As we head into the last few months of 2023 many organizations are thinking about their sales playbook for 2024. The start of a new calendar year is often a great time to update or in some cases create a sales playbook. The sales playbook provides a practical guide to the team, There can be many components of the sales playbook here are a few of the major sections.
Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Personas
It is good to update your ICP and buyer personas on a regular basis. For an ICP you could use industry, size, geography, or other factors. You may want to add a new ICP or in some cases even get more narrow based on your success through the year. The buyer persona could also be updated. Are there new contacts within existing ICPs or does a new ICP mean a new persona. Remember to operationalize them for tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator by framing it to match the fields and filters.
Messaging
What messaging worked in the past year? What new products, features, or benefits do you have in 2024? Update your messaging based on these questions. Messaging can apply to emails, social messaging, cold calls, and other customer facing sales tactics. Update them in your plan and associated templates and scripts.
Sales cadence
Take a look at sales cadence for different campaigns. Review how things went the past year. Is it time to add more phone calls, better utilize LinkedIn, or reduce the number of emails? You should have a years worth of data to make decisions on.
Tools
It is good to take a look at your sales stack at the beginning of the year. First start with your CRM. There could be new add-ons that you could take advantage of. As an example HubSpot has some new AI tools. You may want to switch up your research solutions, look at email automation, or new social media tools.
Personal Development
How will you make work on your team’s personal development this year? Could you try something new or double down on what worked. Personal development doesn’t need to be expensive. There are many affordable options including free training modules by people like HubSpot, Udemy courses, local Peer2Peer groups, whitepapers/blogs, or even a good old fashioned book or maybe an audio book. Don’t forget about yourself. What will you do for your personal development?
If you would like to talk about creating or updating your sales playbook please connect with me.
