How to create a Sales Playbook?

A Sales Playbook is a step-by-step guide every sales team should have in order to follow the same practices for every possible sales situation. Reps are guided through all potential scenarios and are able to make better decisions about what to do next, ensuring always the right and most precise outcome.

The Sales Playbook brings together all the information into one central location so that reps can leverage it. And why is this important? Well, people only remember small amounts of information, which is not ideal when you’re trying to implement a solid strategy. This can be solved with a Playbook because the team will always know what to do and how to do it.?

So, how do you create one?

1. Defining your GTM strategy

In order to define your Go-To-Market strategy, you’ll have to ask yourself, What kind of companies do we want to sell to? Who do we want to talk to??

You’ll be identifying:

• Target market
• Target persona
• Value prop by TM and TP

Sales Reps become more effective when they’re consistently targeting prospects who are the most likely to buy your solution. While most companies already have a solid idea of their ideal customer, this takes it a step further.

2. Establishing Processes

How do I assign inbound leads? When should I send a company into Nurturing??

These processes must be followed closely, something which can’t be done in a spreadsheet or a stand-alone document. They have to be integrated into the sales engagement tool your team is using.

You’ll be defining:

• Contactability
• Inbound management
• Pre-qualifying and qualifying processes
• Recycled companies policies
• Discarded and Nurturing accounts management

These are the pillars of your strategy. They’re systematic elements that have to be ironed before anything else as they support your Playbook. Bonus tip: having a clear, defined process also makes it easier for onboarding new Sales reps.

3. Creating Content

Finally, ask yourself: What’s the best message to deliver? How do we structure our pitch?

Even the best trained Sales rep will forget pitches and qualifying questions from time to time, especially when targeting complex markets. Avoid this and suggest the best messaging content in real-time.

You’ll be establishing:

• Pitches and templates
• Snippets
• Sales collateral and marketing content
• Objection handling

How often should the Playbook be reviewed?

The Sales Playbook is not a one time thing. You must keep revisiting it in order to optimize it and adapt it to your business needs.?

As a general rule. if you’re building it for the first time, you should update it nearly on a daily basis. Once the process is validated, this can change:

• GTM Strategy should be reviewed at least quarterly
• The process will depend constantly on feedback from your sales reps and the team using it
• Content should be very proactive. You should keep looking for new pieces to create thanks to feedback gathered from the market. What topics are prospects interested in, what are the trending topics on the target market. It’s essential to absorb that info and review it constantly

The key to every successful sales team is scaling best practices. But, in order to repeat your best reps’ tactics throughout the team, you’ll need to be able to understand what in your Playbook is exactly helping them to achieve success.

What’s the best way to implement your playbook?

The first rule for success is to have it all documented in one place. If your Sales Playbook is living in an old PDF or Powerpoint that your sales reps need to constantly check, chances are they probably don’t even know it exists. Your strategy should be easier to access and follow.

You can also incorporate the team into building your Playbook. This allows them to understand where all guidance comes from and will make the onboarding process easier.

Finally, listen to your reps! They can be a huge source of insights and learnings as they’re the ones having actual conversations with prospects, so their feedback is important when it comes to updating and optimizing the Playbook.

Hungry for more? Check out the webinar we hosted with Sarah Jane Hicks, Director of coaching and consulting at Predictable Revenue.

Or, check out how Bloobirds digitalizes your Sales Playbook while guiding and assisting sales reps in real time.