You may have this kind of information in your head, on myriad documents, maybe pieces of paper, but a playbook is your definition of your Go To Market strategy and how to make it repeatable.

Here is what should go into a playbook:

• Priority offerings: What are the most important services or products that you offer? Do you have any materials such as white papers, case studies, press releases, or analyst report snapshots that the sellers can easily grab and share? Most importantly, can you explain them to a six year old?
• Personas: Who are you selling to? What levels are they in their organization? What is important to them? What thought leaders do they read? What are the challenges in their roles?
• Prospect Companies: What kinds of companies would be buying these services or products, and why? Segmentation of what you sell to is a critical first step. Identifying prospect tiers comes next. The tiers determine who in your organization owns the relationship. Tier 1 prospects are usually owned by the salesperson, with marketers adding support. Marketing owns the Tier 2 prospects and keeps them engaged with campaigns, thought leadership pieces, event participation, and more. The last tier is owned by the outbound calling team. More on them later.
• Target Titles and Campaign Types: Here is where you get into the good stuff. Focus in on your target titles and levels in the organization. Where you go up the food chain is important too. In my experience with outsourcing companies, we rarely called on anyone lower than a Vice President. The reasons are a lower title such as specialist, supervisor, manager, or even director typically has limited if any visibility into company initiatives and is not involved in the outsourcing decision-making process. Making matters more complicated, they may see outsourcing as taking away their job. You’re there to help their function (e.g., customer care, claims processing, revenue cycle management) work better, not to take it away. But be careful to keep people in these roles engaged, because they will likely be your key points of contact once the deal is signed and execution of the program begins.
• Messaging and Differentiators: What are your top selling stories for each solution? Can these be distilled down into sound bites that a seller can easily quote? What about your differentiators? And be careful with what you think is a differentiator. It may be new to you but not to your prospects. I keep going back to the example of a very young child who suddenly realizes they can wiggle their own toes. At that early stage they don’t realize wiggling toes is something most people can do. But do you do anything different – maybe counterclockwise, or synchronized to the alternating beats of “Stairway to Heaven,” – that is unique to you?
• Competitive Landscape: Every company has competitors. Run screaming from those who say they don’t. Make sure you know who you are competing against, and what you offer your prospects that makes you better.

Early in my most recent role as VP Marketing at an outsourcing company, they transferred two inbound customer service reps into new roles as outbound appointment setters. You’d think since they both use the phone a lot, that it would be an easy transition, right? Think again. Inbound care people and outbound hunters are two very different animals. An inbound care rep may be uncomfortable with the tenacity needed to secure meetings with prospects, while the outbound hunter would typically lack the empathy needed to understand customer issues. It is a very drastic leap from “thank you for calling Blue Cross, may I have your member number?” to “would you take a meeting with us to see how we can boost your Net Promoter Score?”, so the team needed a lot of direction and context into the prospect-facing side of the house. I sprang into action and created a playbook to help them understand what we were selling, who they were calling and what is important to them, and how they could be successful in their new roles. I used the playbook to help in-house and external resources (when it comes to pipeline, you can never have too many oars in the water) to understand our business, and even shared it with the PR firm. The PR firm loved the selling stories and integrated them into media pitches.

So ask yourself: What’s in your playbook? How often do you update it? Who else can use it?