How to build your first sales playbook

In 3 easy steps

Most sales leaders are familiar with the concept of a playbook, however I’ve found few teams actually have a written playbook and more often than not the playbooks that do exist are for the benefit of management, rather than salespeople.

Instead, most teams rely heavily on tacit institutional knowledge for moving deals through the sales process. While this works ok when you are small, it starts to hold you back the moment you start adding salespeople.

Getting started on your playbook sooner rather than later gives you several benefits:

• It helps your existing salespeople be more efficient and successful.

• It helps your new salespeople ramp up quickly.

• It creates consistency for managing your pipeline and forecast.

• It maximizes the ROI on your enablement library.

• It surfaces issues in your process and helps you prioritize them.

Building a sales playbook (or a playbook for any stage of your customer journey) involves 3 steps:

1. Define your process stages.

2. Describe the key activities for each stage.

3. Describe the best practices for each stage.

1. Define your process stages

Most sales teams have stages in their sales process, however the key is to define the goal and exit criteria for each stage, in a table like this: