Sarah Jane Hicks, Director of coaching and consulting at Predictable Revenue and Bloobirds’ CMO, Marc Gassó, offer their expert advice about creating a sales playbook.
By Lucía Beldarrain on March 03, 2022
Wondering how to ensure that your prospecting and sales teams are functioning correctly? The first step is making sure they have a clear idea of your strategy and ensure the whole team is working towards the same goal. This is what the Sales Playbook defines.
Assembling what constitutes the backbone of your Sales Team can be one of the most challenging and complex projects to achieve. It should include all the steps of our sales process, buyer personas, pain points, qualification criteria, templates… anything and everything that can help the Sales and SDR teams perform at their best.
So in order to highlight the best practices that high-performing leaders should be paying attention to when it comes to building their sales playbook, we sat down with Sarah Jane Hicks, Director of coaching and consulting at Predictable Revenue and Bloobirds’ CMO, Marc Gassó. They offered their expert advice on what should go in it, where it should live, and everything you need to know about creating and implementing your sales strategy.
A Sales Playbook is a step-by-step guide every sales team should have in order to follow the same practices for every possible sales situation. It helps reps through all possible scenarios and helps them make better decisions on what to do next and how to do it, ensuring always the correct and most precise outcome.
Sarah assured: “It’s like your bible or manual, it brings together all the information into one central location so that SDRs can leverage it. People only remember small amounts of information and this results in huge issues with scalability, complexity makes scalability difficult. This issue can be removed with a playbook because the team will know how to walk through step by step”.
Marc agreed, adding that “the more complex your go-to-market strategy is, the more you need a playbook”.
Steps to create your Sales Playbook
1. Defining your GTM strategy
In order to define your Go-To-Market strategy, you’ll have to ask yourself, What kind of companies do we want to sell to? Who do we want to talk to?
You’ll be defining:
Target market
Target persona
Value prop by TM and TP
“It’s the foundation for your playbook as it dictates the rest of it”
Sarah Jane Hicks, Senior SDR at Predictable Revenue
SDRs become more effective when they’re consistently targeting prospects who are the most likely to buy your solution. While most companies already have a solid idea of their ideal customer, this takes it a step further.
2. Establishing Processes
How do I assign inbound leads? When should I send a company into nurturing?
These processes must be followed closely, something which can’t be done in a spreadsheet or a stand-alone document. They have to be integrated into the sales engagement tool.
You’ll be defining:
Contactability
Inbound management
Pre-qualifying and qualifying processes
Recycled companies policies
Discarded and nurturing accounts management
Sarah explains: “They are the systems to use which tell you what to do. They’re systematic programmatic elements that have to be ironed before content as they live underneath it to optimize it. Not only that but it also makes it easier for onboarding SDRs”.
3. Creating Content
Finally, ask yourself: What’s the best message to deliver? How do we structure our pitch?
Even the best trained SDR will forget pitches and qualifying questions from time to time, especially when targeting complex markets. Avoid this and suggest the best messaging content in real-time.
You’ll be defining:
Pitches and templates
Snippets
Sales collateral and marketing content
Objection handling
How often should it be reviewed?
Sarah: “If reps and sales are prospecting and having meetings, it means they’re out there learning. It’s important to gather all this information, take their feedback, and implement it in your playbook. You must keep revisiting it in order to optimize it”.
If you’re building it for the first time, you should update it all the time, nearly on a daily basis.
Once the process is validated, this can change:
GTM Strategy should be reviewed at least quarterly
The process will depend constantly on feedback from your sales reps and the team using it
Content should be very proactive. You should keep looking for new pieces to create thanks to feedback gathered from the market. What topics are prospects interested in, what are the trending topics on the target market. It’s essential to absorb that info and review it constantly
Marc added: “It also depends on the stage of the company. Any company that’s starting their sales team will have to do it on a daily basis. On the other side companies that are in growth mode won’t have that need. Taking all of that into account, GTM strategy and content will always be the most updated parts.”
“Revising your playbook TOO often is better than not often enough”
Marc Gassó, CMO at Bloobirds
The key to every successful sales team is scaling best practices. But in order to repeat your best sales rep or SDR’s tactics throughout the team, you’ll need to be able to understand what on your playbook is exactly helping them to achieve success.
How to integrate your Sales Playbook into reps’ daily tasks?
Sarah: “In most cases, companies don’t put their playbook into their system because they don’t even know you can do that. The biggest key to operationalizing it is having the step-by-step as you prospect or reach out a lead, and the most effective way to do that is having it inside your system”.
Marc:“You don’t want to have it in different docs, that makes it more complicated for reps to follow indications and can lead sometimes to reps deciding on their own. The more people in the team, the more challenging it is to make sure they are all following the steps. Having it inside your system instead as Sarah said, allows them all to have:
Precision, when it comes to picking up the right companies
Relevance, in order to choose the best messaging and content
Consistency, which means having intensive and systematic teams
Automation, to boost productivity
This is built-in to Bloobirds, and tracking that also helps managers understand what is working and what is not and improve reps effectiveness.
Best way to implement your playbook?
Marc shared that the most important thing is having the three elements (GTM Strategy, Process, and content) and covering each of them. “As a best practice, I would say it’s answering all the bullet points considered in each element.”
Also, the importance of treating it as a daily tool. It’s obvious that when SDRs are trained they won’t have the need to check it constantly but if they have it inside the sales engagement tool they won’t have to worry about having to search for it somewhere else.
Sarah remarked how essential it is to have it all documented in one place. Not only that but also being able to incorporate the team into building it. This allows them to understand where all guidance comes from and also helps build everyone as a team.
All of that being said…
Sarah highlights it’s important to start having conversations and learning. Sales teams can be a huge help when it comes to building it as they go. When it comes to early-stage, gaining experience first will allow you to then build a playbook.
“Your playbook can’t be based on guesses, everything needs to be proved. Start talking on the phone and building the playbook can get done both in parallel.”
Marc Gassó, CMO at Bloobirds
Now you’ve seen everything you need to know to create and implement your sales playbook, your next step is to implement it in your system and Bloobirds can do that for you. It makes sure reps follow best plays with the in-app playbook’s help.
