What is a sales play and how can I craft my own?

What is a Sales Play?

A sales play is a repeatable action or set of tactics used by sales people to target a specific type of customer within a defined period of time.

They’re like pre-planned tactics for a sports team: consistent, reliable, and practiced to perfection. They’re designed to increase efficiency by giving sales reps a plan to follow that has a proven success rate.

If used consistently across the entire team, sales plays can transform the way a business does sales, increasing conversions and helping team members hit their targets, with less stress and uncertainty along the way.

We’re going to look at how sales plays work, what they need, and how you can implement them successfully.

What’s the difference between a sales play and a sales playbook?

A sales play is a single strategy for a given situation. A playbook is a collection of plays that can work across a range of situations. You might have a small business playbook and an enterprise playbook, or a prospecting playbook and a closing playbook.

Each playbook would have several plays, ready to be used depending on the circumstances. Playbooks hold a business’ best practices, tactics, and strategies that the sales team have used over time, that can promise strong results no matter what the situation.

Why are Sales Plays important in Sales?

Sales plays give support at every level of the sales process

A business with well-defined and organized sales plays will likely have one or more plays prepared for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

This helps the sales team be prepared, no matter what the stage prospect is at, allowing them to seamlessly execute a given strategy without the need for lengthy analysis – they already know the best option for the stage they’re at. This confidence can help when it comes to interactions with prospects, eliminating guesswork and uncertainty.

Sales plays keep tactics consistent

One of the major benefits of sales plays is that they get everyone on the same page when it comes to sales tactics. They give everyone a clear roadmap to follow, which means you don’t have individual salespeople going off script and trying a new tactic for each new prospect.

When your team is consistent in its approach to sales, it should have a higher success rate overall.

Sales plays allow for deeper analysis of tactics

When your approach to sales is consistent, it’s easier to see what works and what doesn’t, and when certain plays can be used for full effect. Over time, you can improve upon these plays, or refine them for more specific use cases.

This analysis wouldn’t be possible without an organized set of sales plays, and the data that comes from them being repeated consistently, and at scale.

Phases of designing a sales play

Strategy phase

When you set out to build a sales play, you need a clear strategy. First, understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Is this play about reassuring completely new prospects, or is it for upselling to existing customers?

It can be helpful to follow this framework when in the strategy phase of designing a sales play:

Situation: what is the situation of the market, and of the prospect?

Problem: what problem does the prospect have, and what problem are you solving for them?

Implication: what are the negative implications of ignoring the problem?

Need-Payoff: How can your solution solve the problem, and what are the benefits of doing so?

Design phase

The design of any sales play should be driven by data. Which messaging had the best results? When was it sent? On what platform? Which assets have driven conversions?

The outline of the play needs to be specific, so the design has to be thorough, ensuring that anyone, whether a seasoned sales vet or a brand new hire, could follow the play accurately.

Adoption and execution phase

Once you’ve designed a play, you need to get your team to use it. If you’ve been using sales plays for a long time, your team will be used to them. If you’re only just introducing them, it may take some time for your team to come around to the idea of more scripted selling.

If you’re encountering resistance, impress on your team that sales plays are designed to make things quicker, easier, and simpler for them, and should help them hit their targets faster.

Of course, once your team sees the power of sales plays, they should be happy to use them!

Improvement phase

With tactics, platforms, and industries changing all the time, it’s important to keep sales plays up to date.

Analyze which plays work best, and which are starting to fall behind. Market trends, customer feedback, and notes from your sales team can all help improve your plays.

What does a good sales play need?

A defined scenario

The first thing a sales play needs is a well-defined scenario. This immediately helps your sales team understand when to use it, or when to try a different play.

If your play is designed around when a small business wants a demo before making a decision, you know it’s no good for when an enterprise business wants to read a case study.

If your plays are based around clear scenarios, it helps with the entire rest of the process, setting you up for a clearly defined next step.

Trigger events

The next thing a good sales play needs is a clear trigger event. Without one, you can’t be sure when to execute the play, and might jump ahead of where the prospect is in their journey.

A trigger event might be: ‘when the prospect asks for our prices’, or ‘if the prospect mentions this competitor.’

When you have a clear trigger, it’s easy to know exactly when to act, and what action to take next.

Tailored messaging

A sales play should have messaging tailored to the given situation. As with any touchpoint with a prospect, the messaging should be specific to them and their needs.

This can come from your sales data, seeing which types of messages have worked best, and then applying that across the board. Always remember to keep the prospect in mind – how is this interaction benefiting them?

Actionable steps

Once you’ve sent a tailored message, you need to know what step to take next. What if the prospect responds asking for more information, or if they complete their trial period and don’t get in touch to sign up? These triggers should lead to a clearly defined next step, so there’s no chance that anyone on the team is left uncertain about what to do next.

All these elements help sales plays have a reliable structure that everyone on the team can follow consistently. Over time, you can analyze which plays are performing best, and which might need additional work.

Don’t overload your sales teams with too many sales plays

While it’s good to have specific plays, you don’t want to overload your team with hundreds of niche tactics. The objective is to make things more efficient, streamlined, and consistent, not to bog things down with so many options that they can’t figure out which play to use.

Example of a Sales Play

Consider a sales team at a cybersecurity firm targeting large financial institutions. One of your sales plays could be the “Intent Signal Response Play.” This play is triggered when a prospect shows a high level of buyer intent, such as visiting your pricing page multiple times or downloading several high-value resources from your website. The strategy involves the following steps:

Immediate Outreach: Within an hour of detecting the intent signal, a sales rep sends a personalized email to the prospect, acknowledging their interest and offering a 15-minute consultation to discuss their specific needs.
Follow-Up Call: If there’s no response to the email within 24 hours, the sales rep follows up with a call, aiming to engage the prospect in a conversation about their cybersecurity challenges and how your solutions can address them.
Tailored Demo: Once contact is established, the sales rep schedules a detailed demo customized to the prospect’s industry and specific pain points identified through their browsing behavior and any initial conversations.
Content Delivery: After the demo, the sales rep sends a tailored content package, including case studies and whitepapers relevant to the prospect’s interests, along with a personalized video message summarizing the demo highlights.
Nurturing Sequence: If the prospect is not ready to move forward immediately, they are entered into a nurturing sequence with periodic check-ins, additional relevant content, and invitations to exclusive webinars or events, ensuring they remain engaged and informed.

How can Surfe help with Sales Plays?

Sales plays only work if everyone follows them. If you have sales reps deviating from the play, or using their own version of messages, you can get mixed results, which not only loses potential deals, but can also harm your ability to analyze your outreach, meaning you can’t iterate and optimize moving forward.

Surfe’s message templates for LinkedIn allows an entire sales team to have the same message templates available to use on LinkedIn, so everyone can follow their sales plays to the letter. Surfe then syncs those interactions with your CRM, so everyone knows exactly where they are in the sales cycle.

This not only ensures that everyone is following the same play in the same way, but also saves hours of manual CRM data entry that can be better spent on using sales plays to get more conversions.

Let’s wrap it up!

Sales plays can help sales teams work better, and more consistently. They help provide a reliable framework for understanding which actions to take across a range of scenarios, and can give sales people increased confidence, knowing that their tactics are always dependable.

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