The Sales Enablement Playbook: Key Takeaways for the Busy Professional

The Sales Enablement Playbook by Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey (2017).

Note: Cory was kind enough to send me a free copy for review purposes.

A First for the Sales Literature: Structured Techniques to Mitigate Salespeople Biases. The reason I have engaged so heavily with the field of sales is because it is the most advanced field in terms of understanding how to psychologically analyze third-persons (i.e. prospects). Sure, psychology takes all the credit for biases and nudge theory but it doesn’t take more than reading some P.T. Barnum or Elmer Wheeler to realize that sales people have been in the know about these concepts years before academia “discovered” them. My one issue with the sales literature is that while they’ve been on the forefront of analyzing what makes their customers/prospects tick, the field of sales has been woefully behind on applying that same scrutiny to their own thoughts and biases. So many wonderful methods for understanding personas and ideal customer profiles but little more than a “chin up” and “it’s all in your mindset” for trying to analyze oneself.

I think Bray and Sorey have broken the ground on introducing structured analytic techniques (as they are called in the intelligence community) to help sales people analyze (the standout being the Persona>Pain>Feature>”X” Matrix [pg. 65] which I will refer to as the Bray-Sorey Matrix in future work) and reframe their mindsets (the standout being setting “Negative Goals” [pg. 88]). In fact, I think the best way for sales leadership to engage with this book is that BEFORE reading any the contents of The Sales Enablement Playbook, look at the topics for the 17 chapters in the Table of Contents and write down off the top of your head what your company’s strategy/process is for each topic. With that list in hand, see how your assumptions stack up with Bray and Sorey’s suggested best practices.

The Bray-Sorey Matrix for planning your assets to specific customer needs.

Their Understated Triumph with Metrics. As long as I’ve been studying the sales enablement field, it has been looking for the metrics to justify its existence. While there have certainly been some decent articles that have looked at the metrics that a sales enablement department itself would need, Bray and Sorey successfully argue their thesis throughout the book that sales enablement is an ecosystem that permeates all departments throughout an organization. With that in mind, the ends of Chapters 2 through 14 mention the relevant metrics that many different departments throughout the whole company can use that would track the sales enablement ecosystem. This is a very big deal and this accomplishment will likely provide the superglue for securing sales enablement’s place at the table.

Micro-Content: The Next Big Thing. While it has been a rolled around concept in social media marketing for a few years now, to my knowledge Bray and Sorey are the first to introduce the concept of micro-content to the sales world [pg. 68] in terms of making sure it matches with the persona, pain, and features (a la the Bray-Sorey Matrix). Once sales folks get a hold of the concept, I can see it launching 1000 blog posts (and 10,000 LinkedIn posts) and you’ll know where you’ve heard it first folks.

Sweet Sales Hacks: Brilliant but Out of Place. Page 97 starts off a phenomenal section on some great competitive intelligence tactics that are “sales hacking” in the true sense of the second word (seriously, it’s the kind of info that social engineering hackers would have had to dumpster dive for back in the day). It is great info (along with another section on page 74), but it feels disjointed from the rest of the book.

What this Book Absolutely Needed. The book has no index. It is chalked full of wonderful content and I had to continuously thumb through multiple pages trying to remember where certain quotes, concepts, and figures were (and trust me, it’s a book where you would ideally want to keep coming back to as a reference). My suggestion is that in V2 of the book, Bray and Sorey should have an alphabetical index and maybe something like a “pain point index” where managers/executives would know exactly which section(s) to go to when a problem crops up.

Who this Book is Really For (and it’s not Who You May Think). It’s fantastic that this book is really taking off within the sales community but having read the book myself, I don’t think that sales people are the ideal audience for this book. Sure, it can be used like I explained earlier to test how well sales people can clearly articulate important sales variables, but not too much in this book is going to be new to the literate sales person who keeps up-to-date with thought leadership content (i.e. “new” in terms of true “unknown unknowns” to sales leadership). The true audience is revealed quite early in the book [pg. viii] when explaining why sales enablement is an ecosystem:

Sales Enablement is the concept of extending a prospect-centric mindset to all departments within an organization.

Sales people already know to focus on the prospect; this book is for all of those inside of the company who don’t know that. If anything, sales enablement is the idea of selling the idea of sales to the rest of the company so you can have the ecosystem that Bray and Sorey proselytize. So it’s great that sales people love this book but Bray and Sorey leave the reader with some homework in making sure that you share this book with others in your company where most of these concepts will be brand new to them (Christmas is coming right around the corner if you’re looking for something to stuff in the company-wide stockings). No one said the revolution was going to be easy but Bray and Sorey created a heck of a manifesto for the field to unite around with The Sales Enablement Playbook.