Sales Playbook Guide: How to Write a Perfect Sales Playbook

A sales playbook is a comprehensive reference guide useful for onboarding new sales reps. An effective sales playbook outlines how to execute a company's sales enablement strategy in a way that's replicable and predictable throughout all stages of the buyer's journey. Teams use the sales tools laid out in their sales playbook to familiarize themselves with their business's sales strategy in order to close deals efficiently.

Examples of items typically found in a sales playbook include:

• Call scripts
• Buyer personas
• Overview of the sales process
• Email templates
• Key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Lead qualifications
• Product demos
• Negotiation tactics

While new reps still need to go through the standard training process once they're hired, there are numerous advantages to assembling a detailed sales playbook for your sales organization.

1. 1. It expedites and standardizes new hire training. Training new sales reps is easier when there's a manual that gives a rundown of your company's products and your entire sales process. In addition, you don't have to worry about new hires receiving inconstant information during onboarding depending; no matter who's in charge of the onboarding session, they will all use the same sales playbook to train their new hire group.
2. 2. It creates a hive-mind mentality. A business's sales tactics aren't set in stone, and you never know when you or a coworker might discover a more successful sales play than what's already outlined in the sales playbook. When this occurs, you can update your sales playbook with the new, more effective tactic so the rest of your sales team and future new hires will benefit from it.
3. 3. It gives salespeople more time to sell. Generating sales scripts, messaging, research, and strategies is a time-consuming process. A sales playbook eliminates the need for sales professionals to generate their own sales strategy materials, allowing them to focus on the one task that matters most: selling.

The following sales playbook chapters all contain key information essential to the success of your sales team.

1. 1. Overview of the company and sales organization: This typically includes a brief description of the company's mission and sales philosophy, an employee organization chart with names and job titles, rules of the office, and an onboarding schedule.
2. 2. Breakdown of sales team responsibilities: This breakdown explains how the responsibilities are divided between roles on the sales team, ensuring that everyone knows what is expected of them. For example, inside sales reps (ISRs) have different responsibilities than sales development reps (SDRs).
3. 3. Buyer persona report: Sales reps need a thorough knowledge of their company's ideal customer profile, and they should know how that ideal customer goes about the buying process. A buyer persona profile is especially useful during the prospecting phase and should include information that outlines what makes a potential buyer a qualified lead, such as typical pain points, spending budget, size of their company, etc.
4. 4. List of product offerings: Sales must be knowledgeable about what they're selling. In addition to product features, sales reps should memorize pricing information, competitor's products, and each product's unique value proposition (i.e., why should consumers choose this product instead of a similar alternative?).
5. 5. Rundown of the sales process: This step-by-step guide outlines the workflow of the company's sales process and the ideal length of a sales cycle. This section should specify any preferred sales methodologies (SPIN selling, SNAP selling, solution selling, etc.) along with which members of the sales team are responsible for each step of the sales process.
6. 6. Guide to the CRM platform: Every sales rep needs to know how to use a company's customer relationship management (CRM) software. The sales playbook shouldn't provide a complete CRM tutorial, but it should give a rundown of how CRM tools are incorporated into the sales process.
7. 7. Compensation plan: This section includes a breakdown of how all the sales reps are paid, and it explains how incentives and commissions work. The compensation plan should include the goals sales reps need to accomplish in order to be promoted.
8. 8. List of sales resources: This section includes customer testimonials, marketing materials, and case studies. In addition, the sales playbook should provide instructions for how to best incorporate the sales resources into the sales process.
9. 9. Metrics overview: The metrics overview describes which KPIs (key performance indicators) and other metrics are most important to hitting sales goals. This part of the sales playbook should also outline a method to track KPIs and specify the metrics for which sales reps are responsible.

Every sales organization will have its own distinct sales playbook, but you can follow a universal set of steps to help you put a playbook together.

1. 1. Brainstorm your objectives. The first step in writing your sales playbook is to determine what information your playbook needs to cover. Make these objectives as specific as possible without getting caught up in minutiae. Break down your selling process into digestible steps, describe how your sales reps fit into the buyer's journey, and consider solutions in areas where your sales reps are currently struggling.
2. 2. Assemble a playbook team. Decide who else is going to assist in creating the sales playbook. When assembling your team, include top sales leaders, sales managers, subject matter experts, and marketing team members. It's especially important to make sure you include your company's marketing team since they'll be responsible for creating educational resources and sales enablement materials.
3. 3. Create your buyer personas. Based on research and past sales experience, develop a profile of a fictional person who represents your ideal customer. When making your buyer personas, include your target market's demographics, behaviors, pain points, organization type, job title, and preferred contact methods.
4. 4. Educate sales reps in your product offerings. Supply the necessary information for your sales reps to have a thorough understanding of all the features and uses of your products or services. Make sure to also include each product's primary value proposition and decide the best way for your sales reps to familiarize themselves with the products. For example, you might schedule time for all your sales reps to test out a product as though they were a real customer.
5. 5. Determine and write up your sales plays. Sales plays are replicable, proven steps that your sales reps can use to help close deals. There are numerous types of sales plays you can incorporate into your playbook. For example, follow-up plays detail how sales reps should go about following up with leads throughout the buyer's journey. Lead qualification plays describe how sales reps should best identify qualified leads. Closing plays explain effective techniques sales reps can use to close a deal.
6. 6. Assemble and distribute the playbook. Collect and organize all the information from the prior steps so you have a cohesive sales playbook ready to go. Once it's put together, distribute it to your entire sales and marketing teams.
7. 7. Continue to revise the playbook. Analyze your sales team's performance to see if the strategies in your playbook are successful. In addition, ask your team members for feedback to see if they have input on how to improve the playbook. Based on how your playbook strategies work and the feedback from your sales team, revise the playbook, and add more effective sales tactics.

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