively, and much of that advice also applies to memory retrieval, so check out the post to find out why interleaving and spacing matter.

The four stages of learning

Conclusion

We’re not rebels without a cause here at MobilePaks. We’re calling for a radical revision of playbooks because the old ways aren’t just sub-optimal, they actually work against the way people process information, especially in a hectic work environment. Long, flat stretches of text broken up by a complicated chart or illustration. Big, bulky chapters that are difficult to search. These old playbooks may even lead to sales reps believing they think they know it all already, only to freeze during clutch time.

We’re pushing for this structure for this new style of playbook not only because we make the software that makes this possible, but because we’re a bunch of learning science nerds and we know it’s going to be a far better tool for improving sales productivity and effectiveness. We have a treasure trove of learning science, some of it going back well over a hundred years, that shows us what helps people learn, remember and use information more effectively. It’s time we used that wealth of information.

 

Download Sales Playbooks of the 21st Century

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Sales Playbooks 2.0: The Sales Playbook Revolution

Sales Playbook Revolution

Sales Playbooks 1.0: Overdue for an Overhaul

The original sales playbooks were enormous binders filled with dead trees. And then almost 20 years ago, PDFs emerged, and playbooks made the leap into digital—Sales Playbooks 1.0, if you will.

But that was almost 20 years ago. Since then, we’ve seen governments topple, new countries form, the exponential growth of the Internet (as well as the bursting of the dot-com bubble), and the largest economic crisis in the USA since the Great Depression.

We’re overdue for another sales playbook revolution.

Sales Playbook 1.0 probably looked a lot like this:

  • Format: PDF with links (if you’re lucky, you also get a table of contents)
  • Delivery: Download from a portal or stored on a network drive
  • Length: Anywhere from 25 to 100 pages of content
  • Cost: $25,000-$50,000 to produce

There are a couple of upsides to the PDF playbook regime. For one, it’s a massive improvement over paper. And for another, it’s a comprehensive repository of sales process and best practices, making it an indispensable part of sales enablement.

The downsides, however, are pretty big. This type of sales playbook is just about impossible to update on the fly, difficult to read and absorb, complex to navigate, and not easily searchable. In short, they’re large, clunky, and slow.

Worst of all, not only is the playbook not a part of the salesperson’s daily activities, it actively pulls them out of the sales workflow.

The end result? Salespeople receive these PDFs at kickoffs or boot camps, glance through them once or twice, and then proceed to email or call people when they need help—or, even worse, just winging it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we can rebuild this sales enablement asset. We have the technology.

What a Sales Playbook Revolution Looks Like

The mobile revolution has transformed the landscape already. Most of us walk around with a staggering amount of computing power in our pocket or purse, each device able to connect to unfathomable amounts of information in milliseconds.

Sales playbooks are only just beginning to catch up with this paradigm shift. An ideal Sales Playbook 2.0 looks like this:

Short modules
It’s getting harder and harder to get and keep attention—the mobile revolution giveth, and the mobile revolution taketh away. Keeping things short and snappy not only helps snag (and hold) attention, it ensures sellers don’t overload their limited amount of working memory, and from there, helps them write information into long-term memory. We recommend no more than 150 words at a time, with a point of interaction every 45 seconds, and modules that don’t take more than three to four minutes to complete.

Provides relevant content within the sales workflow
If you use a CRM, integrating your playbooks with the CRM is ideal. It situates the sales playbook squarely in the sales workflow—so reps don’t have to burn precious selling time searching in a content portal or their email while flipping back and forth between different windows.

Playbooks integrated with the CRM can also be capable of delivering predictive content recommendations based on context: as sellers switch between prospects or move through sales stages, the playbook adapts accordingly and serves up the best information in each case, helping to increase sales effectiveness.

Sales playbooks in the CRM

Synced with the cloud
Instead of reserving changes for the quarterly or yearly kickoff, a modular sales playbook stored in the cloud and accessed in real time allows quick additions and real-time edits. Version control is no longer as much of a burden, and salespeople are assured of getting the latest and greatest.

Interactive
Long, flat content can actively interfere with learning. Sales Playbook 2.0 can support embedded videos, knowledge checks, and light games that provide practice opportunities for salespeople, so they can sharpen their skills and boost their ability to recall important information.

