Sales Playbook Development and Training:
The Professional Sales Academy has several sales enablement options to help you develop your sales playbook. We can offer training and guidance on how to develop and design your sales playbook, or we can lead the process for you by developing, designing and helping you implement the program.
What is a Sales Playbook?
A Sales Playbook is a document of the sales process steps and best practices for each sales role. It’s an onboarding tool, reference guide, coaching tool, and map for sales success. It’s not a training manual for the entire sales system, it’s more akin to the Coles Notes version of your sales process, methodologies, KPIs and procedures.
What are the benefits of a Sales Playbook?
Sales Playbooks help reduce ramp-up times, capture best practices, help create consistency across the team and help create key benchmarks for sales success. They’re also a map of sorts, helping the team know where to get information or help on a specific area of the sales process.
What are the typical components for a Sales Playbook?
The components of a great Sales Playbook can include:
- Ideal Customer Profiles, including micro niches and personas
- Map of key steps to your sales process
- A sales process scorecard (KPIs and best practices in each step)
- Key outbound talking points and template samples
- Key numbers and conversion ratios for the sales process
- Where or from whom to learn about products and sales technology
- A “Discovery or Needs Analysis Cheat Sheet” on each vertical
- A well-documented sales discovery (qualification) and demo process
- Templates or processes for outreach and client nurturing (cadences)
- Talking points on key objections and closes
- Ready to use stories and UVP talking points for key segments
- KPI’s broken down from annual to monthly to weekly and daily disciplines
Our process for helping you develop your Sales Playbook:
Step 1: Interview, discovery, and shadowing
Through group and one-on-one discovery sessions as well as shadowing and/or roleplays we engage your top performers and get them to walk us through their sales process. In addition to this we also engage your sales managers to get their direction and perspective on the ideal process. We also create a master list of existing assets including process documentation, on the job tools, and create an inventory of tools that already exist.
Step 2: Develop a map of the sales process and a process scorecard.
Mapping your sales process and measurably defining success at each step is vital. It enables you to ensure that people are following the steps and quantifies the quality of each step taken. Sales coaches and sales managers can use the tool to help sales people identify what part of the sales process they are effective at and what areas they need to improve.
Step 3: Collate learning and best practices from the team.
A lot of the key content pieces for the Playbook such as Ideal Customer Profiles, objections and answers, needs analysis questions and more have already been created by the team that took the sales training. These documents just need to be collated, refined and presented in a way that is duplicable.
Step 4: Identify gaps or opportunities to embed additional sales approaches and best practices.
After mapping out the existing sales process and creating an inventory of the sale tools available we identify any gaps or opportunities to improve or add to the process. We may supplement the existing process and tools with additional methodologies and processes from the training program. We will also collaborate and workshop with key staff to develop these additional processes and strategies together.
Step 5: Create the final Sales Playbook
After steps 1-4 we will develop and refine the Playbook document, scorecard, and support tools and ready it for deployment and implementation with the team. This phase will include feedback from the team and any revisions required. The final Playbook will be approximately 25-30 pages in length not including support documents or additional sales tools we may create.
After this Sales Playbook is developed it can also be customized for channel partners, resellers, and different market segments.
Step 6: Roll-out – This step will include the following:
- Train the manager and sales coach sessions on the Playbook to ensure they buy-in and understand how to use it
- Sales team training on the Playbook, walking them through the process and best practices. We will also recognize the team members that contributed to the ideas and methodologies the Playbook.
- (Optional) Development of a condensed video overview of the Sales Playbook and how to use the Sales Process Scorecard – (this would be an eLearning development component).
The Sales Playbook development program take 60-90 days and would be developed in collaboration with you and your team. Sales Academy consultants and sales coaches would lead the process and develop the document.
For more information on our Sales Playbook training, consulting and design contact us: