This is the time of year in which many NFL teams wrap up their training camps and head to their home fields to prepare for the first actual games of the year. Prior to and throughout the pre-season, each player was tasked with learning the latest schemes for their respective positions from their team’s playbook. These are the game plans designed to maximize scoring opportunities when the offense or special team has the ball and minimize the opponents’ yardage when they have control. Every player must understand his role in literally every scenario, which requires a lot of memorization and continuous repetition, to ensure a winning season.
Solution providers can also boost their chances for success by developing and maintaining similar playbooks for their sales and marketing teams. Just like in the NFL, these guides map out a variety of scenarios and a multitude of options for company employees, helping them understand not only what needs to be done to complete a sale, but the importance of each action required to accomplish that goal.
As channel organizations move away from traditional break/fix services models, the sales processes and complexities associated with each solution set can grow exponentially. A concurrent transition to cloud services, which is becoming the norm, typically reduces the amount that product vendors extend to their partners. That means a greater share of marketing costs and creativity fall on the shoulders of providers, another great reason for building solutions playbooks. They focus the organization’s efforts, helping them maximize revenue opportunities while minimizing other support costs.
Consider the case of an IT services company with a new unified communications solution for healthcare offices. Management could create a specific set of plays to promote the introduction of their new offering, and a variety of scenarios to help the sales and customer services teams meet their revenue targets.
Playbooks also help MSPs and other recurring IT services providers manage highly complex portfolios. These tools help the sales teams convert a vast amount of intricate details into smaller, easy-to-digest modules that they can master one step at a time. When properly designed and documented, these scenarios make it a lot easier to understand, position and sell new and existing solutions.
While it takes a fair amount of planning and hard work to develop a useful version for each IT services business, CompTIA assembled a new resource to help providers speed up and simplify that process. The Quick Start Guide to Improving Sales Performance with Solution Playbooks provides the background and a variety of best practices every VAR and MSP needs to build their own interpretation of these sales and marketing tools. The objective of this directive is to help IT services companies design a document that helps their employees:
- Understand the business and technology trends impacting their customers.
- Ask the right questions to qualify, scope and propose the right solutions.
- Improve competitiveness and raise the probability of closing sales.
- Ensure sales teams sell repeatable solutions consistently across customers, thus improving profit and reducing delivery risk.
Go here to download your free copy of the CompTIA Quick Start Guide to Improving Sales Performance with Solutions Playbook and other valuable IT business improvement resources.
Brian Sherman is founder of Tech Success Communications, specializing in editorial content and consulting for the IT channel. His previous roles include chief editor at Business Solutions magazine and senior director of industry alliances with Autotask. Contact Brian at [email protected].
