After recruiting your sales team and coming up with a sales strategy, you should then ensure that everybody is ready to work toward your business goals and objectives. A business sales playbook provides your sales team with the information and tools they require to successfully execute your sales strategy. In addition, it helps your sales representatives to sell your goods or services in different situations.

It’s important to note that sales representatives will never come across two similar days in their professional lives. This is because they always deal with a wide variety of customers who need different goods and services, and have varying budgets and reservations. So, there’ a lot for them to cope with.

You undoubtedly need a business sales playbook to simplify the sales process. It will act as the sales team’s go-to guide for your best practices, procedures, and processes. It will further empower your salespersons to adapt to diverse selling circumstances and engage different clients at each touchpoint.

In this article, you will learn what a business sales playbook is and where you can download a free template. Please read on to gain more insights about this crucial business tool.

What Is a Business Sales Playbook?

A business sales playbook is essentially a guidebook that outlines your sales best practices, procedures, and processes. It acts as a manual for selling your services and products. Your sales representatives can improve their customer conversion rate, augment their productivity, and drive the company’s revenue growth by following the steps outlined in your business sales playbook.

Most importantly, a business sales playbook contains all your business sales plays to help your sales representatives know how to behave in each phase of the sales process.

What is a sales play?

This is typically a set of stages that the sales reps must follow in a given situation. Sales plays are very important as they guide your sales personnel on how to convert prospects. Ideally, sales plays help prepare sales reps for each scenario they may come across in the process of selling your products. This implies that you can have a sales play for all the phases of the sales process.

What Is Contained in a Business Sales Playbook?

While there are certain key elements that every business sales playbook must have, you can customize the sales playbook for your business. The most common components of a sales playbook comprise:

The company’s overview

While there are certain key elements that every business sales playbook must have, you can customize the sales playbook for your business. The most common components of a sales playbook comprise:

A majority of sales playbooks provide an overview of a firm and its business needs. They clearly indicate the organization’s business, set goals, culture, history and offerings, and how the sales reps can fit into the company’s broader picture.

The information you should include in this section includes:

• The company’s strategy: you should start by highlighting your sales strategy and how the sales team is factored in the strategy. You should also exemplify how the sales strategy aligns with your overall business strategy.

• The business values and mission: you should elucidate who you are, your business, and what sets you apart from your competitors. You should also indicate your mission statement as it will form the foundation of all your sales and marketing messages.

• Org chart: you need to have a simple chart of the company’s hierarchy in order to clarify the seniority of the management team. It should show titles and names and how the sales team is organized.

• The roles and responsibilities assigned to each person: you should define the roles and responsibilities each sales rep is supposed to undertake. You should clearly explain their roles, including how you set their targets and measure their performance.

Products and pricing

In this section, you need to explain to your sales team about everything they should know concerning the products and services you are selling, including their prices. Your sales reps should have all information about your products and services at their fingertips. You should further highlight what differentiates your products and services from those offered by your rivals and enlighten your sales reps on why customers find them appealing.

You should also explain to the sales reps the manufacturing costs of your products and the prices you plan to sell them at. With this vital information, the sales team will be adequately equipped to comprehensively respond to any customers’ queries and promote your products and services to potential clients.
The sales methodology

The sales methodology

Your selected sales methodology will guide the whole sales process. You should, therefore, explain to the sales team why you chose it and indicate how it aligns with your company’s goals. You should also guide them on how to use it in different stages of the sales process, including:

• Lead prospecting: you will have to guide sales reps on how to find leads. In this regard, you can provide them with tools they can use or directions for cold calling.

• Lead qualification: qualification of leads makes sure that sales reps don’t waste their precious time going after prospects who will never convert. You should, hence, educate them on how to go about it using certain criteria or software if you have any.

• Closing sales: There are some steps you would like your sales reps to take to close sales deals. For instance, you may have specific policies on cross-selling or upselling products and services or allow your sales reps to have custom quotes depending on the products a customer wants.

• Post sales: you should encourage your sales reps to follow-up a customer after sales to find out if they were happy with your product or service and whether they are likely to come back for more. You should, nonetheless, direct them on how to perform a post-sales contact to avoid harassing clients, thereby upsetting them.

Buyer personas

You will find it challenging marketing your products if you don’t know your target customers. Therefore, you will have to conduct an extensive exploration into your sales information in order to draft an ideal buyer persona.

