How many playbooks sold

A sales playbook is a document that sales teams use to employ best practices, tactics, and strategies during different stages of the selling process. It outlines what a rep should do in a specific selling situation, such as prospecting, nurturing, or pitching a specific product.

A sales play includes things like sales enablement materials, strategies, discovery call questions , KPIs, buyer personas, sales process details, and more. A sales playbook might also include sample emails and scripts to guide reps through all parts of the buyer's journey and actions like demos, lead qualification, negotiation, and more. Use a Sales Playbooks Tool that connects to your CRM and arms your sales team with competitive battle cards, call scripts, positioning guides, and more.

First, training new salespeople is far quicker and easier when you have clear, explicit explanations of who your customers are, how they buy your products, what pain points they experience, what to say to them, and more. Without a sales playbook, your reps are forced to learn this information ad hoc. Second, a playbook frees up time for selling. Rather than having each rep develop their own messaging, questions, and resources to use with prospects, give them ready-made content — a.

This will give your reps more time for selling. Third, a playbook helps you disseminate the most effective techniques being used on your team. For instance, if you notice one rep having success with a specific outreach method, you can share it easily with the entire team by putting it in the playbook. Speaking of surfacing your best techniques, a sales playbook also highlights and shares your most effective sales plays for specific scenarios.

A sales play is a set of repeatable steps, actions, and best practices that sales reps can use during one specific point in the selling process. Sales plays allow reps to move deals forward without brainstorming selling strategies from scratch, and all customers receive a consistent experience regardless of the rep they talk to.

You can create a sales play for one specific stage of the sales pipeline. You can also create sales plays for different types of customers. These are only two of the many different types that you can include in your playbook. Sales plays are unique to your specific company and goals, but here are some examples of plays that you may choose to create playbooks for:.

Your sales playbook is unique to your business — however, the following steps for creating your playbook are applicable to nearly any business's sales team. Download Your Copy for Free. Since your sales playbook is a part of your sales process, you want it to fit in seamlessly. And your sales process should be analyzed frequently to ensure it's updated in a way that complements your current goals, the way your reps sell, your latest products and features, your buyer personas, and more.

This is why the first step of sales playbook creation is to review your current sales process. Next, outline your sales playbook goals. These goals may revolve around questions like the following:. Make your playbook goals specific — reps will be more likely to adopt a short, focused, and relevant playbook over a long, complex, multi-faceted one.

Determine who should be involved in the sales playbook creation process so you can invite them to join collaborations. This is also a good point in time to identify directly responsible individuals DRIs for the creation of the sales playbook, so that other team members know who's leading the effort and who they can reach out to with questions and comments.

And speaking of looping in certain individuals and teams, sales alignment with the marketing team is critical to the sales playbook creation process. Your sales playbook, no matter its focus, is bound to need content, sales enablement materials, and educational information that reps can refer to and even share with prospects. Also, by keeping the communication and collaboration lines between Sales and Marketing open , Sales can inform Marketing of what types of content and materials they need to streamline and enhance the selling process.

And Marketing can reach out to Sales with information about their latest campaigns and content about new products or feature updates. Reps must have a deep understanding of the business's buyer personas. That's because the purpose of your sales playbook is to help reps meet leads where they are. It's meant to help reps reach leads by supporting them through a specific part of the sales process. Collect that information and share it with your reps so they're able to refer to it when applying and prepping the sales playbook and while working through the rest of the sales process.

Note : As your business grows, product line expands, and base of customers includes more people, continually update your buyer personas as needed. This is a critical step for all aspects of selling, not just the creation of your sales playbook — reps must understand the product they're selling inside and out. No matter how good your sales playbook is or what the playbook is about, your reps won't be able to apply it effectively unless they have a deep understanding of your product, its capabilities, and its features.

Think about ways to encourage and host this training as well as when your reps will undergo training. For example, you may have reps attend training sessions with your company's product team. Or maybe your reps are required by sales managers to test out the product as a customer would. Next, audit your existing sales enablement materials. In doing so, you'll be able to determine what already exists and can be used as is, or needs to be edited. You'll also be able to make note of which sales enablement materials need to be created hence why we mentioned the importance of sales and marketing alignment.

There are a number of plays you can choose from when determining what the focus of your playbook will be. This is entirely dependent on factors like:. Yet many companies lack that orchestration.

Each play comes with a library of scripts and collateral to accommodate different geographies or industries, deal with common responses from prospects, and recommend actions to take.

The factory creates an inventory of a few dozen plays that can be deployed to win new accounts, cross-sell existing accounts, renew expiring accounts, and win back defectors. Taking a factory production mentality to a sales playbook raises the level of consistency in execution.

A command center to track and manage sales plays. When companies match plays to known opportunities, the sales operations team has a testing and learning lab at their fingertips. Effective plays can be elevated, repeated, and pushed out to the rest of the sales team, while ineffective plays can be refined or retired. The playbook provides a reliable view of whether they are on track, and if not, recommends ways to deploy more targeted, alternative plays. Consistent, intensive coaching.

The difference? Effective coaching. Clear sales plays resemble clear rules of the road in a dense city, helping managers to coach more effectively. Instead of a general directive to sell more, managers can discuss how a cross-sell play to a particular prospect should use certain scripts that have proven effective, and they can role-play on possible objections.

Rich, integrated technology. Having the right technology is necessary but far from sufficient for developing a successful sales playbook. The winning companies in our analysis were 1. For instance, a marketing tool that serves up relevant content must be connected to the sales enablement system, so that sales reps can see which content gets high ratings for a given play.

One software-as-a-service SaaS company had invested in technologies for customer relationship management, marketing automation, sales enablement and cadence, and call recording, but it was barely using them. By taking the time to embed these technologies properly into its sales processes, the company was able to increase revenue growth by basis points within a few weeks.

If there is a particular message that has worked in the past to overcome objections or beat specific competitors, new reps need easy access to this information. They need to know what content can help deals move forward at various stages and a host of other factors. The same goes for sales. To help you draft your own playbook, here are what some of the top sales experts have to say about the importance of a sales playbook, as well as some excellent examples of successful playbooks. This Altify discusses 12 crucial elements that belong in your sales playbook, including:.

This eBook from Marketo and Precision Thinking includes essentials that should be in your sales playbook. It contains:. This video from Demand Metric that does an excellent job of walking you through the creation and management of a sales playbook. It covers:. This eBook from Veelo, which discusses some changes you may need to make to your sales playbook in order to stay at the forefront of sales strategy.

It discusses:. Check out our free day Inside Sales Success Plan for more tips on how to build a winning sales team. This is a fantastic free tool from Sales Benchmark Index that can help you build the ideal playbook to support your business. Key topics include how to:.