Marable: Copy-Pasting Sales Playbooks Into New Companies Fails
“I learned the hard way that coming to a new company with a playbook doesn't work.”
Lemkin: A veteran executive's playbook never works 100% at a new startup
“And a veteran is naturally gonna wanna bring that playbook into the new company and never does that playbook work a hundred percent. It never works a hundred percent.”
Nadhani: SaaS playbooks cannot be directly replicated across companies
“You can take out leaves from somebody else's playbook, but you cannot replicate somebody else's playbook because the number of variables which are out there, you might not even know which variable has changed for you, whether it's a temporal change in context …”
Cassidy: VP of Sales Should Write Final Playbook, Not Founders
“Ultimately, the playbook the in ink should probably be written by the VP of sales, but yeah, you should have a, you know, sort of a loosely built playbook as a founder.”
Doshi: Playbooks become standard over time, outperformance always requires judgment
“If everybody could just follow playbooks then you know, and they might be wonderful playbooks, but over time, even wonderful playbooks become the industry standard. So now if you want to outperform, you need something else, and that something else is always ju…”
Applying rigid executive playbooks leads leaders astray
“You gotta be very careful that, that you don't get into a rinse and repeat mode where, you know, you just think you have a formula or an algorithm and you can just apply it over and over again. That's just really simplistic thinking. It will lead you astray be…”
Jones: Executive playbooks are 'prisons' when applied to new environments
“Playbooks are prisons, right? Like so many times we see leaders or executives join organizations and bring playbooks that they've implemented elsewhere assuming that it's going to be effective in a new environment.”
Wait for 20 ramped AEs before building a repeatable sales playbook
“I don't think you create that playbook until you have at least 20 ramped AEs.”
Lemkin: 10x early SaaS sales reps differentiate by adapting their playbook
“What makes them Tenex, and it took me a long time to figure this out, they can change their playbook. 90% of sales reps, and this works out the bigger you get, they sell exactly the same way.”
Srinivasan: High-Growth Marketing Leaders Must Discard Their Playbooks Every Six Months
“In the last three companies I've been at, every single time, six months in, I'm like, okay, throw out this new, this old playbook, we have to create something new. Because you are outgrowing that playbook so quickly that you have to be very agile in thinking a…”