e-Book

Sales is not about the "luck" or "talent" of the salesperson! Rather, companies need a structured sales process from start to finish. Unfortunately, the reality in B2B sales is often different: SDRs don't qualify leads properly, sellers keep leads in the pipeline for too long without genuine buying interest. The result is unrealistic forecasts and poor win rates! That's why there are digital playbooks: they provide SDRs and sellers with a real-time guide to optimize lead quality across the entire pipeline with every interaction.

The most important facts in brief:

• Win rates in companies are falling because salespeople are not efficiently managing the increasing complexity of modern B2B sales.
• SDRs and sellers keep unqualified leads in the pipeline for too long. Sales leaders do not recognize the problem because their forecast does not reflect the actual lead quality.
• Digital playbooks capture proven qualification criteria and best practices that SDRs and sellers use to optimize the pipeline for every lead interaction.
• Sales managers thus receive a realistic forecast and can use playbooks to standardize and scale proven processes. You have more control over the sales cycle.
• Linkando Playbooks can be integrated into conventional sales tools such as CRM systems with minimal integration and training time.
• Use cases at our customers show double-digit improvements in win rates, significantly lower churn rates, shorter sales cycles and increasing cross-selling and up-selling revenues.

Summary

Purchasing teams working from home, global competition, new technologies and increasing compliance requirements are increasing the complexity of B2B sales. In modern sales organizations, 77% of salespeople can no longer do their job efficiently. Salespeople have less influence on B2B buying decisions, complex products require more knowledge and salespeople are burdened with increasing responsibilities in an ever-growing role that distract them from their real job: sales!

More training will not solve these challenges, as training successes are short-lived and only a fraction of the new knowledge is translated into actual results. Instead, sales managers need to empower their salespeople by introducing "Tech as a Teammate" - at Linkando we call this "Playbooks". Conventional playbooks have been around for decades; Linkando now makes them available digitally and integrates them into conventional sales tools such as meeting software or CRM systems. You can think of Linkando Playbooks as an experienced employee who supports your salespeople in their daily tasks - from lead acquisition to sales and aftersales.

Digital playbooks offer salespeople real-time guidance for their daily work, for example by providing lead scoring criteria or conversation guides. They improve the output of high-value tasks such as lead qualification and customer meetings and reduce the time spent on low-value tasks such as filling out CRM forms. Playbooks capture best practices across the entire sales department and make them available to all salespeople to improve the overall organization's win rates. At the management level, sales leaders can leverage the data resulting from the use of digital playbooks to improve their forecasting, standardize processes, facilitate knowledge transfer between salespeople and gain more control over the sales cycle.

The use of digital playbooks leads to higher win rates, greater customer satisfaction, faster onboarding of sales staff, lower churn rates, more cross-selling and upselling and effective teamwork across different departments. Linkando Playbooks thus significantly increase the turnover and profit of companies.

The challenge:
High complexity in B2B sales

B2B sales have become much more complex in recent years. Globalization is intensifying competition, new technologies are changing processes, demographic change and working from home have altered buying and sales behaviour. In addition, the current political crises are increasing cost pressure to an extent not seen for decades. The following challenges are a direct result of this complexity:

• B2B buying centers have become opaque and salespeople lack an understanding of their customers' requirements and their decision-making processes. As a result, they are finding it increasingly difficult to influence purchasing decisions.
• More complex products require salespeople to have in-depth product knowledge, so they often have to become technical specialists.
• Internally, salespeople increasingly have to take on tasks for which they have not been trained and which are not directly related to their sales targets.
• Salespeople are overwhelmed by more and more tools and processes in their daily work. Perhaps your salespeople are also complaining about the time-consuming nature of CRM maintenance?
• Salespeople are increasingly struggling to adapt their sales techniques to a remote working environment and are unable to keep up with rapidly changing customer expectations.
• Digital channels generate a large number of leads, but sellers need new technologies and techniques to filter the right leads from this mass.

With increasing complexity, salespeople reach their performance limits and no longer achieve their sales targets. Sales managers and teams who are unable to master these challenges are therefore not competitive in the long term.

To overcome these challenges, sales leaders usually resort to either sales training or traditional sales tools such as CRMs or lead generation platforms. However, none of these approaches get to the heart of the problem. Training successes are usually short-lived and only a fraction of the newly acquired knowledge translates into real results. 84% of the content taught in sales training courses is not implemented by new employees. While traditional sales tools aim to reduce complexity, they often have the opposite effect: they actually increase complexity as salespeople have to deal with tool-related tasks that often add little value to the sales process - think of salespeople spending hours entering compliance data in a CRM tool, for example.

Digital playbooks:
A new approach for more sales productivity

Since training and traditional sales tools rarely help salespeople achieve better results, sales leaders are looking for a new approach. Our solution is called"Linkando Playbooks", the first real-time interactive digital playbook software on the market. With digital playbooks, companies can provide their salespeople with real-time actionable guidance during their daily work. At Linkando, we use the term "Tech as a Teammate" to illustrate the difference to traditional sales tools. Instead of introducing another separate sales tool, Linkando Playbooks support salespeople while they use their existing tools.

Digital playbooks offer added value at every step along the customer journey, e.g. lead acquisition, pitching, demos, sales calls, onboarding, after-sales, cross-selling and upselling. You can think of digital playbooks as an experienced employee who is always on hand to support your sellers with their experience and give them specific instructions on what to do next. Digital playbooks also help sellers to continuously improve their habits to ensure maximum sales success in the long term.

For example, companies use social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook to acquire leads, video conferencing tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams for sales meetings, CRM tools such as Hubspot or Salesforce to document

customer interactions and software such as Zendesk or ServiceNow for customer service. Linkando Playbooks can be used in all these tools through a browser integration or as a meeting solution. Whenever your salespeople use one of their conventional sales tools, Linkando Playbooks contribute to their success with concrete instructions for action.

Linkando pursues the following goals:

More high-quality deals through better prospecting: Marketing employees often qualify leads according to subjective criteria and "gut feeling" instead of the objective evaluation criteria of your company. This subjectivity massively reduces the probability of closing a deal. Sales managers say that more than 50% of all leads never had a genuine interest in buying their product or service. Playbooks provide marketers and SDRs with objective criteria for lead evaluation, significantly improving conversion rates.

Timely screening of unqualified leads: Despite a low purchase probability, leads are often "dragged" further through the pipeline because sellers do not want to waste the presumed potential - after all, the lead has been qualified, or at least that is the assumption. Linkando's scoring features qualify each lead along the pipeline based on objective criteria and screen them out as soon as they do not meet these criteria.

More control for sales leaders: As leads are objectively qualified by Linkando, sales managers receive reliable sales forecasts. They can use the playbooks to define best practices and set the standard for their team. This gives them more control over the sales cycle and enables them to better manage and influence the sales performance of their teams.

Recommendations for virtual selling: As virtual selling is still a relatively new trend that has suddenly accelerated during the pandemic, salespeople are not yet able to efficiently transfer their skills from face-to-face sales to virtual customer meetings. 75% of all salespeople believe they sell better live than virtually. Digital playbooks provide guidance for customer conversations directly in digital meetings to enable structured customer interactions and thus higher win rates.

Focus on human core competencies: Conventional sales tools require a lot of maintenance and sales staff spend too much time on documentation. Our solution automates routine tasks such as the creation of sales scripts or routine CRM entries. This in turn frees up the resources of salespeople so that they can concentrate on their core human competencies. High-quality CRM information also facilitates cross-departmental collaboration.

Automation creates scalable processes: Automation makes processes more scalable. However, you can only automate something if you have clearly defined it beforehand. With playbooks, you can structure processes optimally and then pass them on to your sales team.

What our customers say

Linkando customers confirm that playbook-based selling achieves significant performance improvements. On average, we observe the following improvements among Linkando users:

Conversion rates: With the help of objective lead scoring criteria, sellers can reduce the time required to acquire high-quality leads and increase their conversion rates by 30%.

Shorter sales cycles: Optimized customer journey playbooks shorten sales cycles for complex products by 25 %.

Lower churn rates: A structured customer experience and well-trained customer service staff reduce churn rates by 20%.

Higher win rates: Playbook-based selling provides salespeople with the best sales techniques and arguments as well as in-depth product knowledge, which increases win rates by 30%.

Up- and cross-selling: With Playbooks, sellers can sell different products to their existing customer base and increase their cross-selling revenue by 20%.

As Linkando, we use our own technology every day. From the start, Linkando Playbooks have increased our win rate by 50% and shortened our sales cycle from 9 months to 4 months. Our solution is revolutionizing the way sales enablement leaders capture best practices and share them with their entire team at the click of a button.

As Linkando, we use our own technology every day. From the start, Linkando Playbooks have increased our win rate by 50% and shortened our sales cycle from 9 months to 4 months. Our solution is revolutionizing the way sales enablement leaders capture best practices and share them with their entire team at the click of a button.