Our relationships with brands changed once we got our hands on smartphones. Brands consumed huge amounts of data to understand us and to give us relevant suggestions. And we discovered we could do a lot of things on our own. We have more control and don’t depend on human intervention as much.

Today, B2B buyers are completely digital. They do their own research. They create their own criteria. They talk to people in their own networks. They don’t bring vendors in until the very end. They sit in larger committees. They use more channels. 

And they’re harder to catch if you don’t know where or how to look.

So reps make a lot of guesses and don’t hit quota. How do brands respond? They squeeze out more activity from reps, but then call it productivity. The thing is, it’s not productive. It’s just guessing at scale. 

Stop guessing. Stop doing more of what doesn’t work. Start doing what buyers do intuitively: guide actions with provable recommendations and automation. 

Consumer technologies blend intelligence and automation together behind the scenes to do this. They deliberately craft experiences for us that are buyer-centric (us-centric). We create similar guided experiences for our customers on Playbooks, and we do it in ways that are unique for sales engagement. 

Cadence alone is now table stakes. Sales engagement is somewhat of a commodity. But with the right kinds of automation, a reliable and compliant system, and with intelligence about your buyers’ behaviors, you can go beyond guessing at scale and start guiding your selling. 

That’s where Playbooks lives. So, if you wanted to know How is Playbooks different and how does XANT create guided sales experiences for customers, here are the foundational pieces:

1. Integration
2. Automation
3. Telephony
4. Compliance
5. Buyer Intelligence
6. Reporting and scorecards
7. Speed-to-lead

1. INTEGRATION

The way we approach integrations on Playbooks amplifies the investments you’ve already made in CRM. We don’t try to duplicate the CRM itself. 

Works Out of the Box with Your Customized CRM Setup

You have a customized CRM environment. If you have reliable connections between your sales tools and CRM, you spend less time and money on maintenance, on removing data silos and duplicate records, on performing manual tasks that should be automated.

Most solutions require a ton of mapping to CRM, then market it as “flexibility”. What it really means in practice is constant maintenance and more cost. If you make a change to CRM, you have to update your mapping…every time. You own the burden of calibrating both systems regularly. Some vendors compound the problem by letting users create records outside of CRM and take actions without syncing back. 

Most can’t sustain this, so they don’t. The quality of those connections decays and becomes unreliable. 

This is how data silos emerge. Sales starts working exclusively outside of Salesforce. Marketing creates duplicates inside of Salesforce. Sales blames Marketing for feeding them crap leads. Marketing blames Sales for not working leads. An eternal revenue tug of war ensues.

We avoid all of this. Once Playbooks is plugged in, you never have to touch the integration.

Better Reporting Because We Don’t Place Arbitrary Caps on Fields 

A sub-par CRM integration means you have to cap the # of CRM fields you can scan and sync. High-quality integration = no caps.

There are no caps with Playbooks. We built our tech natively around Salesforce and have reinforced it over 15+ years with heavy investments in security and reliability using, in part, custom tools (meaning their tools for diagnosing and fixing problems weren’t adequate so we built our own and they’re great). 

We’ve reached the point where we can automatically monitor and update everything. In fact, there are more than 25 additional cadence-level and outcome level fields in CRM we constantly scan and update, and even alert reps of changes based on their own rules. Nobody else does this. It matters because it means you get better visibility.

For example, if one of your reps calls on the task object in salesforce from Playbooks, we’ll report back to salesforce when the call was made, how many rings the rep waited, the duration of the call, which campaign it came from, etc. Others simply load disparate details onto the subject line of the task object, which you can’t report off of. 

Remember: high-quality integration = no caps.

Better Automation and Lead Response 

The quality of your integrations directly affects the quality of your automation. Playbooks customers can create automation rules for almost every workflow. 

Take lead response as an example. The old way (or the way other solutions work) for managing inbound leads is when a new lead is created, a manager or an admin has to manually assign it to individual reps. Once assigned, everyone else is locked out.

What if the rep is on vacation or sick leave? What if they fall behind? What if the manager or admin is backed up because of an influx? 

Instead, we automatically assign records for personal or shared ownership, auto round-robin leads until someone takes action, kick leads out from an assigned rep back to a shared pool based on elapsed time without action, etc. 

When your chances of connecting and converting inbound leads decreases by 8X after 5 min, responding quickly is no longer a nice-to-have. Your speed-to-lead is only as good as your integration quality and automation capabilities.

Near-Perfect Uptime and Reliability Because We Don’t Recreate CRM

Always on and always working. That’s our standard. It’s hard to do when you try to recreate all the integrations that already exist in CRM.  

SaaS vendors often try to integrate not just with CRM but with everything. The questions you should ask are: Which are the right integrations? and Do they work? 

What are the right integrations? Unless it directly improves the user experience, all you’re doing is taking resources away from your CRM integration, exposing your connections to additional points of potential failure, and exposing your data to security risks.

It also aggravates the putrid sore of data silos and duplication errors. 

For example, your intent data platform already syncs to Salesforce. Playbooks automatically watches for field changes prompted by intent scoring to trigger actions based on rules. Sales tech that duplicates these integrations creates overlap and complicates the data sync to Salesforce because now you’re pushing and pulling the same information between three separate systems.

Simplify, and scale surgically if it improves the experience.

Do More From Any Object

The value of sales execution technologies, and specifically sales engagement, is in the actions you can take. The better the integration, the more fields they automatically map to, the more quality actions you can do.

Some technologies limit actions to just two CRM objects: Leads and Contacts. But don’t some reps work off of Opportunities? In the account-based world, isn’t it more common to plan around Accounts rather than Leads? Don’t some CSMs work off of Cases? 

