Sales Playbook Adherence: How to Define, Measure and Raise It in Stores

Adherence is not script compliance

Retailers who try to enforce a script get one of two outcomes: advisors who recite it and lose the customer, or advisors who ignore it and lose the measurement. A playbook written as outcomes avoids both. The step is "find out who will use it and what for", not "say: may I ask who this is for". The score is whether the outcome happened, in whatever words the floor uses.

This matters for scoring as much as for selling. A step written as an outcome can be recognised in Hindi, English or Hinglish, in a two-minute conversation or a forty-minute one, and by an advisor with their own style. A step written as a script can only be recognised by matching words, and floors do not talk in matched words.

Define: write the playbook as scorable steps

1. List the steps the best advisors actually take. Six to eight. Listen to twenty of their conversations if you can, or ask them.
2. Write each step as an outcome with a plain definition of done. "Offer presented: the current scheme named, with amount and tenure, before the customer asks."
3. Mark which steps are conditional. The ask for the number applies only when the customer does not buy. The exchange valuation applies only when the customer has a device to exchange. Unconditional scoring punishes advisors for steps that did not arise.
4. Give each step a weight. Most networks weight the offer, the objection and the number higher than the greeting, because those are where the sale is decided.
5. Set the disclosures apart. In telecom, finance and education, some lines are required by regulation or policy and are scored as pass or fail, not on a scale.
6. Agree it with the floor. Advisors who helped write the standard record more conversations and dispute fewer scores. The self-assessment at /tools/playbook-self-assessment/ is a place to start.

Measure: the adherence scorecard

The scorecard reads by step first. The worked example below shows one week for two stores in the same city with similar footfall, and the network. Coverage is shown because a score on twelve conversations is a guess and a score on ninety is a fact.

Reading the scorecard

• Store B's problem is not a store problem. It is two steps: discovery and the ask for the number, and the most-skipped column says where. That is the coaching agenda for the week, and it is a different agenda from Store A's, which is objection handling.
• The network's offer accuracy dips every time the scheme changes. That is a communication problem, not an advisor problem, and the fix is the scheme reaching the floor before the customer does.
• Store B's coverage of 58 percent is the first thing to raise. Adherence measured on the conversations advisors chose to record flatters everyone.
• Adherence and conversion move together but not in lockstep. Store A converts nine points better on a thirteen-point adherence gap; the objection step is likely the one with the highest weight on conversion, and the training effectiveness method at /learn/sales-training-effectiveness-analytics/ is how to check that.

Raise: the three levers

Coaching. One step per advisor per week, three lines, re-scored the next week. The session is described at /learn/sales-conversation-coaching-for-retail-advisors/. It is the lever that moves discovery and objection handling, because those steps need judgement and examples.

Prompting. A quiet one-line prompt on the advisor's screen during the conversation when a step is being missed: the scheme not yet mentioned, the number not yet asked for. BorentisCoach does this and reports which prompts changed behaviour. It moves the offer and the ask, the steps that are forgotten rather than misunderstood. It should go on after the scorecard is trusted, and the retailer tunes how often it speaks.

Changing the playbook. When a step will not move across a whole store or region despite coaching, the step is usually wrong for that floor: it asks for a demonstration the store's layout does not allow, or an offer the finance partner there does not support. Adherence data is the fastest way to find a playbook that does not fit, and the review that follows is a playbook decision, not a coaching one.

Pitfalls

• Ranking advisors on adherence before coverage is above two thirds. The ranking measures who records, not who sells.
• Scoring conditional steps as missed when they did not arise.
• Publishing the score without the line. A number an advisor cannot check is a number they will dispute; a line they said is a line they will fix.
• Adding steps every quarter. A twelve-step playbook is a checklist, and floors treat it as one.
• Tying incentives to adherence in the first quarter. Recognition first, described at /learn/how-to-recognise-top-performing-store-advisors-fairly/; money once the scorecard has held for a season.