What’s in Your Sales Playbook?

A solid playbook helps take the guesswork out of your team’s sales. Taking the time to put your company’s standard procedures for a variety of everyday sales circumstances into a guide creates a better workflow and clear goals to achieve. As a result, you’ll not only see your team achieving their goals faster, but they’ll also become more confident in their abilities as sales reps.

What is a Sales Playbook?

Similar to a training manual, a sales playbook gives your team a variety of sales techniques, methodologies, and guidelines for best practices. It covers all things “sales”, and it’ll give your sales reps easy-to-use guidance at any stage of the sales process. This can include call scripts, email templates, your company’s ideal customer profile, and research approaches. 

Sales Playbook Best Practices

Your sales playbook is going to be a map to customer success, so it must have excellent resources to help sales associates make the best decisions when dealing with customers or clients. You’re setting the tone for how you want to conduct your business, after all, so laying everything out leaves no room for confusion. For example, how do you look for your data insights? A sales team is only as good as their research. If you’re looking for relevant and impactful data insights on potential sales leads, you can use HG Insights. Want to learn more about how Intricately can increase your revenue and growth with data insights? Go to hginsights.com today to request a personalized demo.

Recommended Sections for the Best Possible Sales Playbook

Here’s a list of suggestions for your company’s sales playbook. Not everything will be relevant to every business, but these are some popular choices.

This is a great place to start your sales playbook. Here, you can include things like an FAQ for “what if” situations based on common questions your reps are asked or questions your reps usually have. You can go over BANT as a refresher and what your company values are. For managers that handle multiple teams, this is also incredibly helpful as a teaching tool.

Your sales presentations can go here as well, it’ll outline who your customers are and will be in the future. You’ll want to discuss buyer personas, ICPs, go in-depth about your services, and talk about various use-cases so your sales team is all on the same page. 

Having a section dedicated to going in-depth about who your customers are is important to show your sales reps exactly what to look for. Identifying sales leads gets astronomically easier when you get specific about who your target audience is for your service. You can even describe some of your big accounts in this section and use them as an example. Painting a picture of the industries you do business with can help your team accurately form sales territories without casting too wide of a net, generating better quality leads in the long run.

Setting up your team for success is essential to having a good group of sales reps. You can include sample calls and emails and practice exercises or quizzes that help your reps memorize important information. Talk about both good and bad experiences in terms of sales based on a variety of different situations. You can consider this a school for what exactly the product you’re selling does too, go in-depth about what your product does, and give real-life applications. Your sales team should be very familiar with what you do and why you do it. 

Any email templates, call scripts, or sales decks should be included in your playbook. You’ll want to have a variety of things prepared for different situations, such as emails for closing and a variety of lead stages, and powerpoints or whatever you prefer to use for presentations. Some if not all of these should be customizable to allow your team to come up with personalized experiences for any situation that may arise. Taking the time to all of these tools can feel like a daunting task, but you’ll notice how much easier and how streamlined things get after you prepare all of them for your sales team. 

This is the most important part of any sales playbook. You cannot function as a sales team unless there is specified information on how you conduct your pricing. Keeping things consistent across the board prevents any confusion or miscommunications. Pricing sheets can come into play here but should work however you see fit as every organization operates differently. You can show the tiers you have and who they’re best suited for, or outline various price points you sell products and services at. This is where you’ll be directing pricing conversations as well and when you prefer to bring up your prospect’s budget. Providing materials from previous sales reps that showcase how to have an ideal pricing conversation is a good idea so your team has a good reference to start from when making moves on their own.

This is a guideline discussing how to navigate sales discussions and what the best practices are according to your standard. You’ll be helping your team navigate conflict resolution, redirection to the correct teams, information sharing, and more. Setting up the who, what, when, where, why, and how for your team in the upcoming month or quarter is just another way you can get them ready for success. 

This can be applied when your team is looking at territories, segments, and accounts. For example, when considering territories:

“Is this territory defined by country?” or “Which sales teams are designated to these territories?”

Or when it comes to accounts:

“Who is responsible for these accounts?” or “What makes an account an account?”

And finally, some questions about segments could look like this:

“In which situations would a future customer fall under two segments?” or “How many segments are there?”

At the end of the day answering these questions determine how well you’ve built your sales strategy to last leading you to more growth and revenue as a result. 

Drawing up a map gives them a better chance of finding treasure. You should outline how things move in the sales process to give a clearer idea of how far along someone is in the sales funnel and what to do next. As with most of the information in this guide, it’s all about making things faster and easier for your sales team. You can start by outlining:

• Your sales process. Define each of the touchpoints involved in making a sale. Make sure it’s detailed enough so your sales reps can get a clear picture of how their leads are moving.
• Contracts and billing. Your sales reps should know how your payments work, if they’re annual or monthly, and anything else related to payments. You can create different templates based on annual, monthly, and quarterly billing cycles and determine who has the authority to sign off on invoices. Outlining any discounts or deals you provide and what situations those are appropriate is important as well.
• Sales forecasting. This allows your sales managers to better predict what’s coming depending on the season. You can base this on what’s happened in the past, what’s happening in your industry, and where you’re at with your current leads. Sales teams can hire more accurately and have the ability to set reasonable goals depending on the season.

Leads move around a lot depending on where they’re at in the sales funnel. It’s very important to make it absolutely clear where things should be moving and when. Making sure you have a detailed list of how to handle handovers helps keep things running smoothly as this process can get messy fast. It also helps your prospects see that they have your full attention and that your team is doing whatever they can to make sure they’re comfortable and being taken care of.

You should have your demos and qualifying questions ready for sales reps. It should be mentioned that your demo templates need to be guidelines and that each individual demo has to be personalized before being used. All the training and guidance you’ve given them will shine here, as it’ll be time for your sales reps to put it to good use when they’re customizing these demos. Before all of this, however, it’s important to outline how to determine what the prospective customer is looking for. It’s very similar if not identical to how your sales reps would ask questions for lead qualification. The “what problems are you facing the most within your organization?” and “what are your budget restrictions?” questions will help your sales reps get a better idea of how to map out their demos. In addition to all of your demo guidance, you can include some positive customer reviews your sales reps can use to punch it up.

Objection handling is very normal and common when it comes to sales. People will always have questions and concerns about what you’re trying to sell, and most importantly, where their company’s money could potentially be going. This guide should outline how to handle these types of situations. Giving your sales reps the ability to easily dig a little further into a potential customer’s concerns can help them get a better view of how they can alleviate the problem. They can ask questions like “how can I make you feel more comfortable with our product?” or “do you have any concerns with this aspect of our services?”. It’s important to include this aspect of the process in your playbook so your reps don’t become flustered and can build rapport with prospects easier.

Final Thoughts: HG Insights Role in your Sales Playbook

A sales playbook might sound like a lot of work, but it’s worth the time and effort when you start seeing increased revenue. HG Insight's data insights can help you form more accurate buyer personas and get your sales team on track to finding better quality leads. Incorporating Intricately into your sales can help elevate your team to the next level. If you’re interested in learning more about what HG Insights can do for you, request a demo today!