What is a sales play?

What goes into a sales play

A sales play contains everything a seller needs to act on one situation without starting from a blank page. The aim is that two sellers running the same play would contact the same people with a similar message.

• The trigger: the event or signal that starts the play.
• The audience: which accounts qualify and which roles to reach.
• The message: the angle, the proof and the call to action.
• The touches: channels, timing and the content of each step.
• The owner and exit: who runs it, and when to stop or hand over.

Sales play examples

Sales play examples usually map to the moments when a buyer is most open to change. These are common patterns, described in general terms.

• Displacement: an account uses a competitor whose contract is up for renewal.
• Expansion: a happy customer adds a team, an office or a product line.
• New leader: a target account hires a new head of the function you sell to.
• Event follow-up: people from target accounts attended a webinar or conference.
• Reactivation: a deal lost a while ago, where the original reason may have changed.

Sales play vs sales playbook, and marketing plays

A sales play covers one situation, while a sales playbook gathers all of them together with the team's process, stage definitions, qualification rules and talk tracks. New sellers learn the playbook; experienced sellers mostly reach for the play that fits the account in front of them.

A GTM playbook widens the same idea to marketing and customer success, so that a launch or an expansion push is run as one coordinated effort. A marketing play is the marketing side of it: a campaign set off by a trigger, such as content and ads aimed at the accounts in a displacement play.

How to build a play people will run

Build a play people will run by starting from a situation sellers already meet and writing down what the best of them do. Plays designed in a workshop with no seller input tend to stay in a shared folder.

Keep the first version short: one page with the trigger, the audience, three or four touches and the message. Run it with a few sellers, collect what worked and what did not, then revise before rolling it out to the whole team.

Why sales plays fail

Sales plays usually fail because a team has too many of them, so none becomes a habit. A team running a few plays well learns faster than one with dozens nobody remembers.

• A vague trigger that sellers cannot spot in their own accounts.
• One message for every role, when a finance lead and a user care about different things.
• No way to tell whether the play is working, so it is never improved.
• Plays that never retire, even after the situation stops occurring.