ETA Expert Insights: Building Payments Sales Processes and Playbooks for Your Payments Organization
By Ashvin Dhawan, Senior Vice President, IRIS CRM • Janet Frasier, VP Marketing, Cardflight • Samantha Lee, Principal,Digital Payments, Discover Financial Services • Jose Rodriguez, Senior Manager, Acquirer Relations, DiscoverFinancial Services
ETA Industry Affairs Payment Sales & Strategy Committee
Introduction: Why Your Payments Organization Needs a Sales Playbook
Sales turnover has triple the attrition rate than other fields, and Payments is no exception. An increasingly complicated and fragmented industry further exacerbates this. To support scalability and retention, this paper seeks to show you the importance of and how to develop sales playbooks for your organization.
Any new salesperson can pick up a sales playbook to facilitate their understanding of your product/services and industry and allows them to start presenting and selling faster, even if they have no previous industry experience. It also creates accountability by ensuring the products and/or services are marketed and sold correctly.
How to Create Your Organization’s Sales Playbooks
Before getting started, it’s essential to remember that the sales playbook’s objective is to simplify and create repeatability to ingrain patterns that are easy to learn, particularly with Payments products/services, which are inherently complex.
The other consideration is that your organization should research sales methodologies as a basis for the document and what would work best for your market. This whitepaper offers references as a starting point to evaluate the pros and cons of various sales methodologies.
Your sales playbook should have five sections in easy-to-understand language:
- The first section of your sales playbook should address educating the salesperson on your product and your industry.
- You should devote a section to explicitly describing how your organization differentiates itself in its competitive market.
- The second section should cover a list of questions for the salesperson to ask the prospect to better ensure a product/market fit. This includes understanding if your organization’s product/service offerings align with the prospect’s needs. Some guidelines include:
- Avoid yes or no questions. Ensure questions are to learn about the prospect’s needs in the correct tone and to facilitate a dialogue.
- Tailor precise questions for that prospect to get higher engagement. We recommend using ChatGPT for specific questions before meetings with prospective customers. Please find more reference resources in the conclusion of this whitepaper.
- The third section should cover how to prospect and how to maintain prospects. This section should include:
- A detailed guide on analyzing a territory for leads and prospects and evaluating if they meet the criteria for what your organization is selling.
- A detailed description of the ideal customer for your products and services.
- A desktop guide for how to use your organization’s contact databases to maintain and document conversations.
- The fourth section should cover closing a sale specific to your product/service and organization. This section should entail the following:
- Detail common pain points in your vertical and how to address these to make the prospect comfortable adopting your product/services.
- Describe any specific tools your organization offers, including promotions, specific contractual terms that put the prospect at ease, like termination clauses, etc. Support after the sale.
- The fifth and final section should describe who will handle the account after the sale.
- Describe your organization’s procedure in depth, whether the salesperson manages the account or an account management team.
- The playbook should detail what exactly is going to be provided by the account manager or salesperson in the day-to-day operations of the account.
What to Do Next: Resources for Further Information
We hope this paper was useful for your organization to get started. Resources to develop your ideas and tools for your organization’s playbook include the following.
BOOKS
- The Sales Development Playbook by Trish Bertuzzi
- Right on the Money by Colleen Francis
- Secrets of Question Based Selling by Thomas Freese
- SNAP Selling by Jill Konrath
- More Sales, Less Time by Jill Konrath
- Heart and Sell: 10 Universal Truths Every Salesperson Needs to Know by Shari Levitin
- SPIN® – Selling by Neil Rackham
- Integrity Selling in the 21st Century by Ron Willingham
- https://www.pipedrive.com/en/blog/sales-playbook
- https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-playbook
- https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/sales-playbook/
PODCASTS
- Benefiting from the Marriage of Tech and Payments: https://www.ccsalespro.com/podcast/benefiting-from-the-marriage-of-tech-and-payments: There is a discussion at 40:00 on using AI in communications.
- Conversations with Women in Sales hosted by Lori Richardson
- What’s Next! Podcast with Tiffani Bova
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