Figure 29: A money map reveals the best revenue opportunities so a company can choose

which sales plays to run

Combine a macro view …with a bottom-up view of the company’s …to deploy
of market share… share of each customer’s spending… sales resources
Share of addressable market Our current share of wallet
100%

Our competitors New customer

80
Upsell
60
Cross-sell
40

Renewal
20
Our company
Win back
0
0 200 400 600 800 1,000
Each customer’s total addressable
spending, in thousands of dollars
Source: Bain & Company

has spurred nearly $30 million of opportunities in the pipeline at a time when customers had frozen
their decisions on many of the company’s other offerings.

The most sophisticated organizations have moved beyond plays that simply include sales collateral and
steps to orchestrate an account team. They’re building a full-fledged capability with the play serving
as the linchpin of a go-to-market system behind everything from marketing campaigns to coaching to
pipeline reviews. Based on our work with technology companies, those that reap the most value from
sales plays share a few characteristics that other companies can cultivate to their advantage:

Money map. Effective selling organizations maintain a map of how much each customer spends
across major categories in their product portfolio (see Figure 29). This allows providers to quantify
where and how much customers can increase spending in these categories, as well as potential
spending by prospects. A map of spending by individual customer and category is far more useful
than a rough sense of market size. Such a map helped one fiber technology company more than double
the size of its addressable market, by evaluating how much each current and prospective customer
could spend in each category.

Win room. Companies that get a return from sales plays invest in a clearinghouse to orchestrate and
track play execution. A cross-functional team in the win room takes the money map analysis, adds

82 | Technology Report 2020 | Bain & Company, Inc.

the latest intelligence from field reps, rapidly reorients sales capacity to critical areas, and measures
how effectively each play has expanded the pipeline and converted opportunities into closed deals.

The team also ranks the backlog of sales plays, and prompts sales support resources to develop market-
ready plays. The plays themselves are developed in a sales play “factory” by teams typically composed
of subject-matter experts from product management, marketing, sales enablement and frontline reps.

One infrastructure software provider relied on a money map and a win room to improve customer
renewals. The team was able to identify high-priority, at-risk renewals. This new approach led to the
immediate retention of more than $5 million of accounts previously deemed lost, putting the compa-
ny on a path to improve renewal rates by 15 percentage points.

One-on-one. A third attribute of companies that excel in play-based selling is the discipline they bring
to frontline management and coaching. They rigorously track play deployment, progress and perfor-
mance. And they take full advantage of weekly one-on-one meetings between sales managers and
reps to steer the execution of plays.

Our recent survey of 260 sales reps in the US, Canada and the UK
finds that reps at companies that sustainably grow revenue and
market share are 50% more likely than lagging firms to have a
consistent weekly meeting with their manager.

Our recent survey of 260 sales reps in the US, Canada and the UK finds that reps at companies that
sustainably grow revenue and market share are 50% more likely than lagging firms to have a consis-
tent weekly meeting with their manager. Reps that get the most value from these meetings report
that their managers spend more time on deal strategy and coaching. By contrast, those at lagging
firms said their managers focus on process and administrative topics. In the current moment of
great uncertainty, there is a premium on clear, practical guidance to the front line, which prescriptive
sales plays can provide.

We’re all virtual now

Covid-19 instantly accelerated a longer-term trend of B2B companies shifting their sales capacity
from field-based to virtual models. Sometimes unwittingly, companies are discovering the advantages
of virtual selling. It can provide customers with a better experience, with self-serve options for simple
interactions, on-demand support or ready access to expertise. Virtual channels, whether for leads or

Section 3 | The One-Two Punch: Virtual Selling and Sales Playbooks | 83