We give you the flexibility to build workflows off any object that best fits your processes.

Integrations matter. 

2. AUTOMATION

When you think about all the data, systems, and processes we expect sellers to work through while demanding consistency, is it any surprise we end up with so much waste and guessing in sales?

If there’s no clear process, reps will make one up. If reps don’t know who to sell to, they’ll work down a list. No buyer insights >> lose time researching. Poor data sync >> manual logging and data silos. No CRM monitoring >> lose sight of key events. No auto lead assigning >> leads go cold.   

The promised land would be for reps to spend all their time engaging and selling to real buyers. You cannot get close to that without automation. We’re not talking about building an email spamming engine. This is about facilitating sellers to do less of what distracts and more of what works. Let robots set the guardrails.

Accurate Data Entry

Playbooks automatically captures and records data to and from any CRM field. No arbitrary field caps (I’ll repeat that a few times). No complex mapping. It simply plugs into your customized CRM instance, monitors every field, interprets the field type and updates. Once in, you never have to mess with it. Remarkably, this is uncommon, or at least unreliable, for sales tech.

For example, those 25 more fields we update in CRM for every interaction, beyond what other platforms do, gives you better reporting. 

For example, if a rep calls on the task object in Salesforce from Playbooks, it will report back to Salesforce when the call was made, how many rings the rep waited, the duration of the call, which campaign it came from, etc. Other platforms simply load disparate details onto the subject line of the task object, which you can’t report off of effectively. 

Seamless Engagement Off Any Object

Playbooks supports workflows off any object, not just the Lead or Contact objects. We don’t restrict which objects you use—work how you want, aligned to your processes and your ideal motion. Automation makes it easier.

For example, a CSM can auto-enroll customers, who are 3-6 months out from a renewal, into a renewal Play (cadence or sequence in Playbooks) so they can stay ahead of customer contracts instead of playing a traditional reactive game. 

Deal Progression

Process matters in digital selling. There are usually a few standardized processes in most funnels. Defining how deals progress is one thing; having automation facilitate deal engagement, and progress deals from Play to Play is next level.

For example, your AEs can enroll Opportunities into Plays based on distinct sales stages. Playbooks will automatically trigger the Opportunity to jump from stage to stage by Play based on changes in the Opportunity status. It will even prioritize the opportunities most likely to close so you don’t waste time chasing bad deals. 

Auto Record Enrollment

Auto-enroll records (Accounts, Leads, Contacts, Cases, Opportunities) into Plays using rules based on any criteria you choose. If a Play is successful, Automation Robots in Playbooks will automatically enroll other similar records into that same Play—creating a repeatable motion. You can also apply tiered rules to include things like prioritizing records by score.

For example, speed-to-lead matters. You can easily calibrate an Automation Robot to automatically enroll new demo or pricing requests into the appropriate Play and alert reps to take action.

Flexibility with Shared and Personal Records to Improve Speed to Lead

No other platform automatically assigns records for either individual rep ownership or as part of a Shared Record. With Shared Records, leads and contacts are placed in shared pools for any rep to work—Playbooks will automatically round-robin those records until someone takes action, or kick individually assigned records back to the shared pool if a rep doesn’t take action in time. 

For example, when there’s an influx of leads, managers and admins can get backed up manually assigning them out. Playbooks will automatically designate them as Shared. Or if a rep is out sick, instead of locking the rest of the team out, set a time-based rule to automatically kick records back into a shared pool.

Alerts and Activity Triggers Keep Teams Engaged

CRM change alerts and activity triggers keep reps from missing out on key events. Playbooks monitors all CRM fields and updates information in both systems (without arbitrary field caps like on other platforms). Create rules for the types of alerts reps receive and the actions an event should trigger.

For example, reps can juggle a lot of opportunities simultaneously. They may unintentionally let some slip through the cracks. You can set Playbooks to alert reps to take action on an opportunity if there’s been no activity for several days.

Buyer Behavior Insights and Predictions Including Smart Email Send 

(much more on Buyer Intelligence below)

Playbooks runs several buyer-specific algorithms that predict behaviors and offer insights, including the level of buying influence of a contact at a company, their channel preference, verified contact information, and the best time to send them an email.

For emails, as an example, reps can either pre-select a time to send emails or they can enable SmartSend, which predicts when the recipient is most likely to respond. Customers see an average of 23% lift in contact rates from this feature alone. It also recommends verified email addresses to replace bounced emails you have on file.

In the era of modern digital selling, robust automation is an essential mechanism to create guided sales experiences. Embrace it like a warm blanket to improve how sellers and buyers interact. Most treat automation as a means for getting stuff done. Think quality first, then you can scale. 

3. TELEPHONY

Dialing works. People who say cold calling is dead just aren’t good at it. High performers use what works best for the situation—not just what they’re comfortable with. They figure out what mix is most likely to get a positive outcome. 

But…different buyers respond to different channels. This means you need as many weapons in your arsenal as you can effectively manage, including reliable telephony. Reliable means it works when you need it and how you need it. 

An outage, bad call quality, systems not playing nice with one another, or any other issue that affects your customers’ phone experience, can all result in missed revenue.

We built the first dialing technology in 2004 and authored the IP that currently supports all digital sales tech (i.e. click-to-call, immediate response, inbound call paths, next record, etc). As part of that pioneering work, we created our own telephony backbone. 

That lets us do telephony differently from all other vendors. We can afford to offer customers flexibility with three options:

1. Process phone calls on our telephony
2. Run an SIP integration from our telephony 
3. Make calls through your computer (WebRTC)

1. Process Calls on Our Telephony 

The first option uses direct connections to traditional carriers around the globe from your existing phone system. It supports better call quality and faster speeds to resolve issues than other setups. 

