Building Early-Stage Sales Playbooks For Success in 2022

The way your company sells is directly related to how your company grows. Be it a Fortune 100 or a company that just registered as an LLC, understanding and documenting your sales process is critical to continuous growth. 

In most cases, the former already has that figured out. For the latter, creating standardized processes and building a unified sales playbook is a murky part of the business plan.

Honestly, we get it. Only 22% of startup founders have a background in sales, so enacting a sales process and strategy can be overwhelming, especially if you’re just finding traction in your market. However, idealizing your sales methodology and capturing it in a sales playbook is one of the most important assets to develop as a start-up.

When a sales playbook is properly deployed, it acts as the sales team’s guide to their enterprise and a roadmap for customer interaction. 

Regardless, the problem remains: how does a startup find its footing and initiate a sales playbook build? 

It starts by knowing the two points of execution:

• Critical Playbook Sections & Content
• Documentation Best Practices

Once you have those nailed down, you’ll be in a great position to start building a playbook that garners as much repeatability as it does incoming revenue.

Sales Playbooks – Win More Deals, Faster

The Best Chapters of Winning Sales Playbooks

Sales strategies are like cold calls: none of them are the same, but they both follow a similar narrative. Sales playbooks are no different (although they might be more predictable).

For example, a startup operating in competitive industries might spend more time on product differentiation and competitive analysis. Conversely, a startup emerging within less-competitive markets will allocate more space for their company positioning, product overviews, and outbound messaging. 

That being said, both companies, regardless of industry or market, can benefit from including the following sections. 

Company & Product Overviews 

Whether you’re hiring new reps or maintaining a collective vision with the existing team, this section provides details about the company, its solutions, its benefits, tools in use, and more. Once they know the company, it’s time to explore the products.

Your sales team can only operate efficiently when all parties have a clear understanding of what products and services you offer. In tandem, it also helps sellers know how to position themselves in a way that will appeal to their ideal prospect.

Creating concise and targeted overviews helps make your playbook that much more effective and clear while encouraging standardization across the team. 

ICPs & Buyer Personas

Sales teams will often limit the amount of time spent on ICPs and personas. “We know who our buyers are, it’s not a problem.” However, this section is where sales teams should be spending the most time. There’s no drawback to clearly defining your prospective buyers, their goals, challenges, and where there are opportunities for your offering.

Equipped with that information, you can dive into your customer’s industry trends, what’s changing and evolving within their domain. The intent is to understand as much about your potential buyers and their world so that when the time comes to hop into Zoom, your reps are ready for whatever comes at them.

Competitor Research & Analysis

The B2B sphere is wholly congested. Every industry is inundated with niche service providers and product innovators. This section is dedicated to uncovering the nuances and impact of your competitive landscape 

Solid competitor analysis is a vital part of any sales playbook, especially in the early stages of startup growth. Researching your industry’s competitive arena ignites a targeted strategy for distinguishing your product messaging, building market understanding, and finding new customer pain points to help optimize your company’s positioning. If the competition is strong, your move is to be a disruption in their market reports.

Keep your peers close, and your competitors closest. 

Outbound/Discovery Best Practices & Content

One of the major challenges facing growing sales teams is a lack of consistency and repeatability. Thus, the catalyst for certified sales playbooks in the first place.

To remedy the obstacles of inconsistent processes, this section is a detailed outline of iron-clad best practices for your sellers. This chapter will likely hold the majority share of your playbook with critical elements, such as:

• Emailing templates and snippets
• Cold calling scripts and messaging
• Outbound sequence structure
• Objection handling 
• Qualification questions
• Discovery process
• And a lot more

This section is hefty, to say the least. However, it’s not without merit. More information included about what works and what doesn’t is a direct route to sales excellence. 

There is a lot more that goes into a fully-developed sales playbook, but as a startup with one or two reps, you might be better suited for an abridged version. Start with everything above, and when you’re ready to deploy an enterprise-level playbook, you can drill into the more complex aspects by modeling everything based on similar use cases (or reach out to an expert).

Dust-Covered Playbooks Help No One – Create a Resource Sellers Can Use

The ultimate goal for building sales playbooks is to extract what’s been working for your team and consolidate those practices in a central hub. The challenge comes in getting every on board with regularly accessing and using that repository

To no surprise, getting adoption is the plague of change management, even with something as impactful as a sales playbook. Fortunately, there are some ways to minimize the chances of your playbook collecting digital dust in the crevices of your Drive.

Iterate constantly and diligently

Growing quickly means you’re changing quickly. While the parameters and outlines you decide on in the first edition of your playbook are a great base, think of the entire asset as a blueprint in pencil. You can’t test without a baseline, and you can’t improve without measuring your efforts.

Get the foundation poured, and then throw ideas against the wall. Test the efficacy of your playbook on a monthly or quarterly basis. Give your team room to get creative and work outside the confines of their documented process. Challenge the best practices you outlined when you first onboarded the team to identify new strategies for bringing in new opportunities.

In a digital age, B2B sales can’t set their processes in stone and revisit once a year. Buyer preference is fluid today, and to earn a leading place in your industry, you have to follow suit. 

The sooner you introduce flexibility into the sales process, the better.

Related Content: The Road from $0 to $20 Million: Refining the Sales Process

Create a feedback loop with visibility and communication

Adoption is often talked about as a problem of frontline buy-in. Sales leaders see their new processes and tech implementations as the path to growth, but their team is slow to opt-in.

The truth is that the problem is twofold. When deploying change in process or technology, only about 36% of CEOs communicate their vision sufficiently to their organization’s employees. 

While the blame is often placed on the headsets of lagging reps, adoption is as much of a problem at the leadership level as it is for the frontline teams. With that information, there are a couple of ways you can turn the tides of poor adoption.

Prioritize a culture of open feedback and actively listen

Implementing a feedback-focused strategy has left very few sales teams in the dark about playbook efficacy and its impact on their performance.

A lot changes when a new playbook is launched into the bullpen — hand-off process, role responsibilities, cross-team expectations, etc. Those things get confusing, if you have the type of culture to support open dialogues of feedback, reps will let you know early on.

• For Sales Leaders

  • Their role in executing a new playbook is to eliminate the disconnect between themselves and the frontline on what the process should be. Sales leaders need to explain and look through the feedback to see where the pitfalls are and determine how to restructure documented processes to encourage experimentation.

• For Frontline Sales

  • Reps are responsible for actively giving that feedback. That’s a hard thing to do, both as a seasoned rep and a freshly onboarded rep, but the sentiment remains the same. Create a culture of open communication and feedback to unveil the optimal structure and activities to align the frontline’s productivity with the goals of leadership. 

Out of everything covered so far, alignment and communication between reps and leadership might be the most impactful aspect of creating a winning sales playbook.

Grow Your Startup’s Pipeline with Playbook “Closed-Won”

The full impact of well-developed and deployed sales playbooks is hard to pack into 1200 words. It can be the ultimate blueprint for understanding the who, what, where, and why of your buyers and the user’s manual of a strong sales team. 

Simultaneously, it empowers success beyond the sales department, streaming into other areas like Marketing, Finance, HR, and Operations. It’s truly a resource devoted to the entire company’s success. 

There are thousands of resources for “how to build a sales playbook” under the Google search bar. And if now is the time to stage a playbook build for your team, we can help you avoid long-winded searches from page to page.

We’ve created an expansive collection of startup-focused resources and templates to build thorough sales playbooks that enable your business to go from $0 to $20 Million. 

Access the playbooks and ignite your journey from $0 to $20 Million.