Components of a Sales Playbook & How to Write One
So, you want to create a sales playbook that drives results?
Well, you’re in the right place. Sales playbooks are often massive, difficult-to-write documents, but they don’t have to be.
In this article, we’ll go over essential components of a sales playbook and outline a 5 step process to writing one that delivers results for your team.
What is a sales playbook?
A sales playbook is a master document or company resource that covers everything a sales representative needs to succeed, from strategies to processes and beyond. The best sales playbooks are recordings of winning tactics and systems that are already in use, refined over time through auditing and data-driven adjustments.
Since every business differs from others in the market, building a sales playbook is a personal practice that requires considering all internal and external factors. Sales plays will vary greatly depending on the ideal customer profile (ICP) being targeted, the sales cycle, technology (like your sales CRM), and many other factors.
Why Sales Playbooks Matter
Without sufficient training and sales coaching, sales reps often fall apart and miss quotas.
Your sales playbook will be the home base of all the knowledge a rep needs to succeed. By not investing time and resources into your playbook, you might experience several issues in your sales team, including:
- Employee turnover
- Handling objections poorly
- Missing opportunities to close deals
- Wasting time on the wrong prospects
Fortunately, you can avoid these issues by providing a comprehensive sales playbook. Playbooks collect all the information a sales representative could possibly need in a convenient, easy-to-access place.
Components of an Effective Sales Playbook
It’s vital to be thorough when designing a sales playbook, as it can decrease turnover, improve sales performance, and increase productivity.
Company Overview
Your company overview shouldn’t be about your values and mission—it should cover your company hierarchy, who is responsible for what products, sales team structure, and messaging.
When departments understand each other’s roles and where their expertise lies, they can more effectively collaborate to generate more sales. For example, if sales representatives know how the marketing team generates leads, they can lend their input to target specific types of customers.
Put together a comprehensive diagram that outlines the company hierarchy, including product lines, key responsibilities, and points of contact for questions.
You should also draw up an organization chart for your sales team specifically. This is typically done in more detail than the overarching company diagram because this is your sales playbook, after all. Outline each role, each team member's responsibilities, and their expertise and knowledge.
Finally, your company overview should contain your company's messaging and positioning in the market. What value does your product provide customers? How does it stack up against competing products?
You may want to include an elevator pitch example or template for sales reps to work off of as well.
Product Overview
It’s vital that you include a detailed summary of your product line, including its key features, integrations, development roadmap, and differentiators.
To give your sales representatives the best chance of closing deals, you should help them communicate product details in a confident, informative tone.
Knowing your product inside out allows them to avoid overly lengthy explanations to prospects, instead honing in on the main points that they care about on an individual level.
Ideal Customer Profile
Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are rooted in sales targeting, clearly defining a potential lead's behavioral and environmental qualities. They are the most ideal customer for a specific company that is likely to not only convert but also stick around for the long haul. Identifying your ICP allows you to put time and resources into your long-term success.
Knowing precisely who your ICP is helps you focus your sales efforts on the best prospects in your pool of leads, an invaluable efficiency.
While many equate ICPs with customer personas, they have distinct differences that should be addressed:
Both have their own merits, but ICPs are going to be your MVP in creating a sales playbook because of their data-backed approach.
Sales Process
Your sales process might differ from that of other organizations, so it’s important to outline your sales methodology, sales plays, and lead sources.
If you miss this portion of the sales playbook, your staff will be left in the dark, wondering what sales methodology they should use when approaching your prospects. For example, you might use sales frameworks like Sandler, SPIN, SNAP, or MEDDIC.
Your playbook should outline the basic principles of your sales methodology and explain why it’s effective with your ICPs.
From here, you should lay out plays that your reps use to close deals. Only include plays with proven success and are repeatable across different leads. The idea here is that anyone in your organization can refer to your plays when they’re unsure of how to approach a sales situation effectively.
