TL:DR; Video
Have you ever heard the word SOPs? SOP stands for standard operating procedure and it is a very important set of documents to ensure smooth operations.
What does it have to do with sales, you might think? Well, selling is a process and you typically send a prospect a set of materials. If your company serves multiple industries or horizontal space, then materials typically change based on the customer position, industry, and category (is it an SMB or enterprise).
Thus any sales organization has a set of standard sales materials which typically include email templates, slides, case studies, and various calculators.
It is called a playbook. Here is a great article from the How To SaaS team about the importance of the playbook.
Why do you need a Sales Standard Operating Procedures?
There are several reasons why sales SOPs are crucial for the success of a sales team and organization. And no matter, if you are alone doing sales in your startup or working for a large corporation - standard operations will help you become extremely efficient.
Let's iterate why SOPs are important:
They bring consistency: Sales SOPs ensure that every member of the sales team is working in a consistent manner, following the same processes and techniques. This helps to maintain a high level of quality in the sales process, resulting in a better customer experience.
Improved Efficiency: Sales SOPs help streamline the sales process, reducing the time and effort required to complete tasks. This allows sales representatives to focus their energy on more high-value activities, such as prospecting and closing deals.
Help with training & onboarding: Sales SOPs serve as a comprehensive guide for new sales representatives, allowing them to quickly learn the processes and techniques used by the sales team. This speeds up the training process and helps new hires become productive more quickly.
Collaboration and feedback loops: Sales SOPs facilitate communication and collaboration among team members, helping to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals. This leads to better results and a more harmonious work environment.
Increased Accountability: With clear sales SOPs in place, it becomes easier to measure the performance of individual sales representatives and the team as a whole. This helps to identify areas for improvement and ensures that everyone is held accountable for their actions.
By following clearly defined guidelines, teams are able to work more effectively and efficiently, ultimately helping us to achieve our goals and drive sales results. And allow you to build a proper analysis engine.
Now, what does it have to do with business cards and automations?
Building a Process for Sales Automations
Previously, we've built an automated process of extracting data from business cards, detecting automatically the prospect industry and converting it into a dashboard to have a real-time view of the demand flow.
Thus we now go from a business card photo to having our prospect information categorized according to our own criteria and the next step would be deciding on the playbook to use.
The idea behind this automation is that you enable your field sales/event teams with real-time actionable insight about a prospect they have just met. This can significantly accelerate your sales processes and improve win rates.
Sales Playbook Selection Automation
In our case, we will make sure that BDRs/SDRs work on a standard material base. To achieve that we will color-code a playbook. Then based on a prospect's industry and position we will use different sets and make a decision on what set of materials to use.
For instance, for a lead in Technology from a CTO organization we will use a “Blue” book, and for CFO from the Tech industry we will use Yellow Book.
Blue and Yellow books are merely the labels that can define a folder in your Google Drive or a page in Notion with the relevant material set.
However, those playbooks or materials set play an important role - you save a lot of time on onboarding new SDRs/BDRs. The whole idea of standardization is to decrease the number of errors and stop spending lots of time on manual training.
Automating the Sales Playbook decision
Now let's head over to Bitskout and set up the categorization. Our setup will require a new plugin that will make decision based on our examples.
Let's add our examples:
Once we've added some more examples, here is how your plugin will look like:
You can add more books or use different colors. Also, you can use URL shorteners to URLs instead of labels. In any scenario, Bitskout A.I. will follow your examples to determine the playbook you want to choose.
Before we proceed to the next step, let's run a test on our plugin. To do that go to Plugins and click on your plugin. Then select the tab "Test" and then put some data into the field and run it.
Adding a new plugin to the make.com scenario
The next step is adding our plugin to our Make.com scenario. Let's open our scenario and right-click after the last Bitskout module. Then let's choose Bitskout again and select the option "Run plugin for the text".
We need to run it manually once so we can update the list of fields for make. Thus right click on the added Bitskout module and choose Run this module once. Then input the correct data and run it.
Mapping the Sales Playbook Label to the monday.com board
Then let's set up a proper Monday.com mapping. In this case, we will be directly mapping the label detected by Bitskout into a Status field in the monday.com board. Obviously, you can have a different setup - you can use the label to search for an item in another board and connect boards that way. In our example, we will just show the simple mapping.
Now everything is ready to run. Thus let's load a test business card and run the whole scenario. The result will be detecting a proper sales materials set based on prospect position and industry.
Conclusion
To sum up, having rules for how sales should be done is very important for a sales team to be successful. These rules make sure everyone does things the same way, do things faster, make it easier to train new people, work better together, and make sure everyone is doing their job right. All of these things help the sales team do better and reach their goals.
And bringing automation to this process helps to make sure that SOPs are effective and no time is wasted on looking for materials.
A list of case studies, a summary of facts, a competitor breakdown, etc. received in seconds after you met a prospect at an event can truly change your business.