How Sales Playbooks Can Help You Keep Up With Digital Transformation

January 29th, 2024

Getting Ahead by Pulling Everything Together

Despite companies spending millions of dollars on technology to improve their operations, the business-to-business (B2B) sales model remains very opaque and hard to understand. Without sales playbooks, a sales team has to continuously improvise and create new angles every time they talk to a qualified sales lead. Salespeople may be surprised when they discover they are losing money, sales reps miss cross-selling opportunities, or key accounts don’t renew.

Sales teams may be scratching their heads—what happened? Often, sales plays are not tailored to the specific buyer, which can result in a lost opportunities to close the deal. Sales playbooks help sales teams provide with the customer with the right information at the right time to make the sale. Salespeople are busy and need resources to help them be more effective. A sales playbook enables them to spend less time writing emails, entering data, and prospecting or researching qualified leads because it helps them work smarter and faster so they can spend more time on converting prospects into customers.

What Is A Sales Playbook, Exactly?

A sales playbook is a document that sales teams use to employ best practices, tactics, and strategies during various stages of the sales process. It outlines what a salesperson should do during certain stages and how to handle specific selling situations, such as prospecting or during a sales pitch for a product.  Further, digital sales playbooks can be accessed by members of the sales teams from anywhere, so they can have the information on-the-go when needed. They can be created digitally to seamlessly integrate into a business’s customer relation management (CRM) software system and for easy access by a sales team from anywhere.

Sales playbooks can offer sample emails or scripts to help guide salespeople through all aspects of the sales journey. Also, they can provide sales reps with sales strategies, discovery call questions, buyer personas, sales process details, and more. Also, they are a means for capturing sales best practices and communicating them to salespeople. While not a substitute for training, sales playbooks are valuable resources for salespeople and B2B marketing to use in real time. They contain useful information on best practices and encourage salespeople to determine where the best sales opportunities lie, what are the roadblocks to success, and how to gather resources to tackle both. Harvard Business Review found that 50% of high-performing sales entities have developed their own formal sales playbook that they use in their sales operations. They do work!

The Key Benefits of A Sales Playbook

Sales playbooks can improve productivity across a sales team, standardize best practices, reduce ramp-up time, and enable salespeople to be more autonomous.

• Training New Employees is easier and more effective. When you hire new staff, training can be easier, go more smoothly, and produce quicker results because all of the sales information is in one central location. The playbook contains key information on how to make sales, how customers can buy products, what are the pain points, what is best to say to customers, written scripts, and email templates, and more. Without a sales playbook, a salesperson would have to learn all this information ad hoc, which takes a lot of time.
• More time for sales. With sales playbooks already written, salespeople don’t have to spend their time creating content or figuring out how to make their own pitch to a customer. With ready-made content, salespeople can focus on what they do best—selling! Nurturing deals takes time, so salespeople will have more resources to cultivate relationships and close the deal.
• Disseminate selling techniques into data. Sales playbooks can help a sales team figure out what are the bestselling techniques for the product. Once a successful sales method is discovered, it can be written into the sales playbook to be used by other salespeople. Also, the sales playbook highlights the best sales techniques for certain scenarios.
• Integration with Customer Relation Management software. Digital sales playbooks can integrate with Customer Relation Management (CRM) technology to boost sales. For instance, digital sales playbooks can be integrated with the popular Salesforce software for an effective online platform that contains information such as customer contact, sales, segment, and market data, to be correlated with recommended content for each individual customer. These digital sales playbooks can reduce prep time by about 70% because all the important sales information is already documented.

Sales playbooks are unique to each business. Yet, companies can work with a sales team to document their best practices, integrate CRM information, outline sales playbook goals, determine who on the team should be involved in creating the sales playbook, align the marketing and sales team for a common message, plus more. It takes a village to create an effective sales playbook, so everyone’s input across the company should be valued. Sales playbooks assist with qualified lead follow ups and prospecting opportunities, automates administrative tasks, and uses data and analysis to predict outcomes for optimal engagement with customers.

How KlyckBooks Can Help Create a Tailor Made Digital Sales Playbook

Fortunately, there are businesses who specialize in creating digital sales playbooks for B2B companies, who understand the critical integration between a sales playbook and CRM software for optimal performance. KlyckBooks can bring your sales playbook to life.

It’s time to throw away those dust-covered, outdated binders. Your sales playbooks just got digitized. Take your team to the next level with KlyckBooks, the easy, one-stop-shop for delivering content and information on-demand. Your sales team can spend more of their valuable time building relationships with customers to make the sales deal and less time trying to create content or entering data. Built for B2B, Klyck.io reduces the time it takes for salespeople to find content, delivers analytics on sales data and customer engagements, and provides the right content at the right time for your sales team. Check out Klyck.io and request a demo today!