From Playbooks to Performance: 7 Proven Strategies to Close the Sales Execution Gap

The Story Behind the Sales Execution Strategy

What happens when a seasoned consultant decides to cross over to "the dark side" of revenue generation? For John Head, this pivot led to a journey through various software and services companies before becoming the Chief Revenue Officer at Atos Imaging, a company providing visual maintenance and management platforms for commercial real estate and industrial markets.

In this episode of The GAP podcast, John draws from his extensive experience to explore why the gap between sales playbooks and real-world execution persists. His perspective highlights the critical role of coaching, sales enablement, and knowledge capture in bridging this divide. As John puts it, this sales execution gap appears "every day in various different situations and circumstances and conversations and people."

7 Game-Changing Insights to Improve Sales Performance

1.  The Coaching Imperative: Real-time Sales Feedback

While many revenue leaders focus on creating perfect playbooks, John emphasizes that coaching is the primary method for improving sales execution. He illustrates this with a specific example from his sales team:

"One of my AEs a couple of weeks ago, it was on a later stage sales cycle... The prospect actually opened up that he was trying to develop an in-house custom solution with Microsoft Teams. And Jordan just blew right through it and didn't even catch that."

This missed opportunity became a powerful coaching moment – capturing these instances and providing immediate feedback helps sales representatives recognize similar situations in the future and "set the hook deeper" with prospects. Effective sales coaching requires:

• Identifying key moments in customer conversations
• Documenting specific instances where opportunities were missed or seized
• Providing timely, targeted feedback to help reps improve

2. Pragmatic Playbooks: Creating Actionable Sales Guides

John defines an effective sales playbook as "pragmatic capture and presentation of valuable plays that you can use in a lot of different situations." He stresses that high-performing sales playbooks must follow the revenue cycle with specific knowledge areas for each stage of the customer journey.

From his past experience, he shares an effective example:

"Back in my Planful days, we had a very pragmatic approach to compete against Oracle... Don't try to invent your own playbook. Follow these steps, follow this pattern because it's been tried and true, and we know that 75-80 percent of the time we're going to beat Oracle."

The challenge? Creating these comprehensive sales playbooks is time-intensive: "It's a nights and weekends type of job... It gnaws me at night, cause I know I need to be doing this, but the cycle time to actually get it done, it's just not there."

3. The Use Case Revolution: Solution Selling Techniques

John implemented a fundamental shift in sales approach at Atos Imaging:

"When I first got here, primarily they were selling feature function. I was like, 'Guys, listen, companies don't buy feature function. They buy use cases. They buy you solving a problem for them.'"

This focus on solution selling rather than listing capabilities transformed how the team positioned their platform to prospects, leading to more meaningful customer conversations and improved sales conversion rates. Selling use cases involves:

• Understanding the specific problems customers are trying to solve
• Presenting your product as a solution to those problems
• Demonstrating how your solution creates tangible business value

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4. The Two-Headed Monster Approach: Sales Collaboration Framework

John ensures improved collaboration throughout the revenue cycle with what he calls a "two-headed monster" approach to sales management:

"There's always a two-headed monster across every step of the revenue cycle. In the very beginning, it's the BDR and the AE. If it's a qualified opportunity, it transitions from the AE to the solution consultant... And then as you land the account, it goes from the AE to the customer success manager."

This structured sales collaboration framework, combined with well-documented account plans, provides consistency in managing customer relationships across the entire customer journey.

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5. The Sacred Enablement Ritual: Sales Training That Works

To ensure his team can execute on playbooks, John implements a disciplined approach to sales enablement:

"Every two weeks from 4 to 6:30 on a Wednesday, we've got this lockdown in the calendar... This is sacred time. What I do a lot of times is I'll walk them through what I do, I'll prepare certain demo, a certain presentation... And then the next two weeks after that, everybody gets to turn around and actually rehearse it back to me."

This structured approach to sales training ensures reps know what good looks like and can internalize it before facing customers. It also allows John to assess individual strengths and gaps in sales performance.

6. Technology's Promise: AI in Sales Enablement

John sees immense potential in AI and technology for capturing critical moments and providing real-time sales enablement:

"The real magic happens in those moments... you get so few precious moments with a prospect or a client that you've gotta really take advantage of those."

He acknowledges the need for better systems to improve sales effectiveness: "Where no doubt we can use some help is how to catalog those moments in some type of platform on a go-forward basis. So you're building this library of repetitive motions and objection handling."

7. The Constant Sponge Principle: Traits of Top-Performing Sales Reps

What separates top-performing sales reps? According to John:

"The best AEs I've ever seen are the ones who are like constant sponges, learning all that stuff on a regular basis, and they have a really good engine for how they internalize, understand, and they can use those nuggets and that content in a way that's very relevant and pragmatic in a given situation."

Creating a system to capture and share this knowledge remains his ultimate goal for improving sales team performance: "Without a doubt, that would be the eye on the prize for me... finding a pattern, a path, an approach by which we actually just do a much better job capturing this and using it consistently across the entire organization."

Quick Tips to Improve Sales Execution

• Implement regular coaching sessions focused on real deals and customer interactions
• Document successful plays that work against specific competitors or in common scenarios
• Shift from feature-selling to use case-selling to connect with what customers actually value
• Create collaboration points at every stage of the revenue cycle
• Establish sacred, uninterrupted enablement time on a consistent schedule
• Leverage technology to capture and share successful approaches
• Encourage a "constant sponge" mentality among your sales representatives

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