Your sales team runs the offense for your company, and your sales playbook contains the strategies they utilize to win sales and reach the top! Think of it as a set of actionable plans and best practices your team can use to navigate the complex landscape of sales. It's not easy closing sales and reaching goals, and a strong playbook is the best line of support your sales team can have.

With a combination of universal guidelines and specific play-by-by strategies, your sales playbook can work wonders to boost productivity and help sales professionals across all skill levels. While it won't replace in-depth training, it is a way to align objectives, create common goals, and support your reps every step of the way.

There's a lot to gain from having a solid sales playbook, from tried and true strategies to detailed sales processes that empower your reps to engage at every touchpoint. Want to learn how to create a winning sales playbook for your company? We have you covered!

An Example Template of a Sales Team Playbook

Sales playbooks are a must for any modern business. While the concept sounds simple enough, the definition of a playbook goes farther than just a few sales scripts. It's a comprehensive resource that empowers and motivates your sales reps.

It doesn't matter how much experience they have. Sales professionals should never have to go into a sale alone. Playbooks offer support and a well-defined roadmap to success. With tons of sales tools at their fingertips, your sales reps will have all they need to smash goals. What sales rep doesn't want that?

So, what's in a sales team playbook, anyway? All good sales playbooks are unique to the sales organizations they serve. There is no universal sales approach, and your strategies differ from your competitors. As a result, your playbook should reflect that.

However, there are many vital elements to include to cover your bases. Here's an example sales playbook template to get you started.

Company Information

A great sales playbook will start with information about your company. This chapter serves a couple of different purposes.

First, it's essential for new reps you're bringing into the team. There's nothing more daunting than joining an established sales team and finding your place within it. The playbook will ease the transition, introduce new hires into the organization, and provide some crucial need-to-know information.

But it's not just for new hires. The second purpose it serves is ensuring that your existing reps are on the same page. It's about aligning goals and creating shared objectives everyone will work to support.

There are a few things to outline in this section.

Mission Statement

The all-important mission statement should be one of the first things in your sales playbook. Here, you'll detail what the company does and its overall mission in the industry. It's a clear-cut statement of what the company stands for and what makes it different.

Why does the mission statement matter? Ultimately, it's the foundation of your sales message. Understanding the mission statement can help reps approach sales from the proper perspective.

Company Strategy

Every organization has a big-picture sales strategy. It's not about quarterly sales goals and quotas you want to hit. The broader company strategy covers the over-arching plan of what you want to achieve in the market and industry.

It's why your business exists and details the unique challenges you're trying to solve for clients or companies. In this section, it's good to explain how the sales team fits into the strategy and what reps can do to support it.

Organizational Chart

Finally, don't forget the organization chart. This section explains how the sales team fits together. It's a communication breakdown detailing which people to report to, such as sales managers and team leaders. It's best to include names, titles, and short descriptions of each role.

You can also take things further and include a separate section for individual roles and responsibilities. You can go over expectations for every person, making it easier for salespeople to plan and meet goals.

Product Information

Your sales team can't succeed if they don't know everything there is to know about your products! Here's where you detail your products or services, allowing sales reps to learn as much as they can about what they're trying to sell.

Whether you go into extreme detail is up to you. Some companies develop different resources to empower sales professionals and put meaning behind their strategies. But for now, the main priority is to provide basic information and answer questions potential buyers might have. For example, your team members should know what products can do, how they work, and why customers need them.

Complete Product List

Always provide a complete list of products offered. There's nothing worse than a rep missing a potential sales opportunity because they're unaware of your current product line. For example, they could miss out on chances of upsell.

Provide a detailed list that your reps can easily reference on the fly.

Product Bundles and Packages

Does your company offer bundles? Make sure that information is readily available.

Packaged items are a great way to upsell and increase individual transaction values. In many cases, those bundles come with a discount that could sway buyers in one direction and provide better use cases that justify a purchase.

Specials Offers and Sales Priorities

Finally, provide information about any ongoing promotions. Everyone loves a good sale, and special offers could push a buyer to convert.

Also, include information about sales priorities. If there's one item in the product line or service you need to offload, let your reps know what to focus their attention on first.

Messaging Templates and Sales Content

Here's the section that your entire team will likely use the most in your sales playbook. It includes the resources reps will refer to when figuring out what to say and how to interact with potential buyers. There's a ton of room for flexibility here, and this section requires some time to flesh out.

Spend as much time as you can padding this section up with content your reps will utilize. Turn to sales enablement materials for ideas. Make it unique to your company, and don't be afraid to reach out to successful representatives for help. This section is an excellent opportunity to spread wisdom throughout the sales team and adopt a "stand on the shoulder of giants" mentality of coaching.

Sales Pitch Talk Tracks

One of the most challenging parts of sales is giving that real-time elevator pitch. Initiating a sales conversation isn't easy. Say the wrong thing, and you could immediately turn off buyers.

Talk tracks can give your team a good jumping-off point. Think of it as a flexible script. It's one of the most valuable sales enablement materials available. You can include talking points that detail the product's value, explain how it fulfills a unique need, etc. Talk tracks are helpful for call scripts, email conversations, follow-up communications, etc.

Templates for Email, Social Media, and Sales Decks

Your reps reach out to customers in many ways. It's not always face-to-face conversations or telephone calls. Sometimes, they'll take to social media or use a sales deck.

Don't let your communicate without any support. Templates can guide your team in the right direction. Not only that, but it ensures a cohesive voice and branding. Use email and social media templates that are already proven to be successful. Why fix what's not broken?

