Sales playbook creation can seem like a burdensome business task in pulling all aspects of a sales strategy into a comprehensive template. So, it’s worth remembering that a sales playbook acts as a roadmap for salespeople and sales teams to guide them through the entire sales process. It documents all the steps from how to research and find a lead to qualifying an opportunity plus all the markers towards closing a deal. The sales playbook should also outline the sales methodology, techniques, and expectations for each salesperson’s role.
The ultimate aim of the playbook is to make sure that everyone is aligned to the sales strategies and tactics and the sales efforts are all on the same page. Building detailed sales plays within the playbook will instill best practices into the sales process and make all the sales steps repeatable and scalable. Each sales play should include the approach, what qualifies as a genuine sales opportunity, buyer commitments to indicate interest, next steps, time frame, and any related content to move the lead from interest to intent.
The sales playbook will act as the company’s guide or instructional manual for all salespeople that covers what actions they should take in different sales scenarios. With input from sales management, sales trainers or enablement, every section should offer specific information on
when the sales steps, the tactics, and the strategy behind it. When building your sales playbook, it must be customized to fit the unique needs of your target customers, sales strategy, and go-to-market selling tactics for your business.
Sales playbooks are there to ensure that all leads and opportunities receive the appropriate resources and attention. Plus, they take the guesswork out of the sales process when interacting with customers. Your sales playbook is there to maintain a level of consistency and compliance across your sales team. In fact, over 72% of leading sales organizations indicated that sales playbooks help salespeople develop and customize sales tactics most appropriate to their individual roles or territories.
Key areas in a sales playbook.
The playbook will allow you to audit the sales team to determine what tactics, resources, timing, messaging, etc., are effective for any sales campaign or initiative. It will give you insights into best sales practices so you can optimize them and make them scalable and repeatable. It outlines to the salespeople how to leverage multiple communication channels (i.e., phone, email, social media, snail mail, and text). It brings discipline to all sales activities. However, creating the playbook is only part of it; actually working through the various scenarios and steps is the critical element. You, the sales team, and everyone connected to the customer must stick to it.
To recap, your sales playbook is a customized approach to your unique sales process that puts the right tactics, practices, steps, commitments, content, and resources at the fingertips of your salespeople so they can take the right steps, at the right time, with the right people.
Vision & Values
This section of the sales playbook includes high-level information about your company, its goals, and the role of salespeople in achieving those goals. Your vision statement will reveal what the company hopes to achieve in the medium to long term. It sets a vision for the future of the organization. Your values describe your core business and people principles and what you stand by as an organization. Your value statement should be actionable, memorable, and timeless. Then your mission statement will serve to clearly explain the purpose of your business, in other words, why you exist.
Document your sales plan
Most sales planning will work backward from your topline goals and any previous data or results so you can plan for your sales structure and targets for the coming year. Start with your next twelve months goal: what do you want to hit next year? Map out what will come from current customers and what will come from new sales. Include expected churn (lost customers) and forecasted current customer growth. The difference between your goal and current customers is the new revenue you need this year. Then look at historical conversion rates to know how much sales pipeline you need, how many salespeople you should have, etc.
Note: Extensive research shows that circa 30% of inbound leads tend to qualify, and around 15-20% of these will end up buying. Plus, 5-10% of your outbound prospects will end up becoming your clients. These are averages and will vary depending on your business model and sales structure. Now split the year into quarters if sales cycles are long (enterprise selling) or months if they are short (transactional selling). This should help you answer key questions to plan for your sales organization and structure. How many salespeople will you need during the year or quarter? When do you need to hire them in order for them to be fully ramped up? What volume of sales pipeline will the sales team need to create in order to have enough qualified sales opportunities to close?
Sales Process.
The sales process is at the heart of every sales organization. A scalable sales process that can be repeated and improved upon is now a real business imperative. Again, your playbook must be customized to suit the specific needs of your business, ensuring that salespeople are following the same processes and relevant steps alongside adhering to the same set of guidelines. This consistency helps improve training, maintain standards, apply the same measures for all, and reduce variations in sales outcomes. This section should map out your existing or ideal sales journey, including each step from research to prospecting to deal closure. List out key touchpoints, critical stages, commitments, next steps, and decision-making milestones. This will provide you with a roadmap for the sales team’s activities, shedding light on strengths and improvement areas.
Sales Pipeline
Your sales playbook has to account for the sales pipeline to support the sales plan. Some key points to document are how you will monitor the size and movement of your sales pipeline vs. revenue from current and new customers. You need to consider how you will monitor sales velocity into each stage of the pipeline so enough opportunities are moving forward to hit the sales goals. The playbook should detail how you plan to monitor and review conversion rates and how they compare with your plan to reach your target revenues.
Remember that your pipeline is your first step towards revenue conversion. It is important to also consider your sales team’s ramp-up time when building the pipeline, as it will affect the conversion rate. Conversion rates also vary depending on the business model, but on average you should target north of 5-10% from free trials to paid customers. The higher the quality of leads and lead generation through outbound, the higher the conversion should be.
Buyer personas
The playbook must clearly spell out to your salespeople who your buyers are so they only invest time selling to this target audience. Map out your buyer personas or ideal customer profiles and how each of them moves through the different stages of the buyer journey. Include the different requirements for users, influencers, and decision-makers, plus which content or assets the sales team will use to address which profile. Mapping buyer personas will help your salespeople identify the most qualified leads.
You’ll want to include information such as:
- Typical job titles and reporting lines
- Common challenges and pain points that your company’s products or services can help them resolve and aspirations you can help them realize.
- How much power they have and the role they play.
- At what point in the buying process do they get involved?
Build a Strong Sales Culture.
In today’s highly competitive market, a strong sales culture is critical in order to become a successful company. The sales playbook should detail how you will put in place a system to manage salespeople so that high performers are recognized, and low performers are identified for improvement, all against a set of metrics in your sales plan. Document your compensation scheme for all to read, as your salespeople’s behavior will depend on it. When it comes to sales culture, you should think about your company’s vision and communicate this with the playbook.
What sales training can you expect to receive, and when (especially for new salespeople)?
You can go one step further and outline the market dynamics, customer types, segmentation, and understanding of the competition within your space. This should match your seller’s profile for training and recruitment purposes. In sales, like most professions, everyone has ups and downs, so building a team that believes in the company, the product or service, and what is possible is critical to sales strategy execution.
Document what you will monitor
If you are an early-stage company, your focus will mainly be on growing your sales pipeline and revenues. So, customer acquisition metrics such as win rates, timings, sales cycles, and deal losses will be important. The playbook should detail what you deem as sales team efficiency based on targets or other key performance indicators, which is essential.
Sales leader dashboards.
Now think of the different metrics you plan to monitor to evaluate the performance of the different teams and individual salespeople in more granularity. Be clear on what you are measuring so every salesperson knows and can reference it easily. This could be number of demos per month, value of sales pipeline created, pipeline closed, pipeline deals won, number of opportunities opened in a specific timeframe, demos completed, sales calls, meetings, quotations, presentations, etc.
The Final Sales Playbook
The final version of your sales playbook will make life easier for you and your salespeople. It will help guide and drive sales performance for your company. But for it to remain useful, you need to treat it as a work in progress, a living document. One that can be updated as your company’s sales process evolves, your product or service range expands, and your sales strategy and target markets develop. Keeping the playbook up to date will be easier if it’s online and accessible to the whole sales team at any time.
