Four Components of Every Great Sales Playbook
Becca Eddleman
What is a Sales Playbook?
Often erroneously thought to be just a collection of buyer personas and email templates, the sales playbook details a step-by-step process, including the materials required to successfully conduct business at each step of the sales process.
“45% of sales reps say that learning the sales process is the hardest part of their job.”
*Source: Spekit: The State Of Sales Training & Onboarding Report
Benefits of a Well-Defined Sales Playbook
Mistakes in building an effective sales playbook can be costly, ranging from reduced ramp time to poor close rates, to higher-impact costs such as the loss of a sale or the loss of a key sales personnel.
On the other hand, a well-developed sales playbook can contribute to the team’s overall success in the following ways.
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- Increased revenue
- Decreased ramp time
- Increased win rates
- Increased rep efficiency
- Shared overview of the state of the economy
What a sales playbook does not do is provide a one-and-done strategy.
It should be built to be adaptable, based upon real-world examples so that tools and messaging stay relevant and can also incorporate any key changes in the business product or in consumer or industry trends.
For continued adoption and how to keep your playbooks updated and flexible, watch Game-Changing Ways To Drive Adoption.
What to Include in a Sales Playbook
The sales playbook, a standardization of the pathways that lead to successful sales performance, is the most effective tool you can provide your sales team.
Whether you are an early-stage startup (growing from $0-$20 million) or looking to maximize the efficiency of your enterprise-level business, a thoughtfully developed playbook will provide your sales team with the tools they need to successfully conduct business and maximize performance at all levels, from onboarding to prospecting to closing the deal and customer success.
Despite its undisputed importance to doing business, the sales playbook can often be seen as a grueling task to develop. If you’re just getting started, or revising an old playbook, the following four components are a comprehensive breakdown of what you should include in your sales playbook.
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- People
- Process
- Product
- Technology
People
This is probably the section of the sales playbook that we see most companies exclude. They don’t do this on purpose, but it used to be a practice to separate the onboarding process and documentation (if there even was one) from a process-focused playbook. Many playbooks we’ve seen also have very minimal technology sections.
Whereas the language of your playbook needs to be written concisely and clearly for sellers, the more information you can provide them the better. And it’s best to keep it all in one place because this information is going to build on each other and intertwine.
So don’t exclude the “People” section and make onboarding and training materials a first focus in your playbook.
The following are a few of the chapters we would include.
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- Onboarding plan
- Day-in-the-life (time management tool)
- KPIs
Onboarding Plan
One of the biggest mistakes that sales organizations make as they grow is not carefully planning their onboarding programs.
“We have this idea in sales that salespeople just magically sit down and produce sales… It doesn’t work that way… If you’re going to hire and scale your sales team, you have to set them up for success.”
– Jake Dunlap (Sales Playbooks: What Great Looks Like)
The People sections of your sales playbook sets the tone for success, providing new – and existed – employees with all the materials they need to learn about your business. A company overview, team organization chart, and overviews on market and product strategy, with relevant links, are the minimum items needed in the playbook’s introductory section.
Not coincidentally, these are the same content items required for a quality onboarding experience.
“47% of account executives report leaving a sales job due to a lack of training or a poor onboarding experience, and top performers are much more likely than poor to have left a sales job for these reasons.”
*Source: Spekit: The State Of Sales Training & Onboarding Report
The sales playbook should serve as a roadmap for employees as they move from their earliest days of their role into the 30-day and 60-day mark, and beyond.
We’re in the school of actually providing hour-by-hour steps and tasks within the first few weeks of a new role. Not only does it map a clear plan for brand new employees to know what you expect day-to-day, but it also sets them up for creating successful habits.
Other important sections to include in onboarding are:
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- Company Overview and Resources
- Product Overview and Resources
- Structure of Your Sales Organization
- How You Position Your Services or Product
- Market Research Resources
- Additional Reading Materials
- Etc.
Day in the Life: Time Management
Not understanding how they are expected to spend their time can leave sales professionals with lots of questions on expectations.
Effective sales playbooks also provide a “Day in the Life” timeline in time-block chunks that outlines what each sales professional should be doing on a daily business to maximize their time. The Day in the Life tool can further maximize efficiency by defining performance metrics that should be accomplished in each time block – such as emails and calls.
This may look like you’re trying to micromanage them, but this template is really a base line for them to get started and actually makes new hires more comfortable and productive.
Feel free to make a copy of this example 👉 Day in the Life Template
KPIs
Although it’s not the majority best practice yet, more and more sales teams are starting to implement metrics and KPIs that are not just based on activities.
These numbers can still be important, but they actually aren’t as telling as they used to be and they’re hard to coach to.
You can’t coach someone to make more phone calls, but you can coach them to have more valuable conversations.
When building out the KPIs and metrics to include in your playbook (and you must include them), you can include a base for activity metrics (or a range would be better), then set a goal for weekly “meaning conversations” or “quality connections” as well as meetings booked and pipeline generation.
