Selling the sales team on a new playbook

In 2000, Compaq’s ProLiant server group was rapidly growing and diversifying their product line. The sales team was having a hard time differentiating the technical details of each of the servers and understanding which segments were best served by which servers.

Enter Heather Loftiss, Creative Director of Water Design Studio.

Heather was brought in to develop a sales playbook which could be kept close at hand during calls and that would easily and quickly highlight the differences between server products.

What started as a guide to ProLiant servers evolved over the next four years into an annually updated sales tool detailing the full Industry Standard Server product line. The 2001 merger with Hewlett-Packard added many new products to the book, including software and services.

The sales guide simplified the complex selling process by documenting best sales practices for each product in every server line. Each product chapter includes customer testimonials; product messaging; key features; target market; customer problem, sales script overview; ideal customer profile; competitive landscape; common objections; assessment questions; and product architecture diagrams.

The guide features ample white space to keep the dense information from becoming too overwhelming. Whenever possible, illustrations and charts were created to show the features and associated customer benefits of the product rather than simply listing the details.

The results? The original sales guide had to be reprinted twice because it was in such high demand. Over the next four years the guides proved to be a favorite with the sales staff, with calls coming in at the beginning of each quarter to find out when the next series would be released. In the end, the book was retired when the information was migrated to a secure online portal. But the manner in which the sales cycle was explained and illustrated remains the same.