Growth Playbook

The concept of ‘playbook’ isn’t anything new. Sports like football (and soccer) have always had playbooks ever since we can remember them as a professional sport. This applies to businesses too. Growth Playbook is a key component of the product’s growth strategy. This applies to both PLG (Product Led growth) and SLG (Sales Led Growth). But what exactly is a playbook and who needs to create it?

Playbooks mean different things to different people. At the crux of it, a playbook is all about repeatable and scalable growth. The mistake most teams make is they build a playbook as soon as they have a few customers on the board. People assume that if we can get one customer, then we could make that repeatable and leverage that learning to get other similar customers. What’s often being ignored is the fact that there could be multiple other personas where the product could be a better fit.

I would argue that before anyone creates the ‘scalable and repeatable version’ of the playbook, product and business development teams should invest time in creating the playbook about customer personas. This playbook should target key questions, including:

• Who are the target personas?

• What values do these target personas resonate with in your product?

• How do you reach out to the target personas? - Mechanisms

• What unique challenges are you trying to address for this specific target persona?

• How many personas/customer archetypes exist for your product?

Product teams must always be involved in this first iteration of the playbook and this playbook should be iterative*.

Repeatable and Scalable playbook is the next playbook in which ideally should be built by the sales and business development teams. This playbook should call out all the mechanisms that work with each of the target persona and a set of recipes to help scale that. Teams don’t need a relatable playbook until you have at least a set of sales teams and/or partners who can actually go out and sell your product (possibly at least 5-10 account managers selling your product). There is a lot of danger in doubling down on repeatable sales motion, especially if you have not nailed down the right personas yet.

During the early days of a product, it would be much better to focus on agility and being nimble than focusing on repeatability. I want to come back to the point of this playbook being *iterative. It would be best to follow an approach where you focus each quarter doing a deep dive on a specific persona. Document what works and also what does not work/resonate. You should also focus on the key channels/partners that are critical for this specific persona. Example: Do you reach out to this group of customers via cold calls, or is a developer advocacy group more effective? Do these customers know how to implement a solution or do they need customer success or partners to help implement it for them? Once you build enough traction with this, you can then focus on building the repeatable sales playbook.

Finally, product playbooks in its first iteration should always be iterative*. You should, in fact, encourage the Business Development teams and the sales teams to provide feedback and contribute to improving the playbook. Simple choices like what format the playbook exists in and where you post it also matters. In my experience, the first iteration of any playbook should never be as a pdf that’s non-editable. Playbooks should live as a wiki with edit privileges given and encouraged to all teams to contribute back to the playbook.