Sales Playbook: 7 Quick Tips

Follow the rules

Have you read this sentence before? It defines exactly the essence of a sales playbook, a fundamental manual for sellers to close more deals.

The playbook is also responsible for providing knowledge to new team members and assisting with team training. This is because, in its essence, the document explores the culture of the company, the sector, and the best practices to obtain the expected results.

If your team doesn't have one yet, this article is for you.

We will help you create yours with 7 simple steps and good tips when getting your hands dirty.

It's not a waste of time

If you need to increase productivity and improve the results of your sales team, the playbook is your solution.

Start by establishing clear rules and routines that your team must follow on a daily basis.

At this first moment it is good to take a clinical look at the processes. “As is”, how they actually happen and not how they should be and record them one by one in a step-by-step format.
We don't recommend copying models from market-leading manuals, as each company has unique variables that it must consider.
Be creative and keep a close eye on the processes of your company or department!

It's worth investing time and effort in planning and structuring. A tip for your sales booklet is to consider some factors such as:

• Sales structure
• Market opportunities
• Employee profiles
• Compensation
• Mercado
• Localization

Our team is like a family

It's important to hold regular meetings to keep your sales manual in the team's DNA. That way, sellers will need to spend less time searching for answers and more time selling.

Additionally, you can and should encourage your team to share successful sales techniques with other team members.
Encouraging the team to collaborate on the material is the best way to always keep it updated.

Finally, leaders must support and guide salespeople to ensure the effectiveness of the material and its alignment with company goals and culture.

Tips and references

Today, we are filled with information 24 hours a day and often the difficulty is to filter what is really worth consuming. For this reason, we separated some reading tips, podcasts, videos in different formats so you can choose what works best for your routine.

1 — The Netflix Approach to Sales

Netflix is one of the benchmarks for innovation and sales success. The company has incredible sales manuals that emphasize customer understanding and customized sales approaches. After all, who doesn't like personalized service?

The path to success is to build solid relationships with your customers. To do this, they use a clear playbook to train their employees and offer customized solutions, which certainly stand out from the competition.

If you want to delve deeper into this subject, Josh Braun's “The Netflix Approach to Sales” is a classic and remains a great reference book to study.

2 — Organization tools (Free)

Imagine a collaborative application with several features to help you organize and create information the way you want in one place. THE Notion It's one of the best ways to set up an efficient and shared sales manual for your entire team

Among several features, the application allows:

• Creating pages,
• Lists,
• Tables
• Kanban (trello style)
• To do list
• Integration with artificial intelligence

You can use the app for various purposes, such as creating sections in your playbook dedicated to the customer persona, sales processes, prospecting approaches, and closing techniques.

It not only offers real-time collaboration features for teams to share and update the manual, but it also incorporates media to make it even richer and more dynamic.

Here are 2 tutorials that we separated for you to be inspired to organize your manual:

• Building a “wiki” for teams in Notion
• How to build an operating procedure document

But if that sounds complex for your operation today, we suggest the good and always current one”Google Docs”. Simple and collaborative.

Regardless of the application, the important thing is to start the process of building the playbook. Discover the tool that best fits your team's culture and stick with it.

3- Podcast

V4 Company has an interesting podcast on this topic that can be accessed on Spotify or YouTube.

In the episode that we separated for you, you can find powerful tips and information shared by João Victor, COO of “G4 Education”. With a very practical approach, this ep opens a discussion about best practices for process documentation. Those who are curious and want to learn more about João's Instagram profile have plenty of content on the topic.

• Spotify: #167 — How to document processes? — ROI Hunters | Digital Marketing & Growth | Podcast on Spotify
• YouTube: @roihunters
• Instagram: @joaovitor

Finally...

It's very important to keep up with everything we've said so far to be able to build your playbook. We've put together a step-by-step “Pink” way of documenting processes and routines that will help you get started.

These are the 7 steps:

1. Define where to create and present your sales manual;
2. Introduce the company to the training team;
3. Map and describe departments and all processes;
4. Map and describe the sales focus;
5. Establish the relationship between marketing and sales;
6. Clarify sales results, metrics, and reports;
7. Make the manual available to everyone.

The playbook isn't just a “to do list”! As we said, it is constantly changing and must be fed by your team.

Golden tip:

It's common to give up encouraging the use of the playbook and it ends up singing unimportant over time. This happens because we often end up documenting processes as they should be and not as they are today in practice, even with imperfections. Therefore, it is very important to document the details of your process according to the reality of your company

Oh, and if you use WhatsApp in your company to talk to customers, suppliers or your own team and want more organization and control of your business communication, contact us to learn about our solution: Pinkapp.com

We wait for you 😉