Conversation Intelligence

Conversation intelligence is about reacting to verbal and non-verbal cues in a conversation. It involves knowing how to respond to customers in a way that furthers the discussion and creates memorable touchpoints that eventually lead to a sale. Not everyone is gifted enough to have conversation intelligence. It's something you must learn.

There are a few different ways to provide conversation intelligence support. You can create a branching script that's easy to follow and offers successful conversation points. Alternatively, you can rely on technology to think for you! Include that information here so your reps are always prepared to speak with customers.

A Robust Prospect FAQ List

Customers are bound to have a slew of questions. It's natural to be curious about a purchase regardless of its value. Having a list of potential following questions your customers will answer makes it easier for your sales reps to prepare for anything.

Pricing Resources

This section of your sales team playbook details all the pricing information your reps need to make sales and negotiate. It requires more than simple price tags. You must be transparent and give your team the pricing tools to work with customers directly.

Pricing Sheet

Of course, a pricing sheet is crucial. But it should be more than a bare-bones spreadsheet. Pricing is often flexible. Provide recommended pricing and accepted ranges that make negotiating a breeze. Also, don't forget to update the pricing sheet when you release new products.

Price Negotiation Talk Track

There's an art to successful sales negotiations. While you often won't experience that back-and-forth game with B2C sales, it's common in the B2B world.

Prepare your team with detailed negotiation talk tracks. It should include statements that support the product's value and show reps how to respond to offers.

Customer Identity Resources

Knowing your target demographic is half the battle. Sales are more complex than understanding why a product is good. Your reps need to put themselves in the customers' shoes to fully understand their perspective and why they need your product or service.

This section is about painting a picture of buyers. It covers all the pain points, trends, and preferences that will ultimately influence your customers' decisions. The goal here is to empower your team to adjust their sales tactics based on the person they're speaking to at the moment.

Customer Persona Profiles

Hopefully, your research and marketing teams have created detailed personas for your target audience. Buyer personas are sales enablement content that outlines a customer's needs and personality. They act as a framework for how you approach a sale. They represent entire sales segments and provide meaning to the concept of buyer-focused selling.

While they look like fictional people, those are the folks that are most likely to buy from you. Please provide all the information your teams need to understand who those buyer personas are.

Customer Journey Map

The customer journey is the various stages of the sales cycle. It's what a person experiences before buying a product or service. Think about the last time you made a significant purchase. There's a good chance you discovered an item that piqued your interest, did research to learn more about it, and toyed with the idea of ownership before you committed. Your customers do the same thing.

The buyer's journey map can get complex, but it usually includes three stages. These include the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. Understanding what your customers go through is vital for many reasons.

The biggest is that it allows you to shape the journey to your favor. It's about interacting with buyers at the right time to move the journey along and encourage a sale.

Territory or Market Segments

If you cater to a broad audience, you likely have separate territory or market segments. Include that information and make responsibilities and targets clear from the jump. Whether you define these groups based on geographic location or sales potential, be transparent about it to make the selling process more efficient.

Product Demonstration Resources

It's not enough to know what products do or what market they serve. If you want to empower your team as much as possible, give them the tools to show customers what your products can do!

Product demonstrations illustrate your reps' knowledge and can provide some peace of mind that becomes the deciding point for buyers.

Demonstration Videos

It always pays to have demonstration videos. It's one thing to tell people about new products. It's another to show them how things work and provide real-world use cases.

Having demonstration videos available is a fantastic way to support your reps. They can pull those videos out to address buyer concerns. Plus, it gives them the opportunity to learn more about what they're selling.

Product Demo

Product demos are another way to sway sales in your team's favor. Many buyers want to test out big purchases in real-time before making a significant investment. You're likely to experience that with both large B2C sales and B2B sales.

Always provide information about product demos. In most cases, your reps will have to prepare for in-person demonstrations. Here is where you'll provide the information required to make that happen.

Trial or Pilot Program

Does your company offer short trials or pilot programs? This sales tactic is similar to basic product demos. But instead of a quick 20-minute demonstration, your buyers might use the product for a few days or weeks to ensure that it fulfills their needs.

Once again, ample preparation is a must. Trials aren't something reps can set up on the fly. But, having the necessary information readily available lets them offer pilot programs on the spot.

Sales Reference Materials

Here's another section that many representatives will reference pretty frequently. As the name implies, these reference materials revolve around the actual sales process. This section provides step-by-step plans, sales enablement materials, and unique strategies.

Sales Strategies

All sales organizations have unique strategies they employ. There are plenty of best practices out there, and you should certainly include them here if they're successful for your organization. But you likely also have tactics that define how you make sales.

It's the "secret sauce" of your sales department. Consider working with some of your top-performing representatives to provide tips and play-by-play strategies. Include every unique trick you know and give your team plenty of ideas to approach a new sale.

Arm your team with ideas for sales prospecting, lead qualification, and more.

Sales Resources

Most modern businesses work with sales-focused platforms or have a suite of tools at their disposal. They boost sales effectiveness and overall productivity. Here's where you tell your reps how to take advantage of them.

This section should include information on where to find tools, which ones to use at specific touchpoints, and more. A great sales team playbook will also move beyond basic how-tos. Focus on how your team can make the most out of these valuable resources to boost their figures and improve sales efficiency.

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Give Your Sales Reps the Tools to Win as a Team

There you have it! A good sales team playbook will be unique to your company, but this example is a fantastic start. Use it to create your own sales playbook and develop something that your team can rely on for every sale.

Playbooks give your sales teams all the tools they need to succeed! Check out Flockjay to learn more. Flockjays is an all-in-one platform that provides innovative ways to develop and empower your team for tremendous success across the board!

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