Your Playbook Taught You Something About Your Business
—What Was It?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about what playbooks reveal when they stop working. The myths we believe about touchpoints, engagement scores, personas, and scaling.
But here’s what I really want to know from you:
When you built your sales playbook, your customer success playbook, your expansion playbook—what did you learn about your business that you couldn’t have learned any other way?
Maybe you discovered your personas were completely wrong when reps kept ignoring them to chase different buyers. I’ve seen teams assume that one persona speaks for the customer base. They have three personas to address.
Maybe you found out your value proposition wasn’t resonating when your perfectly executed sequences got zero responses. Value propositions change as the product, market, or customer evolves.
Maybe you realized you were measuring the wrong success metrics when customers with 90+ health scores churned anyway. Ebsta + Pavillion notes that only 15% of firms had more than 50% of their sales reps achieve 80% or more of their quotas. Your metrics may miss the real issues you need to address.
Maybe you learned your best reps were going off script because they’d figured out something about customer buying behavior that your playbook missed entirely. McKinsey found that 57% of B2B sales reps ignore marketing collateral and content because it is too generic, misaligned, and unresponsive to the customer conversations they’re having. Sound familiar? When was the last time you were on a customer call with your sales team?
Here’s my hypothesis: The real value of building playbooks isn’t the execution guide you create. It’s the market intelligence you uncover when reality collides with your assumptions. This becomes priceless.
Your playbook failures are feedback. They’re telling you what’s shifted in your market, where your customer and sales team understanding has gaps, and what actually drives revenue versus what you thought drove revenue.
So, I want to hear from you:
Drop a comment below:
What was your biggest playbook challenge?
What was your biggest playbook success?
What did you learn about your business that you couldn’t have learned until you built the playbook?
The messier and more specific, the better. Because that’s where real learning happens—in the gap between what we planned and what actually worked.
Need help building the right playbook for your firm? Schedule a Discovery Session.
