What is your hot take on running sales plays?

Do not over-rotate to very precise sales plays (if you hear x, do y) for the field. Focus more on teaching reps how to do good discovery and then adjust the play/message/demo on the fly (aka "audible ready"). This is because every opportunity/sales meeting is unique and the possible “plays” run in the dozens or hundreds. Reps cannot/will not memorize all these, nor should they. 

Get reps to where they can ask several questions around enterprise size/maturity/industry, buyer role/responsibility, needs, use cases, pain, budget, timeline, etc. And then the rep can work out the right products to pitch and when. This includes the rep in real-time adjusting the talk track, pitch deck slides, and demo. Lots and lots of internal role playing can help reps learn this. Basically a safe “flight simulator” to learn and “crash”.

I’ve seen too many reps never learn how to do good discovery and then translate that into the right pitch/demo,play….of course this hampers the success of that rep.

It assumes that you already know what works, independent of the Salesperson, and you want to scale it. Good problem ;)

But make sure you actually know and have the evidence about what works.

Until then, experiment, observe, experiment, observe,...

Most sales plays are scaled too quickly because we have the tools and love to automatize and dream about a scalable, repeatable process. But are we scaling something that works?

First do things that don't scale (Paul Graham), only when it's working and you can't handle it anymore manually, you can scale it, and make it a "sales play"