How to create a Sales Playbook

Everything you need to know to create an amazing B2B sales playbook: what makes a good playbook, what you need to include and some free resources to help you along the way.

So, you’ve decided you need a sales playbook. Perhaps you’re launching a new product, or maybe you’re setting up a reseller program and want to get channel partners on board. Or maybe you’ve decided that your sales teams and approach need a revamp.

That’s where a sales playbook comes in.

A sales playbook can drive new sales and educate teams on new products and turn your sales teams into sales superstars. In fact, companies that have a sales playbook are 33% more likely to be high performing organizations compared with not having a playbook in place.

What’s more, top-performing companies are TWICE as likely to use Sales Playbooks compared to their average performing competitors, and research shows that B2B sales playbooks enable companies to develop better customer relationships and increase average deal sizes (Research: Aberdeen Group).

But what do you need to include in your own sales playbook template for maximum success?

We’ve put together a comprehensive guide below to show you everything you need to include in your sales playbook.

What is a Sales Playbook?

A Sales Playbook is your product or company’s bible on how to sell a specific product, service or solution. It includes everything your sales teams need to know in order to get out there and have productive and successful sales meetings with their customers.

Playbooks are used within companies for a range of different purposes, across training up new sales representatives or as an onboarding resource for new employees. They are also used to train employees on how to position new products or services.

What are the different types of playbook?

Sales Playbook
A Sales Playbook is your crib sheet for your product, service or company. Some organisations have just one Sales Playbook, while some have a Playbook for each product they sell. It is like a simple guide for anyone selling your product or service which educates them on how to position your product, the challenges customers are facing in the market, and how to align your product to those challenges, and manage common objections – plus a whole load of extra useful sales information. (If you need to create your own Sales Playbook, then take a look at our Sales Playbook Template).

Company Playbook
A Company Playbook is a guide to your company – basically, what your company does and why. It usually includes a company overview, company history, what you do for your customers, how you engage with your customers, your mission and value statements and how you operate.

Operations Playbook
An Operations Playbook is all about how you deliver your services to customers. So, for example, an Operations Playbook for a restaurant might explain the steps that waiting staff go through when looking after a restaurant guest, from whether guests wait to be seated, to how you greet new customers. It’s your playbook for how to operate.

Reseller or Channel Playbook
Many organisations create Channel Playbooks for their reseller community to give them the information and tools to go and sell their products – all in one central playbook structure. This can be a mix of a company playbook and a sales playbook – demonstrating how to sell particular products and services and how resellers should engage with the vendor and partner ecosystem.

Why do you need a Sales Playbook?

How do your teams handle common customer objections? Can everyone pitch your solution or product succinctly? Is your sales messaging consistent?

We often speak to organisations who have all of this information, but it’s disjointed – sitting in brochures, websites and customer proposals. A sales playbook template brings this information together into one document for a consistent approach to sales success.

Let’s take a look at the different sections we recommend for the ultimate sales playbook. PS. If you’re not sure whether you need a sales playbook – check out this article on Why You Need a Company Playbook.

10 Key Sections to Include in Your Sales Playbook

We’re laying it all out for you, step by step with our recommended 10 key sections that every playbook needs to have.

Section 1: How to use the playbook

It’s important to clearly define how you intend the playbook to be used in the introduction section of your playbook document, covering everything from who is the intended audience, through to whether parts of the playbook are customer viewable, and what sales settings the playbook should be used in.

This provides a framework for the playbook and guides the content that will go into the playbook.

But, also, think about what you can tell your audience to get them interested in selling your product.

You also want to use this section to give your playbook audience some enticing facts about the Market Opportunity for your product or service. Why now? Why this product? Why this industry?

Give your playbook audience something to get them excited about selling your product. After all, they are going to be investing time, people and resources into learning about your product, then going out and selling it.

Getting your audience to really buy into you and your product is critical, otherwise, they won’t be motivated to go out and sell to customers – even if it’s your own sales staff that you’re training! Think about the carrot, rather than the stick.

Here are a few questions to help:

• Who is the intended audience for the playbook?
• When should the playbook be used?
• Is it a company playbook or a product-specific playbook?
• How will the playbook be updated?
• What info will I be able to find in the playbook?

Section 2: Elevator pitch

No sales playbook would be worth its weight without a good elevator pitch. This underpins your entire playbook and flows through all of your messaging – within the playbook and also your wider sales and marketing activity.

It needs to be short, snappy and memorable – lose the jargon and focus on customer value.

Your pitch should be a 1-minute overview of the solution, product or service you are selling. Think of it as a simple overview that you want your sales team or company representatives to be communicating to customers.

Remember to use your elevator pitch to tell your customers ‘what’s in it for them’ – why should they care about this offering? Give them something to show that your solution has some business value for them.

Customers are being bombarded with new products and services everyday, they are being sold to left, right and centre. Cut above the noise and tell them why this matters to them, right now. Stop thinking about what’s in it for you, and focus on the business value you’re bringing to customers.

If it is a company playbook, then the elevator pitch could be a quick overview of your company and what it does.

Key points to remember:

• Make the pitch last 1 minute maximum
• If people remember one thing about your company/product/service – what do you want it to be?

Section 3: Identify customer challenges

Here is where you talk about your customers’ business challenges. What challenges is their industry or market facing? What are typical challenges being faced by organizations in this sector?

By understanding what our customers’ challenges are, we can better align our products and services to those challenges.

Section 4: Understand customer objectives

Once you have listed the key customer challenges, next think about your customers’ objectives.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when filling in this section:

• What are their typical business objectives?
• What metrics are they working towards?
• What does success look like for your customer base?
• In their industry, what are some of the common initiatives and goals that companies are working towards?