Compatible with all devices and operating systems
Technically, PDFs meet this requirement, but have you read a PDF that’s not mobile-optimized on your smartphone? It’s not a pretty experience. A truly modern sales playbook is built using responsive design so it works with your device, instead of clumsily accommodating it (or just plain not working).

Remember: It’s Ultimately for the (Sales)People

Never forget the ultimate purpose of the revolution: reinforcing desirable sales behavior and increasing sales effectiveness so sellers can close more deals. The productivity gains from salespeople having the tools to help themselves are nothing to sneeze at, either.

That means getting your salespeople to use it regularly, which means integrating it into their worflow and training. Consistent adoption of sales materials tends to, let’s be brutally frank here, a pain. A playbook that’s interactive, easy to access, and simple to use increases the likelihood that salespeople will turn to it in their times of need—and hopefully, bring about your own sales revolution.

 

Download Sales Playbooks of the 21st Century

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Find Out About the Science of Sales Learning in Top Sales Magazine’s July 2015 Issue

What Happens when a Brain Scientist is in Charge of SalesThe July issue of Top Sales Magazine features “What Happens When a Brain Scientist is in Charge of Sales,” an article about the science of sales learning by MobilePaks CEO Chanin Ballance.

We’ve heard about how incentives and motivators can spark salespeople to do near heroic feats to reach their goals, but what if we simply do a more efficient job of helping sales people have better selling conversations, making every salesperson a superstar?

For example, you determine the desired sales behaviors and skills that you want your salespeople to use for making a sale. By applying the basics of how brains learn and retain information, you can share your knowledge more effectively and have the sales team up to speed quickly—identifying pain, articulating value and making more sales than ever.

Read the full article to find out more about how to use these brain science principles to increase sales effectiveness, or you can check out the entirety of July’s issue here.

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Better Selling Through Learning Science

Co-Authored by Chanin Ballance, President and CEO of MobilePaks, and Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of Corporate Visions

Better Selling Through Learning Science

It happens all too often: Salespeople leave a training session energized and motivated like never before to apply their new skills in the field. But then, just weeks later, they forget most of the skills and concepts they trained so diligently to learn. The results of this pattern are as predictable as they are damaging: skill erosion, low adoption and minimal behavior changes in the field.

However, the sales enablement solutions that attempt to address these issues focus overwhelmingly on getting salespeople content more efficiently without sufficiently taking into account two important things:

  1. Even when the content resides in a single, authoritative repository that’s up-to-date and easily searched (and let’s be honest here, this is very much an ideal scenario), the fact remains that most of these repositories reside outside of the selling workflow, which interrupts sellers instead of keeping them in the selling context.

    For example: If a seller is in the prospect record in the CRM and needs to refresh her memory on key messaging points, she’ll have to leave the CRM, navigate to the content repository, and then waste precious time locating what she needs. These losses in momentum may be small, but they add up rapidly and can end up eating away hours of selling time every week—decreasing seller productivity.

  2. Once the seller has located the right piece of content, there’s every chance that it won’t actually help her in that moment—usually because it’s too long, too bulky, or too difficult to remember and use. Some tremendously useful assets, such as sales playbooks, contain wall-to-wall text that’s difficult to absorb and ultimately gets in the way of truly improving sales effectiveness.

Improving Both Productivity and Effectiveness

Solutions that stop skill erosion and reinforce training more effectively ideally need to integrate with the CRM and intelligently recommend coaching and guidance based on contextual data, as well as provide content that’s easy for sellers to learn, remember and use, improving both productivity and effectiveness.

The true productivity gains lie with the ability to dynamically change content recommendations as the seller navigates to different prospects from different verticals —and occupying different stages in the sales cycle. This type of system provides minimal disruptions to the seller workflow: The content is right there, in the CRM, and sellers waste far less time searching.

Having content in the workflow isn’t just a productivity booster, it impacts effectiveness as well. Surroundings and context can provide useful cues for recall. Think of all the times you’ve walked to the kitchen to grab something, only to forget what it is when you get there—but remembering when you return to your chair, where you initially made the decision. Providing coaching and reinforcement in the selling workflow helps make the content stickier.

Content delivery is only one piece of the puzzle, however. The other piece is the content itself: how to make the content easier to learn, use and remember so sellers can more easily recall what they need and use it when it matters most. To that end, here are some basic content creation guidelines based on over a hundred years of research into how people learn, remember and use information.

