What is a sales playbook and why do you need one?

To maximize your sales team’s potential, you need to track and scale successful processes. Organizations that focus on training their sales managers on all-inclusive pipeline management strategies report that their revenue grows 9% faster than those companies that have unorganized operations.

Therefore, you cannot do without the good Sales Playbook, a salesperson’s “handbook” that empowers them to engage customers at every step of the buying journey and increases the likelihood of them reaching that winning moment.

Let’s find out what a Sales Playbook exactly is, why you need it, and what a good Playbook should include.

1. What is a Sales Playbook?

Simply put, a playbook is a means of collecting best sales practices and sharing them with salespeople. It can be a physical document or an electronic platform with all necessary information and useful resources, using which sales reps can benefit at each stage of the sales process.

What should a good playbook include? In short, it should provide reps with a set of questions to ask customers, the right actions to take to engage them, optional ways to handle various customer objections, documents, audios and videos that reps can use to complete their tasks.

Of course, a young startup does not yet have many methodologies to create a perfect playbook. In this case, you should take advantage of the Revenue Grid’s White Paper and make a journey into the sales playbooks to discover a blueprint for your company’s growth. 

Revenue Grid is a #1 Guided Selling Platform with a wide range of sales engagement, revenue acceleration, sales forecasting, and sales automation features that lead sales teams to repeatable revenue.

This white paper, based on data and expertise from Highspot, Aberdeen Group, Salesforce, and more, will allow you to:

• find out where to start and who to involve;
• be able to replicate selling strategies that work;
• get an actionable blueprint on how to make sure your reps are following the plays.

Get your end-to-end Sales Playbook Blueprint for unbeatable growth!

2. Benefits of using Sales Playbook

• boost the efficiency of the sales team;
• enhance conversion rates and, therefore, revenue;
• help sales team sell faster and smarter;
• speed up the sales process by providing useful resources at salespeople’s fingertips;
• help to add consistency to the sales story and the entire sales process with the clearly defined and outlined steps;
• let sellers devote more time to selling;
• help to speed up the onboarding.

3. What should a good sales playbook include?

All playbooks contain certain standard chapters, but you may need to add some chapters specific to your organization:

• “Information about the company”: its strategy, mission, and values, individual roles and responsibilities, organizational structure, training schedule.
• “Products and prices”: clear answers to essential questions such as “What products do you sell?”, “How do these products work?”, “How might they be of interest to customers?”, etc.
• “Commission structure”: a clear explanation of how the company’s compensation plan works.
• “Sales methodology”: a set of principles and methods that define how salespeople approach each stage of the sales process.
• “Sales process”: tips and tactics to help salespeople succeed at every touchpoint, from finding and qualifying leads to closing a deal.
• “Target personas”: detailed customer portraits that provide salespeople with a clear view of a company’s perfect customer, market conditions, trends, pain points, and customer preferences that influence purchasing decisions.
• “Plays” chapter, which demonstrates what actions and best practices actually move deals forward.  Usually, it includes elements such as identifying leads, forecasting, establishing the right cadence, etc.
• “Using sales tools”: a detailed description of the correct technologies for using the sales software.
• “KPIs”: tips on how to measure the salespeople’s performance and explanations oа how each indicator relates to their daily activities.
• “Time Management Best Practices”: tips on how sales reps should manage their day-to-day routine.
• “Messaging”: scripts for explaining your brand’s value proposition, products/services, and positioning.
• “Resources”: context-specific content that helps reps maintain customer interactions.