In our previous blog: the positives of playbooks, Simon Conyers our brilliant and experienced SaaS lawyer, gave you 10 good reasons to invest in a playbook for your SaaS sales team.
In this blog, Simon drills down into how you can best prepare for, plan and put in place the most effective playbook for your business – as well as some of the pitfalls to avoid.
- Before you start trying to draft a playbook, take stock of your contracts. Are they clear, succinct and fair? If not, you may need to first update your standard terms and conditions. Working with clearly worded, manageable, balanced contracts will make drafting a playbook much easier (and not to mention getting the contracts signed easier).
- Gather information from your sales team as to what are the real issues on the ground. What problems are cropping up regularly? What do customers actually push back on regularly? The answers may not be what you expect. Feed this into the plan for your playbook.
- This isn’t just a legal exercise. Make sure you get buy-in and feedback from all your internal stakeholders such as the finance, operations and c-suite teams.
- You need to work through the practicalities of how the playbook will work, carefully. Start with customer segmentation: what are the low value deals that should be offered standard terms, what’s in the middle (where some tailoring may be appropriate) and what are the strategic, high value deals that you are prepared to negotiate more?
- Get a handle on the terms that commonly cause push-back. How have you resolved these in the past? Is this how you want to do things going forward or are you looking for a different outcome?
- Then decide what range of changes you are/are not comfortable with based on the level of risk your business is willing to take. Confirm who will be able to authorise such changes and what the escalation path will be (e.g. by value).
- Your playbook isn’t finished once you have a final version in place. This is when you will be able to test your approach internally for ease of use and in the marketplace to see whether customers will accept the positions you’ve carefully planned out. It is likely that tweaks will be needed regularly so its important to have a process for making changes and named staff who are responsible for implementing those.
- A playbook should be a living document that evolves over time. You will need to keep it under review and amend it as needed to reflect the reality of day-to-day business and how that may change over time. Your customers are likely to change and market standards may change, so it is never “job done”!
Done the right way, a playbook can be an incredible enabler for your business, streamlining negotiations and your processes to help get your deals done quicker.
How can we help?
We can review and update your existing customer terms and help create your playbook and implement streamlined processes as well as deliver training to your sales team on how it all works. Get in touch on info@legaledge.co.uk
