If your day-to-day travels take you anywhere near the worlds of software development or start ups, you will likely have heard about the concept of the “minimum viable product (MVP)”. This idea was conceived by Eric Ries, author of ‘The Lean Startup’.
Ries observed that too often startups strive to perfect a product before showing it to a prospective customer, which in fiercely competitive markets is way too risky. He posits that instead of working on getting the optimal product out in the market, the priority needs to be to get the MVP into users’ hands as quickly as possible.
The sooner you start getting feedback, the sooner you can iterate the product based on actual and measurable customer input. To accomplish this, Ries devised a simple, but powerful continuous feedback loop process: BUILD-MEASURE-LEARN.
We work with technology sales organizations to help them build and implement sales playbooks that capture and codify top performer best practices to enable all their reps and new-hires to sell like their best reps.
In many instances, the client insists that the playbook needs to capture every nuance and permutation of their sales process before putting it out in front of their customer – their salespeople. Sometimes this is warranted, but it shouldn’t be the default launch criteria.
Overall, I’m a big believer in the quality principle “do it right the first time”. The problem with this line of thinking, however, is that it assumes that you only have one shot at getting it right. To be fair, when it comes to building playbooks, it’s perfectly reasonable to take this position because, traditionally, playbooks have been built in PowerPoint or Word and delivered as hard copy playbooks. The hassle factor with having to continually update a playbook based on new learnings is too high, so revision cycles are often measured in years.
Sales playbook authoring applications, like ours and others, now allow you to build a Minimum Viable Playbook (MVPb), deliver it to a subset of users, get feedback, iterate and phase it into the rest of the sales organization, and then continue the process on a larger scale. We call this ‘Agile Playbook Development’.
Sales playbooks are an essential part of Sales Enablement, so get started, if you haven’t already. Just remember that perfect is the enemy of good (enough), at least in the short-term.
What’s your take? When it comes to delivering playbooks, is good enough, good enough?
One comment
Comment by Mitch on October 24, 2017 at 9:50 PM
Hey there, sounds like you’re asking for feedback in the last line, so here ya go! I could not agree more that perfect is the enemy of good. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Legos and K’Nex toys, but I had one condition: I at least first built it the way it was meant to be built, following every line in the instructions to a tee to make sure it was perfect at least once. As I’ve experienced more times than I can count, this approach doesn’t really work in a fast-paced SaaS business because there is, in fact, no instruction manual. Everything is learned through trial and error. For sales enablement, this can come off as scary and I’ve even seen people leave their companies because they didn’t realize just how much onus was on themselves for success. One way to get around the scare factor though is by implementing fantastic sales enablement tools like best in class CRMs, team chat, and of course training software. All of these tools allow you to track how things are going and allow you to iterate based on the data. I agree 100% – go MVP and iterate, iterate, iterate!
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