What Is a Sales Playbook?
A sales playbook guides your sales and customer service teams to achieve success.
The sales playbook offers best practices, sales tactics and strategies, client-facing or team-oriented content, videos, infographics, articles, blog posts, white papers, and more. A sales playbook includes information about target companies and buyer personas, how to close sales and follow the buyer’s journey, and your KPIs.
A sales playbook in your company will streamline communications, reduce errors, and get your team to operate at its full potential. Your sales playbook will work inside and with your CRM.
The sales playbook is kept in an online central storage area available on all devices by all team members. In analog terms, it’s like a notebook.
What Are the Best Practices for Creating Effective Sales Playbooks?
As you craft your playbook, be sure to:
- Align your playbook to each stage of the buyer’s Journey.
- Be sure to include Ideal Company Profiles (ICP) and Buyer Persona(s).
- Gather all customer-facing and team content, and ensure content is updated and approved.
- Examine your current sales cycle and processes for weaknesses and strengths.
- Train reps on handling customer concerns, objections, and other challenges.
- Get input from your marketing team and management.
- Update your playbook regularly.
- Provide training for systems such as your CRM.
- Include your sales enablement charter.
What Elements Make a Sales Playbook Successful?
- Landing Page — This is the first page your team sees when they open the playbook. Your team members can see any changes recently made to the playbook. They can see the company calendar of events, along with motivational quotes. Remind your team to visit this page regularly to stay in the loop!
- Sales Process — A compilation of top performers’ best practices and habits. It should include steps to closing deals, helpful tips and tricks, benchmarks, and templates. It will also show proper methods of communication.
- Announcements — Include a section for posting announcements. You can include meetings, events, public messages, and more to keep your team up-to-date and engaged.
- Company Credo — Post your company credo in a place your team visits regularly. This reminds everyone of their purpose within the company and keeps the team focused.
- Mission & Motto — The sales team’s mission and motto will motivate the team and keep them aligned for growth.
- Sales Policies — This will list the “Do’s and Don’ts” of selling for your team. It should contain protocols informing team members what they can and cannot do when selling your various products and services. This includes deals they can offer, statements they may or may not make, and any other rules.
- Templates — Create easy-to-follow templates to save your sales team valuable time and energy.
- Contact Information — Your team will have easy access to contact information for department members they interact with daily.
- Protocol Information — Ensure efficient cross-team communication.
- Tool Information — A guide to the CRM, e-signatures, payment tools, and accounting tools, plus log-in information.
- Common Pitfalls — We learn by making mistakes. However, preventing them can save valuable time that is better spent selling. Include a list of common pitfalls your sales reps have encountered so the team may continue learning from one another.
Implementing these elements into your sales playbook will ensure that your team can quickly find important answers and information. When executed effectively, the playbook will also give your team the knowledge and tools necessary to improve their workflows. This will provide them with more time to hunt leads and close.
Why Have a Sales Playbook?
There are many benefits to implementing a sales playbook into your sales team’s day-to-day operations. It is a critical component of successful sales enablement programs and sets the team up for success.
One benefit to a sales playbook is that it evolves alongside your company. It is a living document that can easily be updated as policies and procedures change. It will provide teams with up-to-date information, ensuring that everyone understands important changes.
A sales playbook helps your sales management team maximize their time by eliminating the constant questions they typically field from sales reps and the need to make policy announcements that get lost in the shuffle of emails and other modes of communication. It also increases sales rep productivity, as the information they typically seek from employees across departments can be found in the playbook.
Aside from providing the team with direction, a playbook also dramatically minimizes the risk of errors. When expectations are laid out clearly, they are much easier to understand and result in fewer mistakes. A playbook gives team members the knowledge they need to work confidently and spend less time correcting errors.
The sales playbook benefits every team member, from the newest hires to the most tenured reps. It’s a powerful tool for onboarding new team members, as it helps them become accustomed to the team’s operations quickly and provides them with a guide to refer to throughout their training journey. By including tips and tricks and other helpful material in your playbook, you encourage your whole sales team to adopt the best practices of your top performers.
Sales Playbook: Empower Your Team to Succeed
The TigerLRM platform includes a built-in sales playbook and a professional team to help you customize and maintain it. With decades of experience providing sales enablement services, the team at TigerLRM is dedicated to assisting businesses with organizing and optimizing their sales teams to become more successful.
Often overlooked and underestimated, a sales playbook can be instrumental in enabling your sales team. Team members can find valuable information and tools in one place. With a comprehensive sales playbook, your sales team can maximize their potential for success.
To assign a sales enablement user, simply go to Administrator > User Management > Edit User.
Once you are on the user’s information, you can select if you want them to be “Non-Admin,” “Admin,” or part of the “Enablement Team.” Save this information, and your desired user will have the right access.
Originally published at https://www.tigerlrm.com.
