While making a sale seems simple, building a repeatable and predictable sales program can be challenging.
There are no guarantees; every day is a new opportunity to win big or lose big. However, it is a fact that businesses need to create a playbook if they want to succeed.
A sales playbook spells out the team’s strategies and processes for success: from core company DNA and selling propositions to the specifics of the sales process, hiring plans, and sales scripts and tactics.
When executed correctly, a sales playbook will help sales teams increase efficiency and maximize profits, and do so in a repeatable way so they can scale their efforts.
What is a sales playbook?
A sales playbook is a document or collection that outlines the processes and strategies sales teams will use to engage with customers, close deals, measure success, hire and train additional team members, and in general, achieve their goals.
Some playbooks are highly structured and prescriptive, offering specific line-by-line scripts for cold calls and outbound emails. Some are more flexible, allowing for autonomy but providing the basic foundations of the sales process and plan.
In either case, the sales playbook includes the purpose of the sales team and the best practices and plays to onboard and train sales reps quickly.
Sales leaders can customize their team's playbooks, and a sales playbook can be a living, breathing, evolving document.
Sales playbook vs sales plays vs sales kit
Sales playbooks
Differ from sales plays and sales kits in several important ways.
Sales plays
Are the specific tactics that make up a sales playbook. For example, a sales play could be delivering a weekly product use case webinar that showcases a successful customer. This is merely one sales play that makes up a collection of tactics a sales team engages in.
Sales kit
Contains templates and sales enablement materials that improve the odds and success rate of sales efforts. These materials support individual sales plays and are also generally included in a sales playbook. For example, a sales kit could contain email outreach templates and sequences or opening message templates for LinkedIn InMail outreach.
In summary, the sales playbook is the collection of all the individual sales plays and support materials that make up the foundations of a sales program.
18 key components of a sales playbook
Often, sales playbooks come in two varieties. The first is a traditional sales playbook that may be a bit more prescriptive and thoroughly detailed in how sales reps do their day-to-day work. The other is an agile sales playbook, which focuses on foundational knowledge and context setting but allows for more rep autonomy when it comes to outreach and how they execute sales conversations.
Regardless, both of these types of playbooks have similar, key components necessary for success. Consider the following components to build into any sales playbook.
1. Company information
This part of the playbook outlines everything about the company: how it's organized, including structure, as well as sales contacts, and any other necessary information about other departments key to a sales rep doing their job well.
2. Sales team structure
Similar to the company information, the sales team structure outlines the organizational chart and hierarchy of the sales team.
This includes who reports to whom, which teams are responsible for which tasks, regions, and customer segments, and any subject matter experts or ancillary roles that are involved with the sales process.
3. Mission statement and core values
The mission statement and core values should be a short section with a few pillars that guide the efforts of the sales team.
Don't overthink the mission statement. A sales mission statement can reflect and expand on different parts of a company’s overall mission statement.Core values can also echo company values, but it's helpful to identify specific guiding principles for the sales team.
For example, core values could be:
Be a trusted advisor
Always be learning
Be honest and lead with integrity
These values differ from organization to organization and should provide guardrails and parameters for all sales plays and efforts that the team engages in. They can be used for hiring, firing, and promoting sales team members.
4. Messaging, positioning, and unique selling propositions
Messaging, positioning, and unique selling propositions are the cornerstones of a sales playbook. They should be crafted to appeal to the right buyers and clearly explain how the company's product or service is superior to others in the market.
The messaging should be well-researched and tailored to buyer personas. Messaging and positioning are often combined efforts uniting company leadership with marketing and sales to form a cohesive position in the market.
This artifact explains why the company exists and what value it provides the target audience. The unique selling proposition is then the section outlining how the company is different and what sets it apart from competitors.
5. Product overview
What does a sales rep need to know about the product? Include that information in the sales playbook.
This doesn't need to be a comprehensive technical document. It simply needs to include core benefits and features of the product or service the organization is selling.
What is it? How does it work? Why would someone use it?
This section can also include screenshots, demos, or visuals of the product in action.
6. Competitive differentiators
Flowing from the product overview should be a small section on how the features and benefits differ from the competition.
Sometimes a product is completely innovative, standing alone in a blue ocean. More often, its success hinges on finding some small differentiator that really matters to a specific customer segment and leaning into that difference.
7. Competitive battlecards
Competitive battlecards summarize the core product benefits and use cases and position them against specific competitors.
Battlecards require an understanding of the most common competitors and their strengths and weaknesses. These are often included in individual sales kits for sales account executives at the closing stages of a deal.
8. Buyer personas and ideal customer profiles
An understanding of the market and buying group is critical for success.
Marketers often use the term "buyer personas." Sales teams often use "ideal customer profile." Whatever the case, including information on who the sales team is targeting helps sales development reps reach the right audience with the right message.
It also helps when it comes to lead scoring and qualification.
An ideal customer profile can be as detailed as necessary. For example, an enterprise IT services company might target customers with the following characteristics:
500+ employees
Fortune 1000 status
Located in the US
In the pharmaceutical industry
With an IT budget of $2M/year.