The first thing you need to do is to segment your target customer base into B2B or B2C because they normally have varying motivations for purchasing products or services. The information for a B2B persona may entail industry, company size, goals, pain points, geographical location, and solution requirements, whereas a B2C persona may have such information as demographics, job title, lifestyle, motivations and goals, purchasing demeanor, and frustrations.

This information will help you narrow down your target audience, understand their pain points and preferences, and how your products can solve and satisfy them.

The commission structure

Every enterprise has a compensation structure, containing a baseline salary and a bonus or commission structure. Noticeably, the commission structure varies from one organization to another based on a number of factors, such as types of products or services sold and the number of items sold.

You need to have a clearly defined commission structure for your sales reps to understand how it works and what commission they should expect if they surpass their sales targets. You should indicate whether sales reps will receive bonuses or commissions based on the highest-grossing sales or the volume of sales.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are a vital component of a business sales playbook. They inform sales reps about your business goals and provide an explicit and measurable way of reviewing their performance.

You should set your KPIs based on your sales goals, but if you don’t have them in place, you can consider such objectives as the number of qualified leads, time to close, and average deal time, among others.

Make sure to clarify how the performance of sales reps and business leaders will be measured. Also indicate the responsibilities of business leaders when it comes to coaching and training of new hires, as well as providing them with resources.

Resources

You will need to assemble resources that can help the sales team to effectively do its work. The aim should be to provide sales reps with necessary information for achieving your goals and objectives. The two types of resources to consider in this case are internal and external. The internal resources support your sales persons perform their work, whereas the external ones support your clients.

Messaging

The other element you need to incorporate into your business sales playbook is what your sales reps should tell your customers. You’ll have to provide them with scripts that describe the value proposition and positioning of your brand. Such information will enable your sales personnel to communicate with leads and prospects in a manner that represents your organization.

The Importance of a Business Sales Playbook

The essence of guided selling can never be overlooked in business. When done correctly, sales playbooks help sales teams to realize improved productivity. A survey conducted by the Aberdeen Group shows that businesses that document and disseminate their best practices reduce their sales cycles by 10%, their sales reps achieve 4% higher quotas, and their revenue growth is usually 7.9% higher than their counterparts that don’t use sales playbooks.

A business sales playbook is irrefutably crucial for the success of your sales team for a couple of reasons. For instance, it can help

• Create unity within the sales team: all salespeople will be required to utilize the same sales strategy based on established best practices. This means that the team members will embrace team work and feel more confident, thus fostering growth as they can share their recommendations and suggestions.

• Ease the process of hiring and training new sales reps: you should use a sales playbook to recruit and orient new hires because they have a lot to learn. A sales playbook contains everything they require to succeed. They can also use the business sales playbook to find answers to the questions they are asked by customers, as a result minimizing the time they would spend consulting senior sales reps.

• In rolling out new products: when introducing new products to the market you can use the existing sales playbook instead of developing an entirely new sales and marketing plan. There are even high chances that the current sales practices will effectively work with a few adjustments.

• Save time for your existing sales reps: it’s extremely hard for your sales reps, including the veterans, to memorize each detail of your sales strategy. Then, a sales playbook allows them to countercheck information before they can communicate with your customers. It also prevents them from crafting new sales content.

• Enhance the customer experience: a sales playbook ensures that you don’t have to use customers as the subjects for testing new approaches. Instead, your sales reps employ the already established best practices to provide solutions based on the clients’ needs.

With these numerous benefits, coupled with the opportunity to increase your sales and overall revenue, having a business sales playbook is a no brainer.

An Example of a Business Sales Playbook

Sales to CS Hand-off

The sales to customer success handoff is a very important period in your clients’ journey. When done well, this makes your customers feel supported and prepared to achieve their goals. In contrast, they can feel unsatisfied, alone, and may even become remorseful if the handoff ain’t smooth. So, how can you create a seamless sales to customer handoff?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to a seamless sales to customer success handoff, there are practices you can espouse as a sales leader to have open communication between sales teams. In this regard, a Sales to CS Hand-off comes in handy. The document will contain everything that the customer success agents and sales reps will need in order to have a smooth transition for your clients. That way, your company can augment the client retention rate.

At Smartkarrot.com, we understand that the process of building a business sales playbook can be tricky and time-consuming. That’s why we provide you with a free template download on our website. You can, hence, download a Sales to CS Hand-off template here.

Parting Shot

Having a well-implemented business sales playbook in your business can make your sales team unstoppable. This vital business tool contains everything your sales reps need to find leads and convert them into clients. As your enterprise expands, you can edit and customize your sales playbook to include your new services, products, and customers.

---