Third-party telephony providers are discount services. Tech vendors who only plug into them can’t resolve any telephony-related tickets directly—they route their customers’ to the provider, adding customer tickets to a global backlog. We connect directly to carriers globally and thus have unlimited flexibility to reroute calls as needed or to simply address issues without delay. 

2. SIP Integration From our Telephony

The second option uses a SIP integration from our telephony to connect to your local networks and PBX to facilitate calls. It can bring massive cost savings. Using your networks and PBX means none of the telephony goes through XANT, so we don’t charge you anything for it. But it requires a fairly technical integration that typically only large complex businesses can accommodate. 

3. WebRTC

The third telephony option is dialing from your computer, which has become more common and is now available through Playbooks. If your reps work from home and place outbound calls from their cell phones, as an example, call quality can be unpredictable and at the very least inconsistent. Think of all those sellers who are now selling from a basement office or their high-rise apartment. 

It’s by no means a perfect solution to the problem of poor and inconsistent call quality because it’s dependent on your internet speeds. But, computer-based calling can be a convenient, low-cost alternative when other solutions prove inadequate.

4. COMPLIANCE

Sales reps never ask themselves before a call, “Am I adequately compliant to call this person?” They rightly expect systems to do that. It would be impossible for any seller engaging prospects and customers in multiple regions to be familiar with the standards of compliance in every city, state, and country in which their customers operate.

And legal factors aren’t the only ones to consider. Are your sellers consistently compliant with your team’s processes? Are they delivering the right message? Do they consistently follow sales best practices of persistency, immediacy, etc? Do they adhere to system policies, like accurately maintaining activity logs in CRM?

You cannot ignore any of them. All of them can influence your performance and reputation. And no individual can stay on top of them without help.

With Compliance Comes an Abundance of Nuance

There’s regulatory nuance from state to state, region to region, and so on. How do you avoid creating roadblocks for reps, while keeping your company compliant and safe from fines, legal issues, or from simply developing a bad reputation with your potential clients? 

It’s complicated—you have to ensure you follow data and security compliance, call compliance, email compliance, CRM compliance, while aligning to the codes of the locations you are prospecting into. 

For example, Pioneer Day in Utah on July 24th is a state holiday on which vendors are not allowed to prospect. But if you’re not from Utah, there’s no way you’re going to know that. 

Not All Potential Snares Are Legal But They Still Matter

Then, of course, there are the unique sets of standards, processes, and protocols your business wants to enforce.

For example, you have those situations that could expose you to a sort of insensitivity, and leave your brand looking tone-deaf, like prospecting into a region that is currently in a state of emergency due to a natural disaster.

Compliance also has to do with adhering to best practices and to process—following your team’s predetermined sequences of engagement, of opportunity progression, or just staying aligned to your strategic narrative. Creating a consistent and compliant culture leads to predictable results.

A Foundation for Compliance on Playbooks

Most other sales solutions don’t adequately consider all facets of compliance, including the items you’ll see on the next page. But we built Playbooks with an architecture designed to support an expanding spectrum of seamlessly deployed capabilities to help you stay compliant in all ways that matter to your business. 

In the end, this should result in helping sellers connect with buyers faster and in more effective ways. It’s about establishing a sales system that helps reps succeed through consistent and reliable workflows with peace of mind for them and their customers.

Playbooks + Compliance 

You won’t get a return on your sales tech investments, or amplify the value of CRM, from user features alone. The architectures supporting the platforms you adopt have to meet a high bar of compliance requirements. From data governance and security to platform availability, there are a number of must-have components that, in the current landscape, you simply can’t afford to operate without.

Call Compliance

• Configuration with regional call recording and monitoring restrictions
• Call recording access restrictions
• Local call restrictions configurations 
• Do not call restriction configurations
• Dynamic call record pausing
• Call recording API’s
• One-to-one dialing

Email Compliance 

• Email opt-out and email blacklisting
• Email send limits
• Detect invalid email addresses and prevent spam scores from increasing
• Do not track configuration
• Invalid email address detection
• Custom  and locked email templates 
• Merge fields and placeholder fields

Data Compliance

• Encrypt data in transit and at rest
• Anonymize data in use
• Control over feature access, data storage and data access, email tracking, calendaring data, etc.
• Preservation of customer data sovereignty by global region
• Permission group configurations
• SOC2 certification with policies baselined against industry security protocols (ISO, NIST, CoBIT)

Workflow Compliance

• Workflow adherence reporting
• Custom sorts to enforce priority levels based on rules or scores
• Skip reporting to see if and where reps skip steps and what the impact is
• Play Adherence Reporting to see how many activities reps complete in Plays

CRM Compliance

• CRM merge field limits
• Customers have control over which fields are shared with Playbooks
• CRM sync logs
• Customizable sync controls
• API limit toggles
• Uncapped CRM field scans and updates

See the full list of Playbooks compliance features here. 

5. BUYER INTELLIGENCE 

Buyer Intelligence is…intelligence about your buyers. 

Selling is like steering a boat at night through fog. You need a lighthouse to navigate. Buyers are your lighthouse, but they regularly change their positions and behaviors. Catching their signals gets you where you need to go.

How do we tap into their signals for our customers? 

First, we collect data from every interaction and outcome that takes place on our platform. That’s thousands of sellers interacting with millions of buyers across billions of actions all leading to either closed-won or closed-lost deals. 

Second, we use AI to mine for relevant signals about their behaviors from the data: are they influencers, are the decision-makers, what channels do they prefer, when do they engage, who else do they buy with, etc. 

Next, once we harness those signals, we anonymize and encrypt them, then validate them against third-party data. 

And last, we serve them up to reps automatically in Playbooks in the form of verified recommendations and scores. 

