What is a Sales Playbook?

Markus Jenul
Jun 1, 2022
6 min read

Updated: Mar 1, 2023

What is a sales playbook?
Why are playbooks important?
Checklist: Does my sales team need a playbook?
Must Have Sales Playbooks
How do I make sure the playbook gets executed?
Where should I build my sales playbook?
Example Sales Playbooks

Like professional sport teams use playbooks, sales teams should do so too. 🤟

Implementing sales processes and getting sales teams productive are huge challenges and take long. You might search for years to find the best sales process that increases revenue fast and ramps up the productivity of your team. It is challenging to implement sales processes and to make sales teams productive.

So why don’t you simply take advantage of experts’ pre-defined playbooks and adopt them to your needs? Or better!

Why not standardize your own best practices of your best performing team member and distribute them across your whole team? 🤔

High-performing B2B sales teams use sales plays to faster onboard new members, align their teams on core initiatives and follow a successful processes. Such playbooks bring structure to work practices, they help sales reps to close more deals and, and, and…

But what exactly are Sales Playbooks? ⚡️

Sales Playbooks are best-in-class processes, and standard operating procedures enriched with know how that improve the performance of sales teams. With these playbooks you make sure your sales team gets productive as fast as possible.

For what can you use such? 😎

You can use Sales Playbooks to align your sales team, scale them faster and bring structure into their daily operations. Transparency and clarity are key components of successful B2B sales strategies.

Furthermore, you hold your sales team aligned, can scale it and everyone knows what to do and how to do it.

Why are playbooks important? 🤔

B2B companies are annually spending billions on training and technology to systematize their sales processes and operations. Unfortunately, sales operations remain very ad hoc and unstructured. Such a structure can be accomplished with the help of Playbooks.

And this can be clearly seen in successful companies. Nowadays, high performing firms have adapted the use of already pre-defined standard operating procedures to improve project management and performance.

They have integrated SOPs into their business departments - Marketing, Finance, HR, Sales to bring structure to their daily operations, align ongoing project and improve the quality of such. 🤟

Sales deals might give off the impression that procedures vary. You might think that every deal that you want to close requires different knowledge and a different approach.

But is this really so?

There are differences to a certain degree, yes. Nevertheless, in reality, most sales processes are more similar than one would suppose.

And many sales experts lack that knowledge, especially the ones in the early days of their careers. Additionally, they might lack the needed how-tos and structure to succeed.

Let’s have a look at a normal sales process. You start off by prospecting and end the process with objection handling. But the act does not end here, because you want to sell your product.

As a sales leader you have two options now:

⚡️ (1) You either spend crazy amounts of time and money on employee training. A process that must be repeated regularly. Or....?

⚡️ (2) You give your teams access to best-in-class practices, that will save time, costs and nerves. Your best performing employees will also have more free time as they do not have to study certain scripts, but they can simply follow the structured procedures.

Why can I be so sure?

As a sales leader myself, I got great sales and business trainings from leading companies like Force Management, Sales Impact Academy, Hubspot, Robbins Research International and many others.

And these trainings taught me a lot - they definitely changed my sales skills. But after a while, I recognized that I forgot some of the best practices that I had learned. I was not putting them into practice. That is how my idea of playbooks emerged.

With a playbook you can simply follow the same successful process and practice over and over again. And the best thing, you don’t have to remember the process, and can truly focus on what’s really important - your prospects and your customers. 🙌

Sales playbooks will increase the probability of hitting sales goals by more than 8%. Further, 54% of sales reps are more likely to meet their sales than the remaining 46% that don’t have access to winning playbooks.

Sales playbooks act as a personalized and centralized hub of information. When this information is accessible and scalable, it allows reps to spend less time on planning and administration work.

They have more time to focus on things that really matter - their customers. 🎉

Checklist for sales leaders: Does my sales team need a playbook? ⚡️

Do you repeat the same procedures with your sales team over and over again? YES/NO
Do you feel like your sales team is more ad-hoc than structured? YES/NO
Does your sales team not hit its targeted quota? YES/NO
Does your sales team spend less than 50% of their time with prospects and customers? YES/NO
Do you feel like your team is not taking the sales process seriously? YES/NO
Do you have a sales playbook as a Google Docs File (Confluence page/ Notion), but no one is looking at it? YES/NO
Do you have too many tools which are hard to access? YES/NO
Do you feel like you aren’t aligned with marketing? YES/NO
Do you find it hard to apply best-in-class processes from other successful sales teams? YES/NO
Do you have an unstructured way to share know how with your sales team? YES/NO
Do you still share know how and learnings still via Email, Slack etc.? YES/NO

If you have replied to more than three questions with a yes, maybe you should consider another solution! Feel free o try Kickscale for free and sign up for a personal account here.

MUST HAVE Sales Playbooks

If you want that your sales team performs on a top level, then you will need to provide them with the right set of playbooks. The following playbooks are a must have for every successful organization:

You can also start with the Playbooks & Templates in our Marketplace.

See All Playbooks

How do I make sure playbooks get executed? 💪

Firstly, we should mention that our playbooks can be used for either knowledge sharing or task monitoring.

You can share your know how with tutorials, guides, personally recorded Loom videos or Youtube materials. To monitor tasks or improve procedures, playbooks can be created that include checklists and task management tools.

You can create a plan for sales onboarding, customer onboarding, sales meetings etc. You can also externally share this procedures with your colleagues.

To execute such playbooks, you will need to make sure that such are visible to your co-workers. Provide your team with a complete overview of your learnings. They should be aware of the existence of the playbooks, and they should have an easy access to all steps incorporated in them.

⚡️ We would recommend having a centralized place for all playbooks.

After you have set up your database, it is time for you to share it.🤝 Assign your playbooks to your teammates and manage their execution at first hand.

You will see clear benefits in terms of:

(1) ⚡️ Goal achievement

supercharge your team with the needed knowledge

(2) ⚡️ Structure

Never lose track of made progress

(3) ⚡️ No repetition

You will never ever have to explain the same thing again. Simply record a video and share it with your teammates when needed.

Where should I build my sales playbook? 🧙🏼‍♂️

In Kickscale! The easiest way to build, execute and share your sales playbooks.

Kickscale keeps your playbooks in one centralized place so everyone on your sales team can access their own and playbooks from others. Furthermore you get pre-defined playbooks and SOPs already with Kickscale.

Most sales teams build their sales playbooks in Google Docs, Confluence and Notion pages. But this makes it increasingly difficult to organize and manage the existing data and the processes themselves. Kickscale removes that barrier.

Our platform keeps all of your playbooks in one centralized place. Every member of your team will have access to their own playbooks and to the ones from others. You will save time and energy in keeping track of your subordinates, whilst improve their knowledge and performance.

Additionally, sample Playbooks filled with best-practices and SOPs of experts can be found on the Kickscale Marketplace. You will not have to look for certain best practices or create them from scratch.

In our playbook library you find the outline of all most popular sales policies and processes needed for your business. Furthermore, you will have access to Playbooks for niche markets and operations. Have we convinced you?

Start building your sales playbook in no time by using our predefined templates.