In summary:
- Firms are producing too much sales content
- This is hindering sales performance, not helping it
- Top-quartile teams keep their content lean and consistent by using sales plays
Why top-quartile teams use sales plays
In B2B sales, content creation has risen substantially in recent years. So much so that the average sales rep now has over 1,400 assets to choose from, according to Forrester.
This might sound like a good thing. But it’s not.
Because research shows that an excess of sales content has two damaging effects on performance: it overwhelms sellers (and then buyers) and it makes your message inconsistent.
So how are top-quartile sales teams tackling the issue of too much content? They’re making their content leaner and more consistent. And they’re doing it using a proven technique: sales plays.
‘A perfect storm of content’
Let’s start with that number from Forrester: a typical B2B sales rep has 1,400 assets at their disposal. That’s a lot of material. And to compound this, the number of interactions per buying cycle has shot up by 54% in the past two years.
Forrester calls this situation ‘a perfect storm of content’. Reps are being confronted with more than a thousand assets to choose from, across multiple categories and formats, produced by different parts of the business. And they’re having to make this choice frequently, as interactions with buyers increase.
Too much complexity
The result of this perfect storm? Too much complexity. Sellers are overloaded with information and face difficult choices. And it becomes hard to link content to results: there’s too much material, in too many categories, to properly track which sales assets perform well and which don’t.
Overwhelmed sellers = overwhelmed buyers
How does this affect buyers?
Sellers tend to pass on the excess of information they receive to customers. As this research in HBR shows, 68% of sellers think that ‘more information helps customers make better decisions’ – and 86% think that ‘helping the customer consider all possible options and alternatives is important’.
Information overload
Sellers believe that giving buyers more information will help the sale. But that belief is mistaken.
In reality, more information leads to buyers feeling overloaded:
- Even when the information they receive is of high quality, 75% of buyers are overwhelmed by the volume of it
- Information overload reduces the chances of making a high-quality sale by an average of 54%, according to Gartner.
Inconsistent message
As well as information overload, there’s a second problem: inconsistency.
When thousands of sales assets are being created, by different parts of the business, there’s no way the material can all be aligned behind a consistent message. And yet consistency of message is crucial.
Why consistency is important
As Brent Adamson puts it, top-quartile sellers give customers “just enough information” and use it to “create a consistent narrative”. And that works for buyers: they feel more confident in making a decision when the information they’ve received has featured consistent patterns or themes throughout the purchase.
And when customers feel more confident in making a decision, they’re far more likely to make a high-quality purchase: 157% more likely, in fact.
The top-quartile solution: sales plays
To keep their message consistent, their assets aligned and their content targeted, top-quartile teams adopt a proven approach to sales content creation: they use sales plays.
What is a sales play?
It’s a set of assets created especially for a specific sales campaign. Or, as Bain puts it, “a coordinated set of actions to create and win an opportunity at a specific customer or prospect, driven by data”.
A sales opportunity is identified using ongoing data analysis. A set of materials are created around that opportunity – all aligned in message and laser-focused. Sellers are then immersed in the play and coached on its aims, and the play launches.
Sales plays get results
And the results speak for themselves. Bain found that top quartile sales teams are 170% more likely to be using sales plays than lower-performing ones. And according to Forrester, teams using sales plays deliver 36% more revenue growth and 28% more profitability.
What’s involved in a sales play?
A sales play involves building a bill of materials that’s tightly aligned around a targeted message.
At a minimum, that should include an external sales presentation, for reps to use in the field, and an internal playbook, to provide sellers with everything they need to know about the play and how best to sell it.
Sales plays can also include additional assets, like aligned marketing materials, interactive ROI calculators or business proposal templates.
Quality not quantity
The important thing is to make sure all the assets are aligned – not to generate lots of material for the sake of it.
This tightly aligned, laser-focused set of sales content will make sellers’ jobs easier. They no longer feel the burden of choice and complexity when it comes to picking sales assets for interactions with buyers. Instead, as Bain puts it, they’re “able to meet customers with the right information at the right time”.
60% of pipeline
Customers benefit too. The content and conversations they have with sellers have all been tailored to their buying needs.
That’s just one reason why top-performing teams attribute 60% or more of their pipeline to sales plays.
Create a sales play factory
Sales plays needn’t take long to create. Companies that create a well-oiled sales play ‘factory’ are able to plan and deploy plays within a matter of weeks.
A sales play factory is an ongoing system to develop and manage a set of sales plays. To make sure it works smoothly, it’s important to have a robust process in place for sales play selection, creation and activation.
5 steps to a sales play factory
There are five key components of a sales play factory:
- Ongoing intelligence: Campaign performance and market data are constantly tracked, and so is the performance of sales plays. This data all feeds into the choice of which plays to nominate for the next quarter, which to remove and where new plays are needed.
- Task the build team: Your sales play build team should be a small group focused exclusively on building the assets that will form your play.
- Build materials: The build team creates the agreed assets, with weekly check-ins – frequent alignment with the senior leadership team is key.
- Senior leadership review: Final content is approved for launch.
- Activation: Sellers are immersed in the play and given coaching on how to run it.
An ongoing process
The cycle of selection, creation and activation is an ongoing process, with external and internal data informing where to focus next.
And through this process of ongoing refinement, selection and creation become more efficient, and plays become ever more targeted and effective.