That’s Buyer Intelligence.

We Make Intelligence a Seamless Part of the UX in Playbooks

Even though we’re only scratching the surface, what we’ve built so far changes the game. Here are a few examples of Buyer Intelligence woven into the Playbooks experience:

PeopleFinder // Identifies additional people in the buying group, their roles, their level of influence, their contact information, and their engagement patterns

Buyer Hints // Insight into buyer profiles, purchasing behaviors, influence at the account, and recommendations for how best to engage

Verified Contact Data // Verified email and phone contact information, along with a timestamp for when it was last used successfully

Data Append // Appends enriched contact information into individual records in CRM

Mobile Recommend // Detects and recommends verified mobile phone numbers

Smart Email Send // Recommends the best time to send emails based on actual email open rates

Scoring // Scoring the likelihood of leads and contacts to engage and the likelihood of accounts and opportunities to close

The Flexibility to Control What Happens Next 

The flexibility we’ve built into Playbooks Automation and Intelligence allows customers to easily Prioritize how their teams work. 

• Create and adjust prioritized activities using rules, scores, or a combination of both to enforce the next best action.

• Quickly create custom sorts to prioritize daily tasks with up to 6 different rules.

• Filter tasks by activity type, record type, status, time zone, or by a combination of criteria.

• Give your managers control to set up Play structures with multiple sorts.

• Don’t just work off of static lists. Don’t settle on manual activities when there’s an alternative. And don’t invest in more guessing. Be deliberate about doing the best things next.

Great soft skills, grit and persistency are still essential. But you can also get that extra bit of advantage from technology and Buyer Intelligence to make your team more buyer-centric and to achieve predictable results.

6. REPORTING AND SCORECARDS

You can’t make something better until you know what’s working and what’s not working. Managers tell us all the time that they hate how much effort goes into building reports and tracking down data just to measure performance, hold people accountable, and get marketing and sales aligned. They repeat the process weekly, sometimes daily, but the data is often incomplete and inaccurate. 

Vendors promise actionable reporting and clear visibility, but it never quite measures up. The problem is made worse any time their tools behave like shadow CRMs. 

For example, if a tool lets reps take actions outside of CRM, stores data in separate silos, or populates in-app reports, all without fully syncing back—you’ll end up with a data integrity problem. That will create a reporting problem. One system of record is plenty to maintain. Two just exaggerates friction.

Sellers should sell and managers should coach. You should be able to dedicate more time to individual development and strategy—but that requires having the right insights.

Pre-Built Native CRM Reporting

We plug into your system of record natively and push data updates to all affected fields, without caps or downtime. Once again, the key is in the integration. Playbooks works with your customized CRM instance and doesn’t require a ton of mapping to get set up. 

Most systems require maintenance for the connections on both ends. It’s not easy, so teams don’t keep their bi-directional integrations current. It breaks down the data sync and decentralizes data stores. 

It’s not just that Playbooks automatically scans every field and updates those 25+ additional fields. It’s also that we deploy it in custom reporting packages pre-loaded into CRM, with performance insights. This means that whatever you need to see is in the CRM, and whoever needs to see it only has to open it up.

In-App Reporting, Scorecards, & Leaderboards

There are quick views into rep activity and performance for managers in Playbooks. These reporting dashboards aren’t disconnected from what you’ll find in CRM. They’re a simplified control center from which you can quickly assess what’s happening across your team. 

Gamification has always been an important part of keeping reps engaged and motivated. In Playbooks, you can set up Scorecards with custom KPI’s for the metrics you care about most. Personal Leaderboards show a team’s progress towards a goal and reward those that excel. Recognize reps who go beyond to serve your customers and use the insights to enforce better engagement and process adoption along the way. 

Sample Reporting 

TASK AND EVENT REPORTS

See all activities by team and by rep, adherence to Plays and templates, and results

STRATEGY REPORTS

Measure Plays and step adoption, effectiveness, rep progress, and outcomes.

INBOUND CALL METRICS

Measure wait times, grouped or batched, for inbound calls across time of day

EMAIL REPORTS

Measure email and template usage, replies, bounces, and overall engagement.

ACCOUNT PENETRATION

Measure overall activity level and effectiveness at penetrating accounts

ACTIVITY DASHBOARDS

Quickly see team performance and activity impact

IN-APP REPORTS

Drill into team and rep activity, Play and template adoption, including prospecting results, directly from Playbooks Reports

7. SPEED TO LEAD

Half of buyers still choose the vendor that responds first. What does ‘first’ mean in practice?

From our research on 6 million marketing leads across all industries, conversion rates are 8X higher within 5 minutes, contact rates are 2.5X higher within the first 2 hours, and win rates are 7.5X higher when a rep attempts to engage within the first few hours compared to waiting more than a week. 

Speed-to-lead is a big deal. It’s a matter of minutes and hours, not days.

The way buyers behave—doing their own research, talking to their own networks, creating their own criteria—means sellers have a very narrow window to respond to buying signals. 

But most businesses aren’t instrumented in the first place to get their fast, or at all. 79% of inbound leads are never touched. Reps only attempt to engage 9% within the first two hours. There’s a good chance you’re leaving a lot of cheddar on the table. 

Hot leads to turn cold real quick. Managers and admins get backed up manually assigning leads. Reps let things pile up. Teams get locked out of good leads when someone is sick or on vacation. And leaders can’t see well enough into their businesses to know what they’re missing!

Playbooks makes getting their first much easier. And it starts with Robots.

Doing Things Humans Don’t Need to Do With Playbooks Automation Robots

The more manual tasks a team has, the more waste they’ll create. It’s science. Not every essential task requires a human touch. But we make humans touch them.

