Play Best Practices
How to Perfect your Play Strategy in Playbooks
Most sales professionals have a series of activities they perform in order to get a prospect interested in their company or product. But it isn’t just one prospect you are working, it’s many. You get busy, you forget things, and maybe some of these important tasks to win new business fall through the cracks. This is where Playbooks comes in. By automating your contact strategy using Plays, you will know what to do and when you need to do it.
Who Should Create Plays?
The ability to create Plays is restricted by the “Manage Plays” permission. It is up to you who you want to allow to have this permission. Some customers restrict this permission to ONLY Playbooks Administrators and Managers in order to better control the sales strategy. Other customers have enabled sales reps to create their own Plays which puts the control back in the user’s hands to develop their own strategy and share with their co-workers.
Attention: Decide carefully who you let have access to Play creation. Some customers DO NOT restrict Play creation and their Plays have spread out of control. On the other hand, some customers restricted Play creation from seasoned sales professionals causing those individuals to not adopt Playbooks into their daily workflow.
A user’s role is the largest factor in the decision to grant the “Manage Plays” permission. If a Business Development Representative is using Playbooks, they will most likely not have the ability to create Plays, but rather be required to stick to the same, repeatable process as all other Business Development Reps. If the Playbooks user is an Account Manager, they might be given the flexibility to create their own Plays to support their unique portfolio.
If you choose to allow sales reps the ability to create Plays, managers and admins should give some basic guidelines and training. Consider these best practices:
- Make Play creation part of your employee advancement and training program. For example, it is required for Team Lead roles or to get the next pay raise.
- Any user, admin, or manager that will create Plays must complete this Play Maker course and provide their completion certificate to the Playbooks Administrator.
- Set a guideline that users are allowed no more than 10 personal Plays. For industry specific Plays, leverage features like Placeholders and Snippets.
- Communicate regular “Clean-up” sessions twice per year for unused Plays.
Govern Play Strategy with a Center of Excellence Group
An alternative, and highly advisable solution to granting everyone the ability to create their own Plays is to establish a “Center of Excellence” group. Representatives from all user groups provide feedback to the Center of Excellence on Plays and automation. They report on what is working, what isn’t, and bring new ideas to the table.
Limiting Number of Plays
There is no restriction to the number of Plays your Playbooks organization can have. In order to avoid the proliferation of Plays, we strongly recommend organizations to establish some internal guidelines.
Internal guidelines can be something like:
- Unused Plays are deleted after 30 days
- Only 10 personal Plays per user
- Anyone granted the ability to manage Plays must take the Play Maker Course
Announcing New Plays
Once you have created a Play, you must communicate to your team that is it available for use. Be sure to include things like the pain point the Play solves, when it goes LIVE, what the expectation for use is, how the Play works, and what process changes will be made due to the Play.
Try these techniques for announcing new Plays:
- Email from Playbooks Admin/Enablement/Ops: “We created a Play that will help you drive more attendance to a webinar we are hosting later this month. Begin using it on Monday with all your accounts not within 3 months of renewal.”
- Email from Executive Sponsor: “As VP of Sales, I want to address the concerns escalated to me regarding the unified messaging of our new product line. This Play helps to align all of us.”
- Daily/Weekly Huddles: “Congratulations to our top 3 Play adopters. Here is some of the response we’ve seen from the Play.”
To get started on you own Plays, download these seven pre-made Play files. For more information, Check the other Play articles and the Play Maker Course on XANT University.
