‘The Sales Development Playbook’ [FREE E-BOOK] – Trish Bertuzzi
Xant Team
What sales playbook template do you follow? Check out the six best ways that managers can boost the performance of their sales team to maximize pipeline and generate more profit in The Sales Development Playbook by Trish Bertuzzi.
RELATED: How To Win At Sales Development — 27 Tips From The Experts
In this article:
- About the Book
- It’s All About the Leads
- Recruiting and Retention
- A Must-Read for Modern Sales Leaders
- Free eBook: How to Build a World-Class Sales Development Team
The Sales Playbook | The Perfect Strategy for Sales Success
Sales Playbook Definition: A compilation of best practices, guidelines, and resources to guide employees in sales or B2B marketing.
About the Book
How do you consistently engage clients and generate enough sales pipeline to fuel explosive revenue growth? That’s the question almost everybody’s asking these days, from early-stage SaaS startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Trish Bertuzzi, who’s one of the world’s leading experts on sales training and development, has written a new book that provides a proven sales playbook that sales team members can use to effectively and efficiently build a repeatable pipeline. The Sales Development Playbook masterfully walks you through the six essential elements of running and creating a successful team:
- Strategy: How to develop a strategy that’ll set your sales team a notch above your competitors
- Specialization: Should sales professionals focus on one specific industry?
- Recruiting: The sales manager’s guide to creating their quota-dominating dream team
- Retention: How to make your employees happy at work
- Execution: Becoming a doer
- Leadership: How to become a great sales leader
We’ll hit a few of the highlights in this review. After this, we encourage you to read the book to soak up the incredible insights Bertuzzi has amassed in her illustrious 30-year career-building high-velocity sales team-developing strategy of all sizes.
It’s All About the Leads
As XANT President Ken Krogue notes in the foreword of this groundbreaking book, it’s still all about the leads. If you supply your account executives with a steady stream of introductory meetings or qualified leads, you will always win because they will figure out a way to close them.
The problem, Bertuzzi writes, is that your closers no longer have time to prospect during the sales cycle. Without ample time to use lead generation tools, selling becomes much more difficult to do since you have to work with a limited customer base.
Buyers and clients are busier than ever and feel that marketing teams who contact them via call or email are a burden. That’s why you must adopt a more sophisticated marketing approach that challenges the status quo thinking.
Additionally, gone are the days when sales reps only had to deal with one decision maker. Today, the buying process includes a battalion of decision makers that are very difficult to extract pain points from.
Luckily, you can still market your specific product or service if your team uses the right sales enablement platform. The sales development team should devote themselves to the art and science of finding leads and qualifying opportunities.
Their goal should be to fill your pipeline with high-quality leads. That way, both account executives and sales reps have a larger chance of closing more deals.
RELATED: Sales Leaders: 50 Sales Trends You Need To Know About For 2019
Recruiting and Retention
Bertuzzi resisted the temptation to lump retention into the same section as recruiting, and for good reason. Retaining top sales development talent demands a separate set of strategies and skills.
In the recruiting section, she adeptly covers recruiting tactics, compensation, and the hiring process. You’ll learn how to fill your roster with the right people.
But if you want to maintain a high level of sales performance over time, you will also need to master retention. As Bertuzzi points out in the sales enablement playbook, this is one of the most difficult aspects of leading a sales development team.
The retention section “goes deep on the stuff that never seems to get enough consideration: engaging, developing, and motivating people,” she writes. “These chapters are filled with actionable advice on everything from coaching to building career paths.”
By subtracting average ramp time (3 to 4 months) from the average tenure (12 to 18 months), Bertuzzi estimates that you can expect about 8 to 14 months of productivity and sales effectiveness from each SDR (sales development rep).
In the sales leader playbook, she offers this chart to show variables that can positively or negatively affect SDR tenure:
Pretty neato burrito, huh? The whole book is packed with valuable tips, tricks, and templates.
A Must-Read for Modern Sales Leaders
The Sales Development Playbook covers everything you need to know to build, coach, and lead an effective team. We give this sales playbook our highest recommendation.
You can download free chapters of Bertuzzi’s book here or head straight to Amazon to buy your copy.
Download a free XANT ebook below.
Free eBook: How to Build a World-Class Sales Development Team
Discover how to recruit, hire, compensate, and coach a sales development team that will increase lead conversion rates and lower total sales costs.
Reading this sales playbook is simply one of the best ways you can improve your sales team’s performance to bring in more business. Overall, the key is to oversee them as a whole while guiding them individually.
Teach your team how to generate more high-quality leads, so your account executives and sales reps can target better prospects. Avoid wasting your time cold calling non-buying prospects who don’t respect you or what your company does.
Have you read The Sales Development Playbook by Trish Bertuzzi? Share your review with us in the comments section down below!
Up Next: Sales Effectiveness Metrics for Evaluating Your Team
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on January 22, 2016, and has been updated for quality and relevancy.