Take assigning leads, as an example. Most sales tech requires the manager or admin to manually assign leads to individual owners (why only to individuals? we’ll cover that next). If you have an influx in demo requests, that manager or admin will fall behind in manually assigning leads to the team. Interest wanes by the minute.

Or take teams getting locked out of leads. If a rep is sick or is on vacation, any records assigned to that rep sit in a digital vault. Most tech can’t pull those records out or reassign them. With a window of minutes and hours, this can be a death nail. 

For most vendors, this gap is partly due to below-par CRM integrations, and partly due to not understanding sales motions. 

If the underlying automation in your tech can’t support the simple use cases above (among others), you’re operating below your potential. 

Level up with Robots. 

Auto-Assign Leads and Keep Reps on Rails

This is pretty straightforward. You don’t need to manually assign leads. Robots can do that work instantly, or whenever you want them to. Basically, if you can say it out loud, Robots can make it happen. 

Here’s how it works. Robots query all CRM fields every 10 minutes by default, but for an immediate response, it happens in real-time. This means you can calibrate Playbooks to recognize urgent inbound marketing leads (demo requests, pricing requests, etc) as requiring an immediate response so that as soon as it lands in Salesforce, Robots will enroll them in Plays and assign them. 

Even in scenarios with existing customers, where you’re not concerned about net new buyer signals, this is handy. Let’s say your CSMs manage large portfolios of customers, each with unique contract start and end dates. Set a rule for a Robot to auto-enroll accounts 3-6 months prior to their renewal date so the rep doesn’t lose sight of their book of business. 

Shared Records and Auto Round-Robin Leads

Now we get into one of the unique hallmarks of Playbooks Automation: Shared Records for speed-to-lead. And it extends the value of our Personal Records and Urgent Tasks capabilities already available in Playbooks. 

With Shared & Personal Records, you can automatically assign strategic leads and accounts to individual reps, or keep them unassigned—placed in a Shared bucket for anyone to work. 

Urgent tasks for either Personal or Shared Records will get prioritized, automatically alerting reps when tasks are soon-to-be-due or overdue.

Time-based rules can be calibrated to pull Personal Records into a Shared Records pool if the assigned rep doesn’t take action quickly enough. 

Urgent Tasks on a Shared Record will round-robin automatically from rep to rep until somebody jumps on it.

No more bottlenecks.

No more manual processes.

No more unnecessary delays.

Just speed-to-lead. And a much higher chance of closing deals.

Speed-to-lead used to be more of a priority when teams generally accepted high-velocity selling motions. We’ve let those muscles atrophy in the last few years. It’s time to rebuild and retool.

_____________________

Embrace the new (and always changing) digital landscape with tools designed for it. Playbooks is built for the modern seller—guiding them to reach the modern buyer. No need to guess at what works, with Playbooks your actions are backed by data, and you connect with more of the right people in an efficient way, to ultimately create more predictable results. Learn more about Playbooks and give it a spin here.  

THE PROBLEM: 

Sales reps spend on average 35.2% (or ⅓) of their time selling. That’s only 14-hours in a 40-hour workweek. Meaning they spend nearly 65% of their time on other activities—including looking for contacts. 

Even when they have contacts, reps can still run into time-wasting roadblocks like targeting the wrong prospects or getting deep into a deal only to find there are other important members of buying committee that they haven’t considered.

So, how do you ensure reps aren’t wasting time and focusing on the right contacts? 

That’s why we crafted PeopleFinder. 

THE SOLUTION: 

PeopleFinder provides intelligent contact recommendations to reps reducing wasted time and quickly connecting reps with the prospects most likely to engage. 

The number of people in the buying committee has surged in recent years, leaving many reps to fall short of closing deals simply because they don’t reach enough of the right people. For example, if you have two key contacts on file, Playbooks will identify and provide contact information (validated with third-party data) for additional decision-makers who can influence the deal—significantly increasing your chances of closing the deal. This contact information comes with information about the individual such as their level of influence, role in the deal, etc. 

HOW IT WORKS:

When a rep logs onto Playbooks, there is a yellow, clickable “NEW” on the menu—when clicked it provides all-new, recommended contacts that haven’t been used yet. 

PeopleFinder is a massive time saver that solves the issues of reps wasting time looking for contacts or tracking down the wrong ones. XANT’s Buyer Intelligence draws from the records of all users of XANT tech to build buyer profiles and identify individuals who might be part of the buying group or other contacts information for other similar personas—this information is then verified with third-party data. Recommendations include contacts outside of their CRM.

Simply put: PeopleFinder suggests the next best person to contact, additional members of the buying group, and provides their level of influence in the deal to help reps get to selling faster and close more deals. 

PeopleFinder is the secret superpower your reps need to get more of the right things done. Demo Playbooks today to learn more about PeopleFinder, Buyer Intelligence, and what your team needs to take the guessing work out of selling and close more deals. 

Customers should feel safe interacting with your reps and know that their information is secure. Managers shouldn’t have to worry about reps accidentally breaking compliance rules or unintentionally going rogue. Building a culture of security for your customers and consistency for your team starts with compliance. 

So, how do you ensure your team is following the rules and winning at the compliance game? In sales, it’s aligning communications and infrastructure to regulatory standards and guiding reps with guardrails that can be measured and enforced. Failing to cover either facet of compliance can result in both legal action and missed targets. Not to mention, it’s a turn-off to current and potential customers. 

One Forbes article suggests building a culture of compliance with:

• A management culture that encourages compliance.
• An organizational chain that allows access to the CEO or board.
• An established, formal program for internal compliance.
• Sufficient resources dedicated to the program.
• Tools and training to enable employees to comply.
• Systems and protocols for monitoring, identifying, and correcting possible violations. 

