We all have playbooks. Today, the Chiefs and Eagles will be using theirs, each in hope of winning the Super Bowl. In selling and GTM, we have our playbooks. Marketing has any number of them, SDRs, BDRs, AEs, AMs, Rev-ops/enablement, Customer service, all of us have our playbooks. All our leaders have their playbooks. Running a consulting organization, we have our own playbooks in finding/closing business, how we work with clients, in projects, and other areas. Each of us have our own personal playbooks on getting through the day—rise/shine, feed the cats, workout, two cups of coffee, journaling…… (at least that’s the start of my daily playbook).
We couldn’t achieve anything without our playbooks. Without them, life/work would be a random walk. We’d probably achieve more by playing poker in Las Vegas (oops, they have their own playbooks.)
Playbooks help us focus on the things most important to what we want to achieve. For example, in selling, our playbooks help us focusing on executing our company strategies with our customers. They help us identify and focus on the most effective and efficient means of doing these things.
Playbooks are built on our experience, what’s worked, what doesn’t work, helping us avoid the latter.
But there are problems with our playbooks.
Sometimes they are too prescriptive, they aren’t playbooks, but scripts/steps we rigidly follow. And life/business never follows a script. Failing to recognize this, failing to adapt, causes us to fail. Great playbooks, provide guidance, relying on our ability to leverage them as we adapt to the specific circumstances of a situation.
Playbooks have relatively short lives. In a turbulent world, things constantly change. We have to adapt out playbooks to account for that change. And as we are doing this, our ability to flex, adapt to the situation helps us both in bridging the gap in updating our playbooks and in helping us recognize the changes in we need to make.
Sometimes we develop playbooks to address certain situations. I good friend is SVP of M&A for a very large organization. He and his team have foundational concepts/principles for their acquisitions, but for each one, they develop a playbook. In a sense, our deal strategies are the same. We have a foundational playbook, but we as we are developing our approach to a deal, we adapt that playbook for this specific deal.
Another vivid example, is the Superbowl. Neither the Chiefs nor the Eagles are walking into the stadium with a standard playbook. They have taken their playbooks (as they do in every game) and highly tuned it to this specific game and the individuals/team they are competing against. And, those playbooks enable them to adapt to the real time situation on the field.
Stated differently, if our playbooks aren’t constantly evolving, then ultimately our playbooks have us playing the wrong game.
But having playbooks as a starting point, enables us to adapt and change more quickly than not having a playbook. So playbooks are important!
Some rely too heavily on their “one playbook.” It may be the playbook a seller first learned, and they take the same playbook into all subsequent jobs. It may have worked in the first job, but it’s not likely to be as effective in the current job.
Managers, and senior executives fall into the same trap. At some point they developed a playbook that worked for them in driving performance. Then they take that playbook into every other job–and it may not be the right playbook. One of the biggest mistakes I have made in my career is, as a new CRO, insisting the organization comply with my playbook, based on previous jobs, Fortunately, one of my VPs took me to the side, saying, “Dave, we’re different!”
One of the challenges I see with many organizations, today, is caused by the revolving door of leaders. With average tenures of 11-18 months, they adapt their playbooks to a very short term perspective. They focus the playbook on what they can achieve in 11-18 months, do that, then move to another organization with the 11-18 month playbook, then the next, and ….. And the people in these organizations recognize this, keeping their heads down, saying, “This too will pass…..”
Continuing on the previous point, sometimes the “playbook” for a situation takes longer to put in place than 18 months. It may involve bigger changes and a longer cycle to validate that it’s working. For example, imagine an organization that has a 9-12 month selling cycle. A new manager comes in, and let’s assume this manager doesn’t take time to understand what’s happening, they just implement the new playbook. It takes some time to change, but people comply. But the sales cycle prevents us from understanding if it works, or how we might adjust it. We may just start seeing some initial success (or failure), but it takes a couple of cycles to validate and scale. By then, the new leader is in place implementing the only playbook that leader knows.
You can start to see the problem.
And, too often, we “consultants, gurus, and trainers” fall into the same trap. We have only one playbook and we make it fit into every situation we face. To often, the only tool we carry is a hammer in looking at our clients’ situations. Last week, I had a fascinating conversation with the CEO of a leading sales training organization. He was seeing a problem with what they were doing. He recognized what they focus on was only part of the issue his customers were facing. While they were producing great results, he recognized they could do more if they shifted their perspective and broadened their playbook. And that would drive much greater impact with their customers as well as additional revenue growth for the organization.
The moment we create our playbooks, they have a limited life/applicability, some much shorter than others. This doesn’t mean we should abandon them, the alternative is far worse. But we have to have an open mindset. We have to be agile in how we implement these. We have to continually be adapting and changing them, based on what’s happening in our organizations, markets, worlds.
And at some points, we may have to abandon our playbooks, developing something brand new.
For decades, if not longer, there has been the principle of continuous improvement. We’ve seen this have great impact in TPS and flexible manufacturing. The foundations of lean and agile are based on continuous improvement.
Our playbooks cannot be cast in stone. We cannot have just one playbook that covers everything we do. But we do have to have playbooks and we have to continue to adapt and change. We have to, also, have the courage to recognize, sometimes we have to start all over.
Go Eagles! (oops)
Afterword: This is the AI generated discussion this article. I’ve shared my concerns with the hallucination and sometimes aimless wandering of these tools. This discussion stays pretty much on target and is very useful.
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