What Is a Sales Playbook & How to Create One
A sales playbook is your company’s cheat sheet for cashing in on leads and closing more conversions. However, although these handy references make your team more likely to close deals at higher rates, four in ten teams don’t have one established.
If you’re in the same boat, you’re probably wondering: What is a sales playbook, really?
Essentially, they’re guidelines meant to guide your reps through different stages of the sales process. From brand info to buyer personas, let's explore their most essential elements and lay out some crucial practices for optimizing your team’s sales playbook.
What Is a Sales Playbook?
A sales playbook compiles best practices and helpful notes your reps can lean on to inform their actions during the sales process. It’s like a guidebook, outline, or manual for selling your specific products and services that offers actionable advice for different stages of selling—from prospecting to closing. With it, your sales professionals will always know how to prepare for calls, react to client objections, and deal with other developments in deals.
Generally, sales playbooks comprise several components, including:
Brand information
Products/services overview
Buyer personas
Sales process
Sales plays
Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
We’ll expand on all these components later in this guide but, for now, remember that sales playbooks aren’t sales strategies.
A sales strategy is a more overarching approach to achieving revenue goals and can include other actions—such as identifying selling targets and channels—outside the traditional sales process. Meanwhile, sales playbooks detail your approach to your sales process in a more complex and intricate manner than your sales strategy.
Importance and Benefits of Sales Playbooks
Sales playbooks take the confusion out of the selling process. They’re an invaluable reference for sales professionals and, with them, they’ll never be lost about what to do next in the sales process. Besides this, they also offer:
A higher chance of sales success – Sales professionals who utilize a playbook hit their individual performance targets 54% of the time compared to just 46% for those who don’t.
Increased revenue growth – Organizations with playbooks expand their deal sizes by almost 4% year-over-year versus 2.8% for those that lack one.
Better lead nurturing and acceptance – Using a playbook allows companies to more than double their lead acceptance rates over their playbook-less competitors.
Shorter sales cycles – Playbooks make your company almost twice as likely to shorten buyers’ journeys and speed up sales cycles from year to year.
The chance to pull ahead – 42% of any given sector's top-performing companies use sales playbooks versus 29% for average performers and just 14% for those at the bottom.
The numbers simply don’t lie: using a sales playbook empowers your company to secure more leads, close deals faster, and net more revenue. What do you need, then, to implement one in your organization?
Core Elements of a Sales Playbook
As noted above, various elements must come together to establish a robust, effective sales playbook. Different organizations may utilize different components more and place less emphasis on others. Regardless of your company’s specifics and industry, however, a functional sales playbook usually contains the following information.
Brand Information
Even if your legacy sales staff knows your company like the back of their hands, brand information can help refresh their memories, onboard new colleagues, and keep everyone on the same page about organizational information.
Brand information should state anything your employees need to know about your company and everything your potential clientele may want to learn. Some important details to highlight include:
Company history – Some information on when you started up, a short bio on your founders, and a bit on your company’s journey to the present day should give your employees the footing they need to discuss your brand at length.
Offerings – Include what you sell or service and some basic information about your overall line of products or offerings.
Mission and values – Clients may want to know what your company stands for and the direction it’s heading in, so enable your staff to answer them by including information such as your mission statement and core values.
A summary of your sales strategy – Obviously, your playbook offers an in-depth look into your company’s sales tactics, but your staff can refer to this short, “elevator pitch” version when needing a quick reminder of your overarching ethos.
Roles and responsibilities – Include the different duties expected from each position on your team so colleagues always know which tasks are theirs and which fall onto someone else’s lap.
Products/Services Overview
If your sales team is going to convince potential customers to invest in your products or services, they need to understand them inside and out. Your products/services overview section is the spot to include any information to better sell your offerings. It’s the pertinent place to share factors like:
Use cases – Why would customers want your products or services? What functions do they serve? How can they improve their life or business? Identify your offerings’ utility and the benefits they present to your customers.
Differentiators – What ‘unique selling points’, or USPs, set your products apart from your competitors? What features, technology, or aesthetic qualities make your offerings the best in their sector? Such differentiators help your sales professionals convince buyers to invest in your offerings over others in the market.
Specifications – If you sell physical items, this is where you’ll list their characteristics such as styles, dimensions, features, and more. If you offer services, list what they include, the different kinds of packages customers can purchase, and your timeframes for completing jobs (if applicable).
Pricing information – Be sure to include the cost of manufacturing specific products or rendering certain services. That way, if a sales associate wants to cut customers a deal, they can still sell at a price that maintains profitability.
Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are fictional portfolios of ideal clients you aim to sell to. They help teams get a sense of the human element of selling—who likely proves predisposed to interest and how to communicate effectively with them.
Most businesses create multiple buyer personas based on the different kinds of customers they cater to. While there’s no magic formula for how many you’ll need, if you’re a niche business, less is often more; just a couple of buyer personas can go a long way. No matter how many you create, however, they should contain key information such as:
Demographics – How old are your clients? Where do they live? What gender are they? How much money do they make? These types of essential demographic questions can provide key insight into your buyers and help reps provide a personal touch during lead nurturing and sales calls.
Pain points – What problems are your clients trying to solve? How can you use their frustration with currently available solutions to emphasize the efficacy and uniqueness of your products? Reach deep into your base’s minds to understand what questions and issues they’d most like addressed.
Industry – This one is of particular importance to B2B companies. If you offer a commercial solution, it’s key to identify what industries it’s best suited to serve. These are the sectors you should target when building out your buyer personas.
Sales Process
The steps you take when interacting with a potential customer and nurturing a lead forms your sales process. Every business’s sales process looks different depending on their industry or strategy, but often contains some mix of:
Prospecting – Explain where your reps can find leads—especially those more likely to convert. Will they be cold calling or selecting from a pool of pre-approved candidates? Do you have any tools or software to facilitate prospecting? Lay all that—and any other relevant instructions—out in this section.
Lead qualification – This is where you assess how likely a lead is to actually end in a sale. Set specific criteria for hot and cold leads and, if your organizational resources are running thin, focus your efforts on clients who are most likely to convert.
Nurturing and closing – This part of the process will vary heavily based on industry and other factors. Some purchases are snap decisions, and their sales cycles complete themselves in the blink of an eye. Conversely, other cycles end up drawn out over months or more. Regardless, this is where you’ll set standards for how you want sales reps to handle qualified leads. Include any specific instructions about upselling, cross-selling, quoting prices, and more that you’d like them to follow.
Customer success – After a client converts, maintain your brand’s reputation by periodically keeping in touch. Set rules for follow-up calls and emails, cross-selling, and more so your reps can keep customers engaged and loyal.
Sales Plays
This is where you’ll include materials, advice, and techniques that enable your staff to better nurture leads and close on deals. It can be strategies that have worked on past customers, new organizational approaches you’re trying to implement, or any other resources you can think of. Some key examples of effective sales plays include:
Templates that guide your reps during sales calls
Social media content they can share or reference
Messaging scripts for customer service requests
Similar sales enablement materials
Metrics and KPIs
Finally, your sales team will need to know what they’re striving for to set revenue goals and refine effective sales strategies. Sales metrics and KPIs offer concrete figures that let reps know whether or not their efforts pan out—so set them early, ensure everyone knows them, and track them as often as possible.
Some key KPIs for sales and marketing teams to keep tabs on include:
Average profit margin – Simply subtract the cost of closing a deal from the revenue you gained by the sale, do so for every client, and average this number. Obviously, the higher your profit margins, the better—but you should still set realistic, achievable goals that your staff can aspire to without fears of failure.
Lead acquisition costs – How much, on average, do you spend prospecting to find a lead? Costly leads cut into profit margins, while unqualified leads can also waste organizational resources. Align your expectations for lead acquisition costs with overall revenue to maintain a healthy sales culture in which reps don’t feel stressed to unnecessarily abandon or press leads.
Average conversion time – After a while, combine your data with your intuition to determine how long sales cycles generally take for your industry. Set (soft) parameters for how quickly you want your team to close deals. Not every customer will stick to your business’s schedule but, more or less, average conversion times should be similar to your observations for sales cycle length.
Tips for Maximizing the Effectiveness of Your Sales Playbook
Sales is not a static industry. It’s persistently evolving—so too should the techniques, tools, and information you use to interact with your clientele. Hence, to get the most out of your sales playbook, you must constantly adapt it to new market norms by:
Customizing rules to meet the specific needs of your clientele and the strengths of your staff
Integrating it into your tech stack—including reworking your playbook to account for any new systems, software, or solutions you implement in your sales department
Continually training and updating your staff on the new criteria of your evolving playbook
Tracking and evaluating your playbook’s efficacy—including comparing past sales figures to see the effect it's had on overall revenue
A sales playbook can help boost your bottom line and shorten your sales cycles. But, if you really want to speed up your conversion times and skip out on more of the laborious bits of sales, automate key data sorting and prospecting tasks with Nimbler.
Effective Sales Playbook + Nimbler = A Winning Combination
In much the same way that a sales playbook simplifies tasks such as lead acquisition, sales calls, and customer support, Nimbler makes data management and prospecting a breeze.
With the largest repository of B2B data in the United States, Nimbler instantly gives you access to over 100 million potential clients. And, with features such as automatic sorting, qualification, and outreach, you’ll effortlessly contact the most likely leads and guide them into your sales funnel.
Try Nimbler for free to unlock the power of sales automation for your business.
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