Building this culture of compliance is much easier and more effective with a platform built from the ground up to ensure your success in these areas. That’s where Playbooks comes in. 

What You Should Consider Tackling 

Driving a winning and compliant sales team means following the legalities of compliance as well as providing reps with a proven structure for their workflow. In Playbooks, you can set customized compliance restrictions based on location (global, regional, etc), time (date, day of the week, etc), or other activity (repeated dialing, outbound calls, etc). Playbooks in the only sales engagement platform with this level of compliance and this kind of solution. Use Playbooks to meet your compliance needs and run a highly functional, effective, and compliant sales team. 

Compliance applies to several areas of sales—mainly call compliance, email compliance, data compliance, Play compliance (if you’re a Playbooks user), CRM compliance, and general compliance. Below, we’ll dive into each of these sections—including some legal requirements and other team-specific workflow requirements, and what Playbooks can do to enable it.

Call Compliance 

This one is a doozy. Sales reps spend A LOT of time on the phone. One study found that 92% of customer interactions happen over the phone. With that kind of investment of time spent on the phone, it’s important to get it right. Some call compliance areas to consider including:

• Call recording and monitoring restrictions— Some regions may have restrictions on if (or what portion of) a call can be recorded or monitored live. 
• Local regulations call restrictions— There may be local restrictions for when reps can call. For example, in the state of Utah, you cannot cold call on July 24th. Why? Because it’s Pioneer Day, a state holiday.  
• “Do Not Call” restrictions— Contacts that are on a “Do Not Call” list cannot be cold-called. There are several “Do Not Call” lists to keep track of and reps may not know if their contact is on one of those lists. 

These are just a few things to look out for in your cold-calling compliance. Sales engagement tools, like Playbooks can be a safeguard to ensure your team is up to date and following these rules. Playbooks can be used to:

• Create rules based on area code restrictions (only applicable within the US). Set these rules to avoid monitoring, recording, or cold calling when it’s not legal. 
• Get alerts for the numbers you are dialing based on the area they live in (coming in May 2021). For example, if you are calling a number in Texas and the state is currently in a “state of emergency”, reps will be notified and can redirect accordingly. 
• Dynamically pause call recordings. Pause a call recording at any time, like when you’re taking down credit card information, to avoid recording illegally. 
• Set up your platform to alert
• Automatically block numbers that are on national “Do Not Call” lists. 
• Avoid over-dialing and over-calling. Alert reps when a record has been contacted that day. Managers and admins can also run reports to see how many calls reps are making to each contact. 
• Customize fields on your call log. Add custom and dependant fields to keep track of metrics that matter.

Email Compliance 

In this digital era of sales, salespeople spend 21% of their day writing emails and send an average of 36.2 emails per day. Having fool-proof (and fully legal) email methodology is vital to a rep’s success. Examples of email compliance include:

• Email opt-out— Sender must allow an opt-out option and comply with opt-out requests.
• Email blacklisting— Emails may be marked as “private” and cannot be added to your CRM.
• Email send limits— Inboxes may have limits, and when they’ve reached that limit, emails will no longer reach them. 

Here’s how Playbooks helps you follow email compliance, produce reliable results, and create the best email experience for your prospects:

• Block emails from being sent to those who have opted out. And include an embedded email opt-out link that will automatically update your CRM, to make things simple. 
• Detect invalid email addresses. Prevent spam scores from increasing by avoiding sending emails to invalid addresses. 
• Create custom email templates. Admins can create and lock certain email templates for reps to use. Reps can also customize email templates within the bounds set by administrators. 

Data Compliance

The new landscape of sales relies on data to get the job done. That said, sales orgs must comply with relevant data, privacy, and security laws. Playbooks has several features that help you comply with these laws and keep your data secure, including:

• Encrypt data in transit and at rest.
• Anonymize data in use.
• Control which features are available to individuals and groups.

Workflow Compliance

A consistent and reliable workflow means consistent results. Ensure reps are following the workflow most likely to set them up for success with these features:

• Workflow adherence reporting— Review levels of activity complete on steps in a workflow.
• Custom sorts— Make sure reps focus on the best records first, resulting in higher compliance and higher conversation rates. 
• Playbooks PriorityMode— Managers can create a custom order for reps to work records and reps are unable to break from that order.
• Skip reporting— Reps can choose to skip a task within a Play, but they are required to explain why. Data is saved to the CRM.
• Play Adherence Reporting— Administrators and managers can run reports from the CRM to see how many activities are being completed inside of a Play or outside of a Play. 

CRM Compliance

CRM is the main source of knowledge for many salespeople—it is no longer an optional tool. In 2020, CRM ranked as the most attained tech tool for sales teams. But having CRM is not enough, how you use it will make all the difference. Here’s how Playbooks builds on and augments your CRM:

• CRM merge field limits— Through Playbooks PriorityMode admins can ensure that reps work records in the order in which managers define. 
• Access user data access— Customers have complete control over what fields are shared with Playbooks platform. Only fields that are shared can be accessed by Playbooks.
• CRM sync logs— Detailed logs (including activity data like calls, emails, etc.) are available for customers to review the activities that have been synced to the CRM. 
• Customizable sync controls— Admins can determine how Playbooks syncs activities back to the CRM. Common configurations are to sync as the user or the access user.
• API limit toggles— Set the maximum number of API calls that Playbooks can use over a 24-hour period. 

For a full compliance and security checklist click here. 

Creating a Mindset of Security and ConsistencyThough there are several boxes to check when it comes to compliance, going beyond the checklist and encouraging a mindset of compliance will help your team connect with buyers in a more significant and effective way. As stated previously, compliance is about building a culture of security and consistency. Consider how you would like your information dealt with by a company. Establishing a sales system that not only complies with legalities but also ensures customer’s peace of mind and helps reps succeed through consistent and reliable cadences is all possible with Playbooks. Demo it today to find out how. 

When the *stuff* hits the fan, most will double down on what they’re already doing, but with a little more grit, more snarling, more sweat.

In sales, we mistakenly call this productivity, but really it’s a synonym for increasing activity. What’s really going on is movement without direction. 

Battle strategists will tell you that when faced with unforeseen obstacles (i.e. COVID), operate with more fluidity, reevaluate positions and objectives and take practical measures in face of the present, not the ideal.

In sales, this looks like figuring out what really works, what’s really worth your time, and scaling that, instead of just scaling—doing more of what works, rather than just more of the same.

Last year sucked for everyone. A lot of black holes and misalignments were exposed. The silver lining, though, is that sales teams began to embrace technology as a means for structuring and guiding sales rep’s effectiveness, more than they had before. 

Leaders suddenly needed better visibility. They realized they couldn’t operate remote teams very well without data or process. 

These are signs people have begun to reevaluate strategies and to operate with more fluidity.

Product teams face the same challenge. Fortunately, at XANT, we had already built a platform to support the future of sales. That future just came a lot sooner than anyone thought. 

So, like our customers, we reevaluated objectives. We spoke with hundreds of customers and prospects, looked at trends, met with analysts, and came up with 3 categories into which we could invest product dev cycles to further up-level our customers:

• Effectiveness – How do you get more from your effort?
• Remote work – How do you make it work remotely?
• Compliance – How do you protect data while using it to guide effort?

This served as our north star and now we’re excited to announce a number of transformative innovations which set a new bar for the future of sales.

AVAILABLE NOW 

Problem: Strong leads slip, then revenue follows. Sellers leave revenue on the table when they don’t contact leads quickly enough. To start, 77% of leads never get touched. Too many of those represent closeable pipeline but don’t materialize—reps don’t prioritize them or a rep falls behind, maybe they lose track during an influx, or it could be that because of an ownership rule, while a rep is out of office, the rest of the team is locked out.

Solution: Shared Records. This is a problem that affects almost every business development and inside sales team. With Shared Records, you can prompt Playbooks to automatically designate records for either personal ownership or shared ownership—where anyone on the team can access and where urgent tasks can round-robin automatically from rep to rep. No more lockouts! No more missed revenue!

Problem: Slow lead follow-up. Leads are 8x less likely to convert after the first five minutes. Quick inbound lead response must be an essential motion, but, of the 23% of leads that actually get worked, almost 60% don’t get a first call attempt until after a week. Teams simply aren’t making the cut.

Solution: Immediate Response. Engage with prospects the moment they express interest and are loaded into CRM. New leads are routed to the next available rep within 5 minutes of a new lead being created until someone works them.

Problem: Ineffective cold-calling. How well is your remote cold calling going? By definition, remote work means prospects, not just sellers, are dispersed, and it’s even trickier to get a hold of people. In this world, mobile numbers are gold. But how do you get that number? 

Solution: Try Another (Verified) Number. Reps call to have conversations. For that to happen they need numbers that work—verified numbers. Once a rep makes a call, they will get a prompt to try other, verified, direct dial numbers (even if they didn’t have them in CRM) to increase their contact rates. 

Problem: Prioritization is a guessing game. There’s no shortage of things to do, but additional effort doesn’t automatically translate to additional reward. You need to do more of the right things. If you have 100 things to get done in a day, but only have time 50—which 50 should you prioritize? Which 50 do you leave off? Most teams aren’t equipped to answer that.

Solution: AI Record Prioritization Using XANT Intelligence. The combination of collective data and ML modeling can now be used to identify which activities are most beneficial, and it doesn’t require professional services or customization. You can sort recommended tasks based on closability scores, contactability scores, or a blend of both, and you can do it out-of-the-box. Get the most effective tasks done first and start seeing more impact fast. 

COMING SOON

Problem: Simplifying work when you have so many tools. Reps don’t have time to go looking for the tools and features they need to engage with customers. Those should be readily available where they work—in their inbox. 

Solution: Gmail Integration 2.0. We’re bringing the full breadth of our email IP to the Gmail inbox. Verified email addresses are automatically suggested. Pull an email template from your Playbooks email library. Advanced email tracking shows you when someone views your message, forwards it, downloads an attachment, clicks a link, etc. Auto-fill fields with your favorite snippets, set up reminders to follow-up in a timely manner (whether they respond or not). Send emails when they’re most likely to be read. And much more.

Problem: Generic compliance protocols not tuned to your needs. Increasingly, concerns about data integrity and protection force businesses to evaluate the compliance needs of their industry. But a lot of standard protocols are generically built and not adjusted based on those needs. 

Solution: New and Expanded Compliance Flexibility: Flexibly program Playbooks to fit the unique compliance needs of your business and industry. For example, different states treat sales calls very differently, some mandating lockdowns on cold calls during events or times of the year. This new layer of flexibility would allow teams to block outbound calls to states during local holidays or during a state of emergency. 

Problem: Lack of engagement and inconsistent motivation. One of the biggest demotivators for a rep is to not be able to clearly gauge how well they’re performing or how they compare with their team. A dose of competition goes a long way to keeping teams consistently engaged and stretching their performance. But most tech fails to seamlessly incorporate these insights, or they require additional steps to see them.

Solution: Personal Leaderboard. Reps can see detailed reports of their performance and trends for the day, week, or month. Track inputs, outputs, records touched, emails sent, dials made, talk time, correct contacts, and more, and how they compare with their peers.

Problem: Treating all prospects and customers the same. A subpar, generic cadence won’t work on most people. Buyers are more educated, more prepared, and sellers need to be too. 

Solution: Play Library. See and download best-in-class Plays from a single-click Play Library. Build or customize Plays based on what you are trying to accomplish and who you are trying to reach. Grab effective Plays for awareness, education, engagement, information, nurture, etc. And choose the pace—fast, moderate, or slow—based on factors unique to your business.

Problem: Failing to map to all essential members of a buying group. In the new buying landscape, there can be up to 10 people (sometimes more) involved in the buying process. Most reps don’t reach them all, and probably don’t know who they are, which leads to missed revenue. How many times has a rep been caught off guard late in a deal when they learned of an important influencer on the buying team they didn’t know about before?

Solution: PeopleFinder. Easily identify verified new names and numbers for members of the buying committee directly within Playbooks. Playbooks will recommend people, provide their contact information, and state their role in the buying committee. With one click, you can begin a more effective, multi-threaded approach to your target accounts.

COMING THIS YEAR

Problem: One-size fits all doesn’t work. Different buyers engage in different ways. A one-size-fits-all tactic doesn’t work. Hot leads go cold quickly when you employ generic Plays (cadences) or when you simply aren’t fluid in your approach to engaging customers and prospects.

Solution: Dynamic Plays. XANT Intelligence gathers data to adjust Plays as they run. For example, if your contact is prone to respond to emails, even if you’ve never emailed them, a Dynamic Play will automatically adjust to focus on emails—ensuring engagement continues. We’ve already seen a 22% lift in open rates and a 30% lift in contact rates based on early usage of Dynamic Plays. 

Problem: Not applying customer-centric strategies. Every customer is different, every play should be too. The generic spray and pray method won’t work on the modern buyer. Buyers now are more educated than ever—they know what they want and so should you. 

Solution: Optimal Play Selection. The optimal Play or sequence for each buyer is going to be different—and now you can easily know what Play to put into motion for each lead. XANT Intelligence uses data to predict outcomes and recommend activities for each Play and each buyer.

CONCLUSION

We built Playbooks to give sales teams a way to effectively navigate digital disruption. These innovations are simply the next notches in the belt to guide your sales engagement efforts. 

While your competitors get stuck in the froth of doing more, it’s time you grabbed your competitive edge by doing more of the right things with Playbooks, and make digital selling your bread and butter for 2021 and beyond!

50% of buyers still choose the vendor that responds first. How do you make sure you’re first?

Since contact and qualification rates plummet by 100x after the first 5 minutes, shortening your speed-to-lead is key.

The problem: Buyers aren’t sending you signals of interest until they’re already 60-70% through their buying decision. Your ideal window to engage buyers is shrinking. 

And too many teams allow hot leads to turn cold—assigning leads is a bottleneck, reps get bogged down, leaders don’t have enough visibility or control. 

These practices cause high-volume muscles to atrophy! 

You shouldn’t have to wait for someone to manually assign leads. And you don’t want to lose traction because the assigned rep is out of the office or backed up with overdue tasks. Maybe you shouldn’t even assign some leads to a specific rep in the first place!

Whatever the diagnosis, you can make life easier for yourself by adopting a more flexible approach.

INTRODUCING SHARED RECORDS

We’re excited to announce the first Shared Records capability in sales engagement. It amplifies your ability to provide coverage of records and to easily drive a faster speed-to-lead.

And it extends the value of our Personal Records and Urgent Tasks capabilities already available in Playbooks. Here’s what they look like together:

Shared Records works alongside Personal Records and Urgent Tasks in Playbooks to give you a much more robust way to manage lead response.

Automatically assign strategic leads and accounts to individual reps, or keep them unassigned, in a shared bucket for anyone to work. 

Mark either “personal” or ”shared” tasks as urgent so they get prioritized, and so you can automatically alert reps when tasks are overdue.

Here’s why sales leaders AND their reps are pumped for this…

PUT PRODUCTIVITY AND CLOSABILITY ON HYPER-DRIVE

Today, managers or admins have to manually assign records to individual reps—unnecessarily wasting time 

If that time is stretched even a little, leads will become cold. 

And when they’re assigned to a rep who goes on a vacation, or is out sick, or simply falls behind, those leads, again, become cold. 

Prospects and customers move on. 

The window shuts.

Revenue slips. 

In Playbooks, you can automate time-sucking administrative tasks with Robots. You can also assign records for personal or shared ownership based on rules you define. 

Let’s say you’ve just completed a webinar or a virtual event and you have a huge influx of leads to sift through. You probably don’t care which of your reps reaches out, as long as someone does quickly.

In this case, you can set the rule for a Robot to have all leads from the event automatically assigned to the Shared Records bucket. They’ll get enrolled into the right Play and will be prioritized. Shared Records with Urgent Tasks will round-robin from rep to rep until somebody gets to it. 

No more bottlenecks. No more manual processes. No more unnecessary delays. Just speed-to-lead and a much higher chance of closing deals.

CUSTOMERS ON PLAYBOOKS CAN’T WAIT

Like all our product developments, we first tested out the concept for Shared Records with customers.

Here’s what Brian Browne, Sr Manager, Americas Marketing BD at VMWare said:

“Our reps always have a set number of strategically assigned leads, but once they work those leads, Shared Records will give me the flexibility to send them to the well. With a single click, my hardest working reps will have the most opportunity for success. And I’ll never have to worry about leaving revenue on the table.”

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT

Want to see how Shared Records on Playbooks can help supercharge your team’s productivity and accelerate revenue?

If you’re a XANT customer already, I have good news: You’ll have access to Shared Records in a couple of weeks! Talk to your Customer Success Manager to get started.