Finally, your sales process should include an overview of how you source leads for your sales staff. These lead sources should be explained in great detail, showing off how warm a lead is, what their specific needs are, and where the lead is coming from.
Educating your sales team on lead sources, possibly with insights from your marketing team, allows them to tailor their pitch and increase conversion rates.
Sales Collateral
Sales collateral is any document or data set that helps support the sales process. This can include product brochures, buyer guides, industry summaries, case studies, and competitor battle cards.
When organizing sales collateral, you should sort assets by which sales funnel stage it aids, which product it covers, or by a specific ICP. This helps your sales representatives more easily search for relevant information when they’re trying to close deals. If they can find what they need in your sales playbook unassisted, you’re golden.
Case studies are possibly the most powerful form of sales collateral because they provide first-hand proof that your product benefits specific types of customers. Sales reps can provide validation that your product helps and how it helps with metrics to back it up.
Ideally, you should have at least a couple of case studies for each of your ICPs. This way, you can provide references to previous successes that are relevant to your prospect.
Here are a few things you should include in your case studies:
- Product
- Customer persona
- Key data with ROI figures
- The customers motivation to choose your company
- Benefits of using your product
The last form of sales collateral you should consider putting together is competitor battle cards. Any serious prospect will do their due diligence, researching competitors in their purchasing journey. That’s why it’s important to understand what your competitors offer, why they’re chosen over your product, and where your product stacks up in the market.
Identify your top 3-5 competitors and write summaries of their products, pricing, strengths, and weaknesses. You should consult with your sales leadership and top-performing sales representatives to see how they handle situations where a prospect strongly considers a specific competitor. Take notes on this and outline how to win these deals so everyone on your team is well-equipped for success.
Tools and Software
Outlining your entire tech stack is a vital component of your sales playbook.
When everyone on your sales team understands the tools they can leverage to close deals and manage relationships, processes get streamlined in an invaluable way.
Beyond listing the software your organization uses and giving access to sales staff, you should also include standard operating procedures (SOPs) for how you specifically use them. Many sales tools and software are customizable and can be used in unique situations, so even if they have experience using a platform, it might not feel familiar to them.
The process of outlining your tech stack may present opportunities to simplify processes.
For example, if you were using Hunter.io for finding new leads, HubSpot for your CRM and MixMax for your cold email software, you might find it easier to use an all-in-one platform like Instantly. It’s a feature-rich sales software that allows you to do all the above tasks plus more.
Sign up for a free trial today!
How to Write a Sales Playbook in 5 Steps
Now that you understand the components that every sales playbook should contain, it’s time to write your own. There are 5 crucial steps that every sales organization should take in preparing their playbook.
Consider Team Composition
Creating a sales playbook isn’t a one-person ordeal.
You should consider assembling a team made up of a variety of hats from different departments and levels of management. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to assembling your playbook team, but you should consider the following when thinking about team composition:
- C-Suite: Involving C-level executives like your CEO or COO means your playbook will always align with overarching, high-level business objectives. It also means buy-in from executives is built-in because they play a role in developing the playbook.
- Sales Leadership: Sales management and coaches have some of the best insight into existing processes and systems, making them an integral part of the team.
- Top Performing Sales Representatives: Cream of the crop sales representatives know what’s working and what’s not because they understand your ICP better than anyone else on your team. They have knowledge that can only be gained from first-hand experience.
- Marketing: Marketing staff provide a unique understanding of your customers and what they really want. Unlike sales representatives, they generate leads and have insight into what makes your company stand out from the crowd.
- Technical Experts: The playbook creation team should include anyone with technical knowledge or skills related to sales in your organization. This can include product designers, customer success representatives, or your IT staff. They can help you implement sales software and create technical overviews of your product offerings.
Audit Existing Sales Materials and Systems
Building on existing documented sales processes is a winning approach to creating a sales playbook. Identifying which tactics and sales materials your team actually uses will help them optimize their daily sales activities.
