J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook - Building out a Commercial Toolbox
Part 9/10
Once you have created a sales playbook, there are hundreds of existing resources you can leverage to create a library of practical tools and templates for aiding your GTM. I have selected five to get you started, which based on my experience are good building blocks for sales effectiveness and complementary to a playbook.
1. Growth Hacking
Growth hacking is a strategic approach that focuses on finding the most effective methods to expand a business through experimentation (think classic A/B testing specifically applied to growth and sales initiatives). This innovative tactic has proven to significantly accelerate growth, enable faster monetization, and foster a mindset centred on expansion. The process begins with a scientific approach, formulating a hypothesis centred on potential growth avenues. This hypothesis then serves as the foundation for a series of experiments, the results of which are analysed to draw meaningful conclusions. Examples of potential growth strategies to experiment with include, building an email list, partnering with other brands, or cultivating a community, among others.
Further reading on distinct Growth Hacking strategies for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referrals: 2O Ultimate Growth Hacking Strategies for Startups
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2. Account Planning & Collaboration
For successful planning, fostering a collaborative environment is paramount. Utilising digital platforms that offer valuable templates and tools can significantly enhance team collaboration and instil structured workflows. These platforms facilitate effective communication, idea sharing, and joint decision-making, all of which are crucial for planning and execution. You can also access a lot of effective templates to help with account management and revenue expansion initiatives to apply and deploy with customer accounts once they are acquired.
Example of such a digital platform: Miro Templates Library
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3. Sales Profile/Personality Assessments
Sales Profile/Personality Assessments, such as the DiSC assessment, are tools designed to evaluate an individual’s personality traits and behaviours and are often applied in a sales context. They provide tools to help guide sales performance management and coaching and enablement plans for managers and reps alike. Best used in collaboration with other evaluation tools and generally requires a degree of personalisation and individual interpretation to be applied and adopted effectively. As always, the key is to not only apply these tools at a moment in time, but to ensure they become part of an on-going programme of continuous assessment and evaluation of performance. This is how you engrain objective scoring into your sales culture and drive high-performance over-time.
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4. Social Selling
Social selling is a modern sales approach that leverages social networks to locate and engage with prospects. LinkedIn is the most common social networking platform used for B2B sales propositions and its ‘Sales Navigator’ solution is basically LinkedIn on steroids. Built for sales reps and teams to prospect for new leads more effectively, Sales Navigator increases your pipeline and can aid closing more deals. Sales Navigator offers a 30-day free trial period and unlocks many additional features and functionality (e.g. more powerful search capability, more tailored recommendations, more customised feed, better list building, etc). Something to consider even in the start-up phase. Definitely something to harness as you start to scale and the sales team grows to 10+.
Further reading: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
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5. Sales Planning
Wasting time in inefficient and poorly run meetings is a huge drain on sales effectiveness and leads to admin creep and impacts output and performance. A well-crafted simple 1-page meeting plan not only fosters efficiency but also ensures that your sales meeting objectives are met in a systematic and engaging fashion. Sales should be selling, not stuck in a cycle of internal meetings that aren’t driving results. Numerous template examples are readily available, providing a wealth of resources to draw from. Renowned SaaS companies, including Salesforce, have set benchmarks by publishing their effective meeting agenda templates. These can serve as valuable references when designing an agenda that suits your specific needs.
Further reading: 10 Secrets To a Successful Sales Meeting Agenda
Ultimately think of this as building a Swiss-Army Knife and having a tool for every (sales) job within the company. Toolboxes evolve, new tools get added, old tools no longer useful are removed. And as always, bring the sales team with you as the toolbox scales and becomes more adaptive and agile.
Access the google slide templates here:
The J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook — All Template Slides (2023).