How to Create a Sales Playbook to Decrease Ramp-Up Time

What Is A Sales Playbook?

A sales playbook is a sales enablement blueprint that helps reps navigate the sales process, get training, deal with sales situations, and understand company goals. Sales playbooks align reps with company goals (mission, KPIs, etc.) and best practices (sales methodologies, customer info, and resources).

They provide a plethora of sales materials like guidelines, product info, and sales plays designed to accomplish the following objectives:

• Train new sales reps effectively
• Reduce ramp-up time
• Win more deals
• Create a company culture and inspire unity
• Maintain consistent sales approaches and results across the organization

4 Ways A Sales Playbook Can Help Your Organization

1. Avoid Bad Sales Practices

New sales reps bring established sales habits and beliefs to your business. Experience can be a double-edged sword. Your sales playbook helps reps avoid bad sales practices, inconsistent sales steps, and outdated or incorrect information.

2. Shorten the Sales Cycle

Evidence shows that companies with an established sales process see 18% more revenue than companies without one. The scripts, messaging, product information, and education in your sales playbook can protect reps from making critical mistakes in the sales process.

3. Consistent Product Value Proposition

A playbook is the glue that holds your sales team together through SOPs, training, and sales enablement materials. Since your playbook describes your best buyers, your reps can confidently and consistently make enticing pitches and ask the right questions when interacting with leads.

4. Increase Sales Effectiveness

According to The Tas Group, sales teams with a well-established sales process are 33% more likely to be high-performers, and two-thirds of companies with well-defined playbooks have win rates over 50%.

Who Should Contribute To The Sales Playbook?

Sales playbooks are a collaborative effort. Staff, partners, and key stakeholders should be involved based on what your sales playbook needs. The answers should lead you to meet with everyone who has key roles influencing sales:

• Founders and CEOs
• Sales leadership (CROs, VPs, directors)
• Sales Enablement
• Marketing specialists
• Customer Success leadership
• Account executives

The Anatomy Of A Sales Playbook

Company Information

Your company information should include mission statement, goals, values, direction, and differentiation. This gives account executives a culture to align with, promoting a collaborative, healthy company environment.

Product and Service Overview

Detail everything about your product including overviews, pricing, how it works, technical features, use cases, and value proposition. Think about it this way: your reps sell the product to the customer, but your playbook sells the product to the reps.

Sales Organizational Structure

Your sales organizational structure informs how your sales team is set up and outlines each member's role and responsibility. Reps can be divided into subgroups: the island (individual reps), the assembly line (tasks assigned to different reps), or the pod (SDRs, AEs, and CSMs assigned to teams).

Customer Profiles & Buyer Personas

Your ideal customers are the people most likely to buy your product. Customer profiles contain information like age, gender, location, job title, industry, buying habits, pain points, and goals. For B2B, also pinpoint budget range and company size.

Sales Process Stages

Your company's sales process consists of the stages your sales team moves through to convert prospects to customers. A typical B2B process includes:

1. Lead generation
2. Discovery call
3. Qualification
4. Proposal
5. Follow up
6. Close
7. Onboarding
8. Customer retention

Time Management Protocols

According to Accenture, 42.5% of sales reps take ten months or more for their productivity to match company goals. Time management protocols detail what reps can do to increase productivity, including sales cadence, focusing on high-ROI tasks, automating repetitive tasks, and asking direct questions during discovery calls.

Lead Management Protocols

Lead management protocols list where your sales team can expect leads to come from and how to interact with them. In a survey of B2B companies, 49% mentioned that sales qualified leads is the most critical KPI for measuring lead generation performance.

Sales Messaging

Your sales messages tell sales personnel what to say and ask to move prospects toward conversion. Consistent sales messaging should show up across company mission, business goals, value proposition, elevator pitches, sales scripts, discovery questions, and marketing messaging.

Sales Methodology

Your chosen methodology should be adequate, proven, and repeatable. Top proven sales techniques include SPIN, SNAP, Value selling, MEDDIC, BANT, and Challenger selling.

Sales Resources

Sales resources are organized materials meant to scaffold reps at each step of the sales process, including CRM, training content, sales battlecards, templates, competitor analysis, customer stories, and enablement how-to's.

Sales Plays and Battlecards

Sales plays provide the actions reps should take in specific sales situations. Keeping your sales plays and battlecards up-to-date is crucial. Aircover's AI technology keeps your plays up-to-date across your organization and surfaces them in video meetings to keep reps equipped with the right messaging.

KPI Goals

KPIs are pivotal metrics (like conversion rates, total revenue, and average time for conversion) that help track progress. Give your reps clear timeframes associated with each KPI and its expectations listed in your sales playbook.

How Do You Make a Good Playbook?

1. Get ideas from your sales organization — collaborate with key stakeholders and staff members.
2. Evaluate the current state — conduct a gap analysis of your sales process.
3. Analyze customers & interactions — determine how you want your team to interact with ideal customers.
4. Delegate sales playbook roles — assign sections to the right specialist on your team.
5. Assemble the materials — create sections and combine them with a deadline.
6. Focus on your company plays — craft proven situational sales blueprints.
7. Establish KPI goals — use the S.M.A.R.T goal model for setting targets.
8. Make it easily accessible — use sales playbook software for digital access. Aircover makes your sales playbook easily accessible with up-to-date plays, battlecards, and resources.
9. Gain organizational feedback and iterate — collectively review before implementation.
10. Update your playbook as time goes on — continuously survey and improve.

Final Thoughts

Sales playbooks add speed to your organization, from your sales cycle to your rep's ramp-up time. Many sales leaders notice that their most common pitfalls happen during the sales calls themselves. Issues from objection handling to poor information recollection are the culprits of many fallen deals.

That's why Aircover has created real-time, in-meeting sales tools that give reps specific in-the-moment information they need to win deals. Get early access to Aircover's data-driven sales enablement tool today.