Section 5: Product detail

So you have a great elevator pitch in place. Now, you need some detail to back up your pitch!
We don’t recommend getting too detailed in a sales playbook – after all, your audience can only
remember so much, so you want to give them a few good pointers and facts about your product or service for them to communicate with customers.

We recommend keeping the product detail pages to 2 pages maximum:

• Overview of your product or service
• Key statistics or facts about your product
• Information to support claims made in your elevator pitch

Section 6: Understanding customer outcomes

Once you have spoken about your product and provided a bit of detail, it’s important to get back to
focusing on the outcomes to the customer that your product or service can deliver.

Outcomes can sometimes be split into two levels: direct outcomes (departmental-level benefits) and business outcomes (tangible outcomes that impact on the business).

Section 7: Target prospect profile

Every playbook needs to articulate what an ideal prospect for your product or service looks like.

What does the ‘right buyer’ look like? What is their customer profile? Does your audience know what the ‘wrong buyer’ looks like?

Drill down onto the key elements of what your ideal buyer looks like and list them out for your playbook audience.

Useful questions:

• What is the prospect profile that you want your teams to be targeting?
• What does a bad target profile look like?
• What does a good target profile look like?
• What customer situations / scenarios lend themselves to customers considering your product or service?

Section 8: Buyer profiles

When we create a sales playbook, we include a range of buyer profiles, usually across different business departments.

How will you sell to different buyer roles across your organization? How will you change your sales messaging to suit each buyer group?

For example, what motivates a CEO might be different to what a Finance Director is interested in.

Including buyer profiles in your playbook helps your teams to position the right solution
information, benefits and detail, and ask the right questions depending on the buyer role they are speaking to.

Section 9: Managing objections

No playbook would be complete without a section on successfully managing objections. Imagine your Account Manager has successfully positioned your product, to the right target customer profile, and asked appropriate questions to their buyer role.

Then the customer throws out an objection, but your Account Manager doesn’t know how to respond.

Having a set of common objections and their answers helps to prepare your team for difficult customer conversations and head off any objections before they can disrupt the sale.

Try asking around your teams for the most common objections they hear from customers – it’s best to use real, live objections that customers are asking of your teams.

Section 10: Key questions

What questions should your sales teams be asking to get the conversation started with customers? What are the important questions which could uncover customer needs related to your solution? Always include some good business level and product level questions in your playbook to support sales teams in opening up a rewarding sales conversation with a customer.

What’s next?

Corporate sales playbooks typically include many more sections, delving into detail about specific customer industries or upsell opportunities, for example.

However, the sections outlined above are the 10 core sections that you need to include in any sales playbook to arm your teams with the knowledge and tools they require to have rewarding sales conversations with customers.

For more detail on the 10 Key Sections To Include In Your Sales Playbook, take a look at our video which goes through each section:

How do you create a Sales Playbook?

Creating a playbook is a lengthy process if you want to end up with a comprehensive and highly successful playbook – and we often get asked about what the actual sales playbook creation process looks like in practice.

We’ve created sales playbooks for some of the world’s biggest brands, and this is a fairly typical overview of the process we go through for our consulting clients:

• We start by interviewing our client to understand what they want to achieve from their sales playbook. It’s a good question, because organizations have different motivators for creating a sales playbook.
  For example, are you launching a new product and need to educate the sales team on this product? Are you recruiting for a number of new sales reps and need to quickly onboard them? Or, is it an existing product and an existing sales team, but you want to increase sales and effectiveness? Depending on the answers to these questions, the focus for the sales playbook will vary – and so will the questions we ask.
• We then interview our client’s selected experts – these could be technical contacts combined with sales leaders from across their company. Always try to make sure you get a good balance of views in your sales playbook – not too technical, but also not too light on detail so that your teams have all the info they need when they go out to talk to customers.
• Next, we review any supporting internal documentation that our clients already have that could be integrated into the playbook – after all, it makes sense for your messaging to be consistent across your brochures, proposals and playbooks.
• Then, we pull all of the different interviews and supporting documentation together and start to build the playbook and design the layout.
• When we have a first draft of the sales playbook ready, we liaise back with our client to check we are on the right track and build feedback into the playbook.

The process continues in a cycle of feedback and iterate until we reach a Sales Playbook structure that confidently articulates a client’s company, products and services and helps sales reps with how to engage with their customers to start the sales conversation.

Sales Playbook FAQs

Where can I get a template for a Sales Playbook?

We’ve put together a Sales Playbook Template pack where you can get Microsoft Word and PowerPoint Sales Playbook Templates, plus Sales Battlecard Templates – all in 6 different color options, plus a comprehensive how-to ebook on creating your sales playbook which goes through section by section in detail.

Is a B2B Sales Playbook the same as a B2C Sales Playbook?

A B2B sales playbook will have a number of differences compared with a B2C playbook. A B2B-focused playbook will focus on business challenges – and center on topics such as business operating costs and operational risk, whereas a B2C playbook will focus on individual’s drivers and personality-types. Our Playbook Pack is focused on the B2B sector!

Are there any free resources to help me create my own Sales Playbook?

We’ve put together a free guide on the Top Ten Sections to Include in Your Sales Playbook in the Resources section. These are ten critical areas that every sales playbook needs and it’s free to download.

What are some good examples of playbooks?

Because playbooks often contain a lot of confidential company data, you can’t readily find many playbook examples online. However, we wrote a post showing the best and worst of some sales playbook examples we found online, going through what made a playbook good, and what made it really, really bad.

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