9. Sales methodology
Most organizations choose a sales methodology used by the sales team. Examples include SPIN selling, Challenger Selling, or the Sandler Selling System.
Sales playbooks can include basic information on the sales process alongside links and training materials on the specifics of the program.
10. Sales plan and process
The sales plan details each step of the sales process and describes how a prospect goes through the funnel to become a customer.
This is usually visualized in a deal board, which may contain stages like discovery, qualification, scoping, nurturing, proposal, negotiation, contract, and closed.
At each step in the sales process, there are typically templates and plays to guide sales reps. Each step also outlines who is responsible for that stage of the sales process. For example, a sales development rep might be responsible for discovery and qualification, and then the lead is passed to an account executive for the rest of the sales process.
11. Sales play templates
What's a sales play? A repeatable sales motion or tactic that aligns with the strategic goals of the sales team.
Simply put, it's something a sales team does to generate leads and customers.
For example, a sales play for an enterprise software solution could include field marketing combined with invite-only dinners and invites for their target accounts and clients.
A freemium product-led growth company might have a sales play that qualifies freemium product users based on their usage and company signals, triggering automated sales emails to start the discovery process.
The individual sales plays that an organization uses are highly variable and evolving all the time, subject to experimentation and changing market dynamics.
12. Sales kits and collateral
Sales kits include everything that helps sales reps do their job, including:
Email outreach templates
Email sequences
Shared LinkedIn prospecting lists
Case studies
Content for sales enablement
Interactive product demos
Slide decks and pitch decks
This section will also evolve depending on the increased needs of sales reps, learnings from the field, and changing sales plays and market dynamics.
Sales kits can also be lightweight prompts that list questions and conversation points for sales reps.
13. Lead sources and goals
While lead sources and lead goals tend to fall on the marketing side of the business, it helps to create shared goals and handshake agreements on where leads are coming from and how many are coming in.
Additionally, sales teams can source their own leads through outbound efforts, complementing the efforts of marketing teams.
14. Lead qualification criteria
Lead qualification determines which leads are good fits, which are bad fits, and how to prioritize them.
Advanced sales teams can include a lead scoring model as well as score thresholds to determine when to pass leads to account executives.
At a very basic level, sales playbooks should include who they're willing to talk to and who to deprioritize.
15. FAQs and objective handling
A living, breathing section on common objections as well as talking points to handle them is incredibly helpful.
This can start as a hypothesis, but with time, sales reps will find themselves fielding the same questions and answering the same questions. Add them to this document, and save new reps tons of time.
16. Software and tooling
Documentation on the software used by sales teams can help new reps onboard quickly to new technology.
This is usually a light section with links to training materials. It can include documentation on the company CRM, sales outreach software, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or any other sales tools that reps will be working with.
17. Sales team goals
This is a great place to document the goals of the sales team, from number of demos and meetings scheduled per rep, to total closed deals or monthly recurring revenue (MRR) targets.
It also helps reps understand how their individual performance contributes to the success of the team as whole.
18. Measurement
To track progress over time, it's important to set up tracking and reporting for the sales process.
This might include customer lifetime value (LTV) measurements, average deal size, deals won/lost rate, conversion rates at different stages of the funnel, customer satisfaction scores, and more.
How to create a sales playbook: 3 best practices
Creating a sales playbook is unique to each company. However, these three best practices will help any organization implement and operationalize its sales playbook.
Create a minimum-viable playbook
Sales playbooks do not have to be static documents with everything planned up front and all at once. They should be living, breathing documents that serve as a utility for sales teams.
Overplanning is likely to do two things: waste executive time, and bog down sales team members with frivolous details.
When building out a sales playbook, start small and add items over time.
Iterate and optimize over time
Performance measurement is incredibly important, as is constant diagnostics and identifying bottlenecks in the system.
Effective sales leaders regularly review their sales playbooks, typically on a quarterly basis, and adjust the materials based on feedback from the team and the market.
Create a culture of accountability
Creating a sales playbook is pointless if the sales team does not use it.
Create a culture where accountability is held at all levels within the organization so that everyone takes ownership over their individual roles as well as their team's performance numbers overall.
This means setting expectations for each person on the team (including sales leaders and executive stakeholders) and holding them accountable when those expectations aren't met.
Develop feedback systems such as regular check-ins with each team member or surveys sent out after each sale so that any issues can be identified quickly and addressed accordingly before they become bigger problems down the line.
Crafting an effective sales playbook doesn’t have to be overwhelming
Breaking down the process into smaller steps—such as identifying goals, establishing processes and strategies, and training sales team members on those strategies—can help business leaders create a comprehensive guide that outlines how their teams should consistently achieve their targets while building strong customer relationships.
After crafting an effective sales playbook, it’s easy to pair it with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build and determine a key, quality prospect list. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to understand sales prospects, conduct research, and start to build those necessary relationships that work toward more closed deals.