This step is best handled by interviewing your sales representatives, both 1-on-1 and in a group setting. There are 3 areas you should discuss with them:
- Identifying Sales Activities You Can Repeat Successfully: When you design your first sales playbook, it’s advisable to model sales plays based on recent successes. Try to figure out the most important parts of your sales process. Is customer education your strength? Or is it handling objections after submitting your proposal? These are questions you should consider, then outline any existing processes that exist for these parts, and finally, brainstorm ways you can improve.
- Interviewing Sales Representatives: What are the most effective ways they move deals further down the sales funnel? Ask in-depth questions about the exact methodology they use to get results for your organization.
- Learning How Your Team Sells: What challenges are your salespeople facing? What challenges are prevalent in top-performing sales reps? What can be done to overcome said challenges? Figuring out what strategies and content are being used in practice will help you fine-tune your sales systems.
Develop a Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map is a visual diagram of a company’s entire customer experience. It showcases the customer’s interactions with your business and displays it as a visual map.
There are 5 main components of a customer journey map you should include here:
- Purchasing Journey: The purchasing journey includes the entire process a customer takes when purchasing your product. This should include data from prospecting tools, analytics platforms like Google Analytics, CRM data, and any post-purchase surveys you conduct.
- Emotions: Emotions are hard to quantify but easy to measure. You can measure customer sentiment using data from NPS surveys, social media monitoring, customer interviews, and more. Consider how you make them feel in the purchasing journey, how your product makes them feel, and their emotions after purchasing.
- Customer Actions: Any action that a customer takes that isn’t prompted by a sales representative should be outlined here. For example, if you run a B2B SaaS company, you might consider page views, CTA clicks, email newsletter signups, and PDF downloads.
- Customer Research: Customer research refers to research done by the customer before making a purchase. You should note what research they do and where they do it. The most common form of customer research is competitor analysis, where they look into competing solutions to make a decision.
- Solution: The final component of the customer journey map is solutions. What can be done to improve the purchasing journey? Are there any tweaks your team can make to speed things up or smooth things out?
Craft Strategy Based on Data and Proven Tactics
Any plays you add to your sales playbook should have a successful track record or, at the very least, be backed up by relevant data.
The core of every great sales playbook is empowering sales representatives to learn from each other. For this section, you’ll want to consult sales leadership and top-performing salespeople. Their habits, activities, and insights will serve as a baseline for how your plays should look.
For smaller organizations and newer companies, this can be a tough section to write because you don’t necessarily have a proven track record (yet) or data sets you can work with. In this case, you’ll want to use whatever insights you have available to create potentially winning plays. Some data you can use to guide your plays include industry research, customer personas, pain points of prospective customers, and sales cycle information.
Share Playbook Access with Your Team
Sharing is caring and there’s no better way to show you care about your sales team than by making your sales playbook easily accessible to everyone who needs it.
Rather than sending PDFs to your staff, it’s better that they have real-time access to your most up-to-date sales playbook.
We recommend using a connected workplace platform like Google Docs or Notion. This way, you can revise your playbook without re-sending it to your entire team. Everyone will be operating with up-to-date information and won’t have to worry about whether they have the most current version.
Key Takeaways
Every organization should take sales playbooks seriously because they are the home base of information sales representatives can use to close future deals.
There are 6 key components you should outline in your sales playbook: company and product overviews, ideal customer profiles, sales process, collateral, and your tech stack.
Once these sections are complete, it’s time to implement your sales playbook in 5 easy steps:
- Assemble your sales playbook task force
- Audit all existing sales systems and materials
- Develop a customer journey map
- Create data-backed strategies
- Share your playbook with your team in real-time
Writing a sales playbook may seem like a lot of work and that’s because it is. But it’s completely worth it. Creating your playbook provides opportunities to optimize existing efforts, gain valuable insights from your team, and aid new hires during onboarding.
