Playbook

Overview

The best sales plays shouldn’t stay a secret.

Some reps are better at converting buyers than others. They surface more opportunities, book more meetings, and get it done faster.

It’s not always easy to replicate their success across your team. Now it is.

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to operationalize successful sales plays and add them to every rep’s toolkit.

Let’s get to it 💪

What you’ll need:

Step 1: Connect data sources

The buying signals that fuel different sales plays are spread across channels.

Our first step is connecting these channels to Common Room so we can automatically surface and centralize buyer identity, intent, and context.

Let’s say we’re an open-source software company. Our buyers tend to be active on GitHub, Twitter, and Stack Overflow, so that’s where we’ll start.

You can use whichever channels make the most sense for your buyers. Just remember that the more channels you connect, the more buyer insights you’ll uncover.

We’ll begin by logging into Common Room, navigating to Settings in the left sidebar (the little ⚙️ icon at the bottom), and going to Sources.

Next we’ll click on GitHub.

We’ll connect it, authenticate our account, and we’re off to the races 🏇

GitHub data is now flowing into Common Room. We’d follow the same general process to import data from our other sources.

Now that we have all this data at our fingertips, let’s create some smart sales recipes for our reps to put to work.

Step 2: Create persona

Click on Team access in the left sidebar.

We can manage user permissions from this screen, but today we want to focus on personas.

Personas are preset user profiles we can use to organize our teammates based on their job functions.

Common Room comes with multiple default personas—such as ones for account executives and business development representatives—but you can always create and customize your own 🎨

We can build templates and assign them to specific personas. This means that once we add a rep to a certain persona, they’ll automatically have access to our templates whenever they log in.

Let’s say we want to create a new persona for our sales development representatives.

Click Create new persona.

We’ll give it a name and click Create persona.

Now we’re ready to get to work.

Step 3: Add segment template

Let’s start by customizing a segment template.

Segments allow us to automatically group together specific people or organizations based on different criteria, such as job title, recent cross-channel activity, industry, and much more.

Depending on which integrations we have set up, we can then add prospects to personalized Outreach sequences, send them DMs, sync their records with Salesforce, and more, all within the segment.

We know that our top SDRs have seen a lot of success prospecting on GitHub, so we’ll create a segment for economic buyers from enterprise companies who have recently starred our GitHub repository.

We’ll click Add segment template and choose Create member segment template.

After we give our segment a name and brief description, we can choose whether this segment is added to our teammate’s Home screen in Common Room, whether it’s presented in Task view (this turns the segment into an interactive burn-down list), and more.

Next we’ll hit Settings at the top of the screen and start configuring our template.

Click Set criteria. We can filter our data based on any dimension, from actions and conversations to firmographic details.

We’ll select Add filter and choose Member tags.

Then we’ll choose Economic buyers from the dropdown list.

Now every person in our digital ecosystem with a director-level title or higher will be added to this segment.

But we want to narrow our scope. Click Add filter again and this time choose Organization size.

We’ll set the minimum at 1,000. Now only economic buyers at companies with 1,000 or more employees will make our list.

Okay, now let’s zero in on GitHub activity. Click on Add filter and choose GitHub under the source-specific section.

Next click # of Stars.

We want to add people to this segment who have starred our repo in the last 12 weeks.

Boom—we now have a segment template that will automatically update itself with new leads that match these criteria 🪄

But we don’t want every SDR chasing the same leads. So we’ll add a variable filter to make sure this template is customized for every rep.

Let’s say Salesforce is our single source of truth. We’d click on Select a custom field and choose whichever Salesforce field we want to use to differentiate segments between reps.

For example, we could customize it so segments are modified based on where the lead is located or who owns them in Salesforce. We can also create and choose our own custom field.

Once we choose our field, we can decide whether it’s auto-matched to reps based on their email address or name.

Now this segment will be personalized for the rep who’s using it.

We can also customize what information will be displayed when reps click into the segment.

Click on Edit columns at the top of the screen. From here we can add and remove columns—such as which organization the person is associated with, when they were last active across our connected channels, and more—then drag and drop the order we want them in.

Once we’re satisfied we’d click Create segment template.

Now let’s determine which team members should be part of this persona and get access to this template.

Step 4: Add teammates

We’ll navigate to the Teammates section of our persona screen and click Add teammate.

We can add new teammates to this persona and configure their permissions or choose from a list of existing teammates.

We’ll click Add existing teammate and choose our SDRs from the list.

And there we have it—a customized version of this template will now be assigned to these SDRs and added to their Home screens in Common Room.

Reps can quickly tap into high-intent, high-fit leads and work their way down their list.

That’s one sales play down. Time to get cooking on another 🍳

Wrapping up

That’s all there is to it—we can now create personas for different teammates, build custom templates for different sales plays, and quickly deliver them to our reps.

Replicating your top performers’ success just got a whole lot easier 🥳

Got a different playbook in mind? We’re all ears. And if you haven’t already, try out Common Room yourself for free.