Your Playbook: Play to Win
It’s time for your big presentation. You’re well versed in the subject matter and you can command a room. What else could you possibly need? A plan. A trajectory. A playbook. Without direction, a company’s output, a company itself, is going nowhere. Projects, presentations, marketing collateral, sales goals, and entire companies have to be tied to a plan to go anywhere.
When you were in school, did you ever pass a test without studying? Do well on a paper without really understanding what you wrote? It seemed like such a win at the time, right? You beat the system! You got away with something! You totally showed them! What if you were then expected to parlay that success by making it repeatable for others? Yikes.
You can’t repeat success if you’re not even sure what got you there in the first place.
We’re in the first month of a new year, so there’s no better time to put a playbook in place for your business. A playbook is a strategy or action plan with precise, measurable goals and related tasks that can be run no matter what players are on the field. That’s an important detail to note: regardless of who is executing, the playbook offers a fixed set of activities that lead to a desired outcome.
So, if your goal is to improve your B2B sales by 10% this quarter over last, your playbook is going to tell you exactly how that’s going to be accomplished. At the end of the quarter, you can see more than whether or not you’ve accomplished your goal. You can see if the number of calls you made actually led to the number of leads you anticipated. You can see whether the lead follow-up converted the estimated number of customers. You can see if the close rate of converted customers was as high as you expected. If not, you can see exactly where things broke down.
A playbook allows you to look at your assumptions vs. your reality and make necessary adjustments for next time.
Creating a playbook isn’t going to be a quick process that you can bang out in an hour. Guessing at numbers doesn’t create an effective playbook. Neither optimism nor pessimism creates an accurate playbook. Your playbook, the piece of the puzzle that tells you what the big picture will be, is the most important thing you’ll spend time on this year. It deserves your full attention.
The Alias Group not only operates off of a playbook, we create them for other companies. Sometimes it’s not the whole book. Often, we are filling in marketing services, a marketing strategic plan, branding services, or we are someone’s choice for outsourced sales management, outsourced inside sales, or so much more. Alias sets you up for growth through careful examination of goals, capabilities, and audience before executing tasks.
We quarterback so you can play to win. What is your next move?