Keep Things Short and Modular

Short-term memory capacity is pretty limited—so beware of overwhelming it. Breaking information into modules makes it easier for sellers to digest and write into long-term memory. Our recommendations:

  1. Keep your content to what the average seller can reasonably complete in two to three minutes.
  2. Avoid blocks of text longer than 150 words.
  3. Add a point of interaction about every 45 seconds—a quick quiz, a flash card, or even a video.
Remind and Repeat

Reviewing information at spaced-out intervals—what’s known in learning science as “spacing”—is one of the most effective ways of improving recall. Having coaching and training refreshers available on-demand provides sellers with the means to refresh their memories as needed, boosting long-term memory retention.

Virtual Coach

Since skill erosion can undermine some of your most important training investments, inadequate skills reinforcement is a problem you can’t afford to ignore. And, thanks to Virtual Coach, a MobilePaks-powered platform from Corporate Visions, you no longer have to.

Corporate Visions’ Virtual Coach improves productivity by giving sellers the right reinforcement from right within the CRM platform or sales portal. Using the MobilePaks Guided Selling system, which intelligently predicts content and enablement support for sellers at each stage of a sale, Virtual Coach provides salespeople with situation-specific coaching content that’s presented in context and aligned to each selling or buying stage. Best of all, the content comes in bite-size chunks optimized for refreshing salespeople on the skills and concepts they need to gain mastery of the key conversations that happen throughout the buying cycle.

By prompting salespeople to use the techniques relevant to each deal stage, you’ll ensure your salespeople not only apply the skills you’ve invested in, but are also highly proficient with them. That will make low adoption and skills erosion a thing of the past. And, it will also get your reps one step closer to shining where it matters most: articulating value on purpose—not by accident—in front of prospects and customers.

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Seamless Learning: Reinforce Sales Training and Combat Learning Decay

seamless learning

Learning decay is what happens when newly-learned information slips beyond your ability to recall it. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have systems in place to combat post-sales training learning decay, which means they’re left with sellers who don’t meet performance benchmarks even a full year after their initial onboarding. These under-performing sales reps cost the company money by not hitting revenue targets, plus they experience higher turnover rates, which costs even more time and money.

A few different methods can help stem sales training learning decay, but the most effective we’ve found is implementing a seamless learning system.

What’s Seamless Learning?

Seamless learning integrates sales training into the sales process. It improves memory retention, helps reps perform better, cuts down on training costs, and provides managers and content creators (including marketing departments) with visibility into which assets are being used by salespeople.

How Seamless Learning Works

Seamless learning provides ongoing support and content through the entire sales training process, from pre-training, to in-class training, and into post-training, where its value truly shines as it provides the refreshers and reminders that stem learning decay.

Its key features are:

  1. Interactive and modular
    Have you really thought about how much you spend on paper and binders for your sales training workbooks? Convert all those dead trees into short, engaging pre-class readings, as well as interactive workbooks that sellers can access on their tablets and notebooks during class.
  2. Continuous Learning
    Workshops and bootcamps are merely the beginning of the learning process. The meat and potatoes of the learning process take place post-training. You can do all sorts of things to reinforce training, from pushing short, targeted reminders to refresh memories, to sending out periodic knowledge checks to assess progress and knowledge gaps.
  3. Just-in-time support
    A fully-featured seamless learning tool makes support and content available to users on any device, so they can get the right refresher before hopping on a call, going into a meeting, or doing the thousand and one things that come with moving prospects through sales process.
  4. Accessible content
    Reps waste hours upon hours every week searching for support and content that’s hidden somewhere in their inbox, or in one of several different content repositories. A single repository with a robust search function, accessible on any device or operating system, is a must.
  5. Visibility into what’s working
    Reiterating information and reinforcing good practices are essential for sales training, but you also need to know which assets help reps perform best. A usage tracking tool allows you to see what materials reps rely on, and how much they’re actually helping.

Not only does seamless learning ensure that your reps will retain information and apply it better, it also saves your company money by cutting down on training overhead. The software takes care of follow-up training sessions, organizing content, and, most importantly, assisting your reps through the sales cycle.

Because ultimately, training shouldn’t be a chore that your reps dread; it should be a benefit that helps them do their job better. And when learning is integrated into your sales process, it becomes less of a class to be avoided, and an integral part of the workflow that keeps sellers sharp and up-to-speed.

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