The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast Build a Winning Sales Playbook
Dani Buckley is the General Manager of LeadG2, an 100% remote inbound marketing and sales enablement agency, which focuses on sales results for B2B and B2C companies that have complex, multi-channel sales processes.
LeadG2 started in 2011 as sales consulting firm that needed to generate leads for its business. Its first clients were media companies that owned television and radio stations . . . and needed to get advertisers.
In the past, B2B sales professionals have tended to have a lone wolf mentality . . . sales didn't "count" unless the salesperson independently discovered and chased down a lead. Dani feels it is important to change that culture, to supplement cold calling and outbound prospecting with inbound and lead gen.
Dani defines sales enablement as "whatever you need to do to help your salespeople sell smarter and faster." She spoke at Hubspot Inbound 2019 on "How to Build a Sales Play in 30 Minutes or Less." In this Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast, she provides a brief overview of the process of developing a sales play:
- Develop a strategy by extracting the best knowledge and information from your leadership and your salespeople and from industry best practices and sales best practices
- Create a simplified process that outlines the five things salespeople need to do to identify quality prospects
- Identify the technologies and tools salespeople need
- Determine the content and resources salespeople need
- Plan the rollout
- Provide training
LeadG2 builds robust customized "thick stack" sales playbooks for its clients, using PowerPoint so that sales managers can easily update the material. LeadG2 recommends that companies store their most up-to-date sales playbook versions where they are easily accessible by the sales team – where they would normally put stuff in the cloud.
Dani also references Donald Miller's StoryBrand and the "hero's journey. She emphasizes that, in messaging and in content development, you/your company is not the hero . . . your customer is the hero.
LeadG2's parent, the Center for Sales Strategy, is a 36-year-old sales consulting and sales leadership training company. A brand-new sister company, Up Your Culture, focuses on helping companies improve company culture and employee engagement.
LeadG2 is on Twitter and Facebook. The company website is: https://leadg2.com. Dani is on Twitter @daniobuckley and LinkedIn.