What’s in Your Sales Guide?

I just finished up an interesting project for a client: a sales guide for a new product area for them. It’s been a while since I worked on a sales guide, and I had a really good time with it. So what went into it?

• Background information: The product area is relatively new, and has just emerged in response to a recent government regulation. So, we put in some background info on what the regulation requires (leaving out the gobble-de-gook and putting things in plain English) and how prospective clients will be impacted by it. I found some good data on market readiness for this new regulation. All this was to paint the picture of an excellent market opportunity.
• Overview of the new solution we’re bringing to market:  Once we set up the market need, we zoomed in on how our solution meets it, with information on its features ad benefits.
• Client scenarios: Prospective clients have a number of different options for how they can deal with the new regulation in terms of whether they take care of it all by their lonesome, or with products and services provided by third parties. We laid out a number of scenarios, and for each one, indicated what part of our solution is appropriate.
• Target market information: We provide both high-level (who’s impacted by the regulation) and detailed (here’s a list to start with) information, as well as a pretty good run down on the principle concerns.
• Principle audiences: Really detailed personas was beyond the scope of the project, but we did lay out the principle buying and influencing audiences, with a matrix showing their key issues, and with talking points for each.
• Our Message: Again, detailed persona profiling and messaging, while they would have been nice to have, were beyond the time frame and scope of this project. I don’t think this fatal, as there is really only one primary buying constituency. Still, in an ideal world, we would have had detailed personas - with complete messaging for each. This would have armed the sales folks with ammo they could use to try to work their way in at different parts of the organization. Instead, we settled for a strong general message, with short and long form versions of the elevator pitch.
• Qualifying questions/objection handling: We provided an extensive list of qualifying questions, and an extensive list of responses to push back questions. And we didn’t hold anything back on those push back questions either: the tougher, the better off the sales folks are.
• The competition: As with the personas, a full competitive analysis was out of scope, but we did include information so that the sales people would be up to speed on what their competitors were saying. Plus we’d included a number of competitive responses in our push-back answers.

The Sales Guide’s been delivered. The client is happy. I learned something about a new area (always a plus for me).

It had been a while since I’d pulled together a Sales Guide. I’d forgotten how interesting and fun it can be.

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