Introducing Playbook Reporting

You can’t fix what you can’t measure. It’s a maxim that we can all agree on, but in practice, it can be challenging for a few reasons, but mainly because not everything is easily measured. 

Even for teams that are performance-driven like growth and marketing, have a hard time measuring the impact of every experiment. 

But by far, the worst state of measurement exists in sales. Sales teams have many tools to measure the tried and true metrics like quota attainment, revenue forecasts, deal velocity, etc. These are all lagging indicators of success, so how does sales measure leading indicators? 

We built Playbook Reporting to solve this problem for Pocus customers. Don’t wait for that CRM report to understand the direct impact of your team's efforts. Understand which product signals have the highest conversion rate toward goals, quickly spot underperformers, and double down on what’s working. Get these valuable insights without manually stitching data across sales engagement, CRM, spreadsheets or dashboards. 

With Playbook Reporting in Pocus, you get fast answers to some of the most challenging questions directly impacting your team's ability to hit revenue targets reliably.

Introducing: Playbook Reporting 

We’ve written extensively about the concept of Playbooks in Pocus, our methodology for building your Product-Led Sales motion. Instead of a single product-qualified lead score (PQL), build Playbooks that help you achieve outcomes across the customer journey.  

➡️ Learn more about how Playbooks compare to lead scoring 

To quickly summarize, a Playbook is comprised of signals (product usage behavior, customer fit, marketing intent) that trigger a specific action. You can have multiple Playbooks that roll into a Goal, like free to paid conversion, expansion, and upsell. 

Playbooks allow you to test your hypotheses for which combination of signals and actions leads to conversion – in other words, all Playbooks are experiments. With Playbook Reporting, sales leaders and RevOps can easily see the efficacy of their experiments without digging across multiple tools, dashboards, and spreadsheets.

Run data-driven sales experiments with confidence.

Why did we build Playbook Reporting? The short answer: It’s table stakes for every sales team to understand the value of their tactics. 

In the same way that marketing teams can see the ROI of their advertising campaigns and growth teams can see the ROI of a new onboarding flow, sales teams need similar visibility into their experiments. 

Sales teams are too often stuck in reactive mode. Most sales reporting solutions are focused on the lagging indicators like revenue instead of leading indicators that look at the actual tactics i.e. playbooks the team is running. 

How customers use Playbook Reporting

Why do some sales teams outperform others? They can build, test, measure, and launch experiments faster than the competition. Teams stick with sales playbooks that deliver suboptimal results for far too long simply because they don’t have visibility into what’s working.

Pocus customers like Asana, Canva, Loom, Miro, and Webflow, are at the forefront of sales innovation because they can use intent signals to experiment with playbooks at scale. No more guesswork on which product signals are driving upsell conversions. Pocus customers can confidently answer questions about their sales motion to make investment decisions.

Measure the ROI of Product-Led Sales

The key hypothesis for Product-Led Sales is that intent signals can help predict the ideal moment to engage customers in their journey, whether it’s to drive adoption, improve conversion to paid, expand an account or a long list of other goals. A question we often get from skeptical customers is, “Does this actually work? Or would that account have converted in the self-serve motion regardless?” 

With Playbook Reporting, sales teams can finally answer this question with confidence. See the incremental value of sales-assisted Playbooks compared to leaving customers to self-serve independently. As you can see in the visualization, there were 505 opportunities surfaced in Playbooks that converted, and below that, you can see 154 opportunities not surfaced in Playbooks that converted without intervention. The lift is clear for this particular goal, product-led Playbooks where sales actioned the leads converted at a higher rate.  

The opposite can also be true. You might find those specific sales-assisted Playbooks have no incremental value over self-serve. You can turn those experiments off with confidence.

Decide what Playbooks could be automated 

Another common question from sales leadership is, “How much of my sales motion could be automated? Do I need to have SDRs manually reaching out to drive adoption?” With Playbook Reporting, Pocus customers can directly compare sales-led vs. automated Playbooks.

We recommend customers consider automating Playbooks where there is a consistently high conversion rate to the Goal and where the action taken by sales is easily automated. For example, if a product usage signal like director + signs up and invites 3 users, which almost always leads to an upgrade, consider automating outreach with an upgrade CTA. 

Compare the effectiveness of Playbooks

Don’t let ineffective Playbooks continue running. Use the table view to see how each Playbook progresses toward your goal to make data-informed decisions about where to double down, iterate, or back off entirely. 

With the release of Predicts AI, Pocus customers now also have AI-recommended Playbooks running. We often get asked if AI-generated recommendations are impactful -with reporting, teams can quickly answer that question for themselves. 

Continually iterate on sales experiments 

The ultimate use case for Reporting is the ability for the leadership team, supported by RevOps, to very quickly spin up or turn down experiments. No more analysis paralysis while searching for results or keeping teams running pointless playbooks because the results are unclear. With Playbook Reporting, the entire team can iterate quickly and keep generating pipeline repeatedly.

How it works

#1 Choose Goals that align to your company objectives 

We recommend starting with 1-3 Goals for your motion. These Goals should tie back to your broader company objectives. 

Here are some examples to help you get started:

There are 5 common Goals most teams are trying to achieve with a Product-Led Sales motion. 

➡️Learn more about the common Product-Led Sales Playbooks. 

#2 Set up your Playbooks to help achieve those Goals

For each Goal setup at least 3-5 Playbooks. Each Playbook consists of a signal and a corresponding action. The actions can be done by humans (i.e. your reps) or automated by Pocus. We recommend beginning with human-assisted Playbooks where opportunities are surfaced to your reps within the Pocus Inbox (or in Salesforce or Slack). Validate that the signals powering your Playbooks are driving conversions before automating. 

Here’s an example of a rep focused on expansion and the various Playbooks they are running. The Inbox surfaces top opportunities for each rep with clear instructions on how to take action, so every rep is running the Playbook with consistency. Reduce the guesswork for reps and reduce the variation in results. 

Not sure what your Goals should be? Or what Playbooks to build? Our in house PLS experts are happy to help guide you. Tap into our library of templates that can be easily customized to your business needs or take Pocus Predicts for a spin. Schedule a consultation with the team. 

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#3 Measure and iterate Playbooks 

Once your Playbooks are running, you’ll typically see results in the first 30 days. Click into any Goal to see how Playbooks are progressing towards the Goal. Use the sankey visualization to get a high level overview of conversions and incremental lift. 

Use the table view to compare Playbook performance and spot opportunities for tuning. 

Key features

• Goal Performance Analysis: Navigate to any Goal and compare the performance of different Playbooks. Quickly tune Playbooks based on their conversion towards the goal. 
• Playbook Timeline: Get detailed insights into who qualified for a Playbook, who was actioned in that Playbook, and timing of conversion events.
• Lift Analysis: Understand the effectiveness of your Playbooks with a clear view of conversions from surfaced opportunities and those not initially identified.

See it for yourself

We’d rather show you! See how teams use Playbook Reporting to level up their sales motion. 

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