The Best Sales Playbook Will Contain These 10 Things

What's a Sales Playbook and what should one contain? 

It's the place where you document, demonstrate & house resources for your sales team - but also for anyone who collaborates with the sales team. Whether you're starting from scratch or updating an existing playbook, you'll want to make sure you include these 10 things in your Sales Playbook:

1. Details about your Company's Product(s)/ Service(s) - and don't skip over the technical stuff. If it's something that could get asked during the sales process or due diligence - spend time documenting how you want to handle it here. Don't forget to talk about the internal processes and teams responsible for the delivery of the product/service as well. How does sales collaborate with those teams? How are new ideas & requests shared? Where does one find information on new offerings & functionality as it becomes available? Bonus for including the company's origin story if it's something that could be a highlight in the sales process.

2. The Market/ Industry/ External Resources to Know for Success. The best way to learn something totally new is to surround yourself with it. Where do your customers and prospects hang out online and get their industry news/updates from? Who are thought leaders in the space to follow? What are some good google alert keywords to subscribe to? Bonus for including a company/industry specific glossary of all the acronyms and terms to be familiar with.

3. Your company's Ideal Customer Profile - and this is not a section to skimp on. Share as much detailed information as possible about your defined ICP. Where do you really focus in? What's the sweet spot? Who are the players? What are their titles and what  are they generally responsible for? What current clients are representative of this ICP? Bonus for detailing why those in adjacent spaces & segments are not your ICP.

4. Go-to-Market Strategy Overview - you will definitely want to recruit some help from marketing to do this section right. The goal is for the sales team to understand all of the different levers marketing has to pull, what the GTM strategy looks like, and how they can help support those efforts by being in sync with marketing. Share details about the Top, Middle & Bottom Funnel strategies, social media strategies, PR & comms guidelines, and how information and ideas are shared between sales & marketing. Bonus for taking ownership of maintaining a healthy sales & marketing atmosphere with shared goals.

5. Where Marketing ends and Sales begins - or details about the handoff process from marketing or SDR/BDR teams to sales. A lot of good leads get lost in this part of the process due to lack of coordination, understanding & communication. You can get ahead of this by spelling out responsibilities & expectations at every step of the process. Don't forget to detail all the CRM info that marketing & product deem critical to collect during the sales process. Bonus for including examples of the handoff process.

6. Sales process overview, step-by-step, with CRM stages & screen shots to accompany. This may be the longest section of the Playbook - as it should. You're going to cover the sales process your company subscribes to, and what should be happening in each of those stages. The more examples you can provide, the better your sales team will be at adopting the process. Don't just say Stage 1 is for Discovery - detail all possible learnings the sales team can get from conducting proper discovery, with sample questions, potential responses, and where those should lead. Bonus for maintaining a library of recordings to supplement the teams' learnings.

7. Outcome strategies for closed won, closed lost & in-pipeline leads. This gets skipped a lot - but having a detailed plan for all potential outcomes of a lead will strengthen your entire GTM program. Closed won? How are we communicating and working with this new customer from the moment the contract is signed? Closed lost? What must be documented in order for us to learn and iterate on our strategy? In-pipeline? What are the comms expectations when we have a prospect in process? Should other departments hold comms and funnel them through the AE? Bonus for automating as much of these steps as possible to ensure compliance & accuracy. 

8. Current clients, their "closed won" story, and how you partner with them today. No one makes a better company to talk about in the sales process than a current client who loves you and what you do. While case studies & references are important, so is being able to tell the stories about why your customers choose you. What problems did they have? How were you able to partner to solve them? What impact did that have on the business? Everyone in sales should be able to speak to these things for a handful of clients. Bonus if the AE who sold the deal helps document the story!

9. Sales Strategies to Win -  What are YOUR organizations best practices to help the sales team work? You can't just copy someone else's playbook - every company has unique differences in the sales process that require a different approach in some areas. These can be tactical, process driven advice, analogies that help bridge the gaps in understanding, current industry hot topics and why they matter, etc. Bonus for sharing recorded examples of how these strategies have been deployed well in the past.

10. Sales career path info - Do not skip this section! Don't have this spelled out yet? Add it to your near-term to-do list. Sales people are competitive, performance driven & always working on themselves. For each level/career path option, spell out what good looks like. What are the basic tasks, responsibilities & KPIs you expect every sales team member to meet? What is considered above & beyond? Are there time or tenure requirements for advancing? Bonus for peers who have gotten promoted contributing tips & resources to this section. 

Remember, this should be a living breathing document. The more people you can recruit to own keeping it up to date and accurate, the better! But make the sales team responsible for it, at minimum. Don't let perfection impede progress - this doesn't have to be anything fancy. Just something that's easy to access, organize & collaborate on. My last Sales Playbook was created in Google Docs. While I wrote the first draft, once it was shared with the team it became everyone's responsibility to contribute to keeping it up to date & relevant. The reward was finding the information you needed there frequently as well. A resource is only useful with users.