Related Content:
The (4) Simple Metrics to Track the Health of Your SDR Org
Process
This is your organization’s opportunity to define what “good” looks like and how to make the path to “good” equally accessible to all sales professionals.
The following are some of the key components to include in the Process section of your playbook
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- Stages, activities and exit criteria
- Ideal customer profiles and buyer personas
- Messaging – templates and personalization examples
Stages
The stages you include in the playbook for your sales cycle is going to look different depending if you’re creating an SDR, AE, or CS playbook.
But as an example, for an SDR playbook, the process can be divided into these key areas:
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- Sourcing
- Outreach
- Book Meeting
- Nurture/Disqualify
Your organization’s stages may vary, so your sales playbook should define the specific stages in your sales process. These stages should be based upon real-world – and not theoretical – examples of what conversations and interactions are held at each stage and should also define the “what next” triggers that drive leads from one stage to another.
Example:
Buyer Personas
It’s critical for sellers to understand who their buyers are and what they care about. Although the buyer perspective is the key driver of the sales message, it often gets ignored as sales teams jump right into building their messaging.
When identifying your key buyers, define their commonalities by persona. While this will vary from business to business, the top personas must always be included in the sales playbook.
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- Persona [Name]
- Job Title/Role
- Background
- Age
- Salary
- Education
- Job Characteristics
- Personality Traits
- Common Challenges
- How you help
Also, define the key team members your buyers work with and/or influence. Will you need to pass a gatekeeper to reach them? Are they the gatekeeper to someone higher up in the decision tree?
Messaging
Once you’ve developed an understanding of the key individuals your team will be sourcing and prospecting, you can start defining their paint points and how your products can provide the solutions to their challenges.
The hard part about including messaging in your playbooks is it should be a guide. Include templates for outreach emails, videos, LinkedIn messages, and calls, but also include call outs of portions where your team should research and personalize touch points.
Specific call scripts and demos can be more standardized, but still include elements of research about the buyer and adjusted accordingly.
Some messaging templates/examples to include:
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- Email messaging
- Call scripts
- Video examples (prospecting to follow-ups)
- LinkedIn messages
- Direct sending items and verbiage (if applicable)
- Demo decks and screenshares
- Discovery scripts
- Etc.
Product
The most carefully scripted messaging can come to a crashing halt if your sales professionals don’t fully understand the product they are selling. Especially if they don’t understand how those products offer value to the people they are selling to.
The materials in your sales playbook should include an overview of the features of that product AND highlight the value they offer.
Some materials to consider including:
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- Product overview one-pagers
- Product best practices
- Case study materials
- Recorded demos for each product
- Demo best practices
- Feature to value matching guide
The Spekit study cited above also found that sales executives spend upwards of 11 hours each week searching for the information they need.
Spending up to a quarter of the work week in search of routine materials is an incredibly inefficient way for top performers to do business. Including the in your playbook by steps and making them easily accessible with save your sellings hours and hours of time.
Feature to Value Matching Guide
While most of the above materials, and why they need to be included in the sales playbook, are obvious, it is worth calling out the Feature to Value Matching Guide.
Here, again, it is important to remember that value is not defined by you, but by your prospects. Focus on the pain points of your clients and allow your outreach to serve as a discovery process to help you both define and understand your client pain points.
Incidentally, allowing customers to speak to their needs before starting to sell solutions will help drive more engaged conversations and gather valuable information before the first call.
As you develop team-wide learnings through the discovery process, be sure to include thought leadership and your business approach to those solutions in the product section of the playbook.
Technology
The final key element in your sales playbook is not just defining the technology you use but how you use it to propel your sales team to success.
Technology is the only way you’ll be able to scale your team’s efforts, but the advancement in tech has also made sales more complicated, especially for team members not fully adopting the tech.
Related Content:
How to Empower Your Team to 2X Technology Adoption & ROI
In today’s business environment, there are more than 1,000 sales technologies to choose from. Moreover, some businesses report spending upward of $1,000 +per employee, per month to get the team efficiently connected to technology solutions.
But solutions are only helpful if they are being properly and fully utilized.
The sales playbook should include all the software in your tech stack and how to use those to maximize efficiency.
Important sections to include in the Technology section:
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- Technology stack overview
- Tech stack to process mapping visual
- Technology SOPs for core solutions
- Lead/contact best practices
Key Takeaway & Resources
When thinking about what to include in your sales playbook, provide information that sellers need to better present your products and solutions that will make them better advisors for your business and also better advocates for their buyers.
The only way for them to do this is to be experts, researchers, creatives, and technology sufficient. It sounds like a tall order to fill, but your playbook is their best asset.
If sales was easy, everyone would do it.
Start building your own great playbook with these four templates:
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- SDR Playbook Example Template
- AE Playbook Example Template
- Territory Planning Template
- Cold Calls & Email Best Practices