Yesterday, returning from the Boston office to the NH beach, I just "stopped by" Market Basket in Portsmouth to pick up the standard "Extra Milk, Bread & Eggs."
- Portsmouth is the 2nd largest revenue store in the chain.
- Market Basket has a very distinctive culture totally focused on their very specific personas.
- Employees have dress codes, are always helpful, and they meticulously organize shelves.
- Not surprisingly, the company is highly profitable even given the ongoing family ownership wars.
The parking lot was jammed as were the aisles in the store with everyone buying the standard "Milk, Bread & Eggs" in advance of the incoming storm expected to drop 18" plus here at the beach and most probably more in Boston. I'm never sure about exactly why the "Milk, Bread & Eggs" phraseology was created but it probably goes back to having basic food groups in the house if the family were to be caught in some massive blizzard such as in 1978 when 128/95 was closed for 3 days.
Just because of my own over-the-top / way-too-much focus on advance planning, I found myself in my garage last night filling up the tires of my Ariens and checking on the spare gas tanks.
All of which this morning led me to think as a salesguy just how much we do...or do not do...in advance planning for those 1,100 to 1,400 hours a year (about 50% on average of our total available time to sell) that we're actually "selling". My experience that we see in our in our "A" level top-performing companies (between $25m-$250m across a broad spread of industries is the following:
- They do create individual, highly-structured 30-60-day tactical plans.
- They formally review monthly KPIs and then present results in longer team QBR's every quarter.
- They never create annual sales plans other than identifying a few strategic initiatives.
- 45% are using formal, frequently updated Sales Playbooks.
These are comprehensive, digitally-enabled, consistently-updated structures that contain everything in easy-to-access formats that a sales exec needs to know: personas, value propositions, ROI videos, detailed metrics, CRM funnels and conversion files...whatever's necessary for an uber busy sales exec to be able to quickly access from their phone.
If you want to learn more about Playbooks, just connect with me. Happy to spend some commute time discussing ideas, and then can show you a few example
In the meantime, think about the criticality of the use of playbooks when you're watching the Pats on Sunday: great coach, superb QB, a true team, and very formal playbooks!
Have a great day selling today...and tonight on the way home when you stop by Wegmans, Whole Foods or Market Basket, you might want to think a bit more creatively about what you need since no one is going anywhere on Sunday or Monday.