J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook – The 13 Parts of a Sales Playbook

Part 8/10

The final piece of the commercial excellence puzzle is creating the sales playbook itself. This should capture your defined sales approach end-to-end and meticulously outline the optimal practices for every phase of your sales process for you to follow as a guide on how to effectively sell your product. A playbook should map out everything from how the initial outreach and prospecting is done, navigate the complexities and stakeholders included in deal closure, and how to onboard and integrate new customers. It is an opportunity to clarify, align and share the values and behaviours that are expected from your commercial team (and the extended teams working across all company functions) which will shape your culture, and ensure your approach to sales adheres to the overall company identity.

There are many good sales playbook templates available (some inspiration is provided further below), so you do not need to reinvent the wheel. Leverage these resources, adapt their best elements so that they suit your commercial environment. To help you get started, I have outlined a Table of Contents with the 13 pieces needed to create a sales playbook.

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Why a Sales Playbook?

A sales playbook will bring benefits if created collaboratively and implemented deeply into your organisation, improving sales efficiency by

• Driving positive and accretive sales behaviours

• Creating more repeatable sales tasks and outcomes

• Tightening up discipline of adoption and adherence to processes

• Enabling faster onboarding of new sales staff (and with it, faster time to value/payback)

• Professional the sales function and prepare a path for scale and sustainable growth, delivering high-quality, repeat (or recurring) customer behaviour and revenue streams

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Finding Equilibrium

One critical point when developing a sales playbook is striking a balance between creating a recognised standard for how a company goes to market and sells, coupled with allowing room for local adaptation and individual personality. This said, it is rare to see an efficient and scalable set-up where there are fundamentally different working practices in play, and materially different usage of systems e.g. a CRM platform within a company. 

It should be a goal to get to a recognised standard sales GTM process and MVP of adoption and usage with it. There will always be different levels of acceptance and usership, but identifying a critical path that every opportunity and customer needs to go through, and every sales rep needs to acknowledge the standard, is important to cultivate sales discipline. 

There are often history and legacy factors in companies at the point when sales playbooks make sense to create, and old habits die hard. Do not let this be an excuse not to set the bar high on creating and embedding a sales playbook. It is impossible to measure anything reliably or consistently, or contrast and compare across teams/markets, etc, without it.   

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The 13 Pieces of a Sales Playbook

• The CEO / Founder Welcome

  Set the tone. An opportunity to endorse the sales playbook from the top. Express criticality, support the palybook as key company commitment and establish it as your DNA. Also, a good chance to land a reminder of company sales specific values.

• Introduction

  Map out the purpose of the Sales Playbook, including its objectives, target audience and intended benefits it will deliver to the company, customers and partners, once adopted and embedded.

  1. Purpose (objectives).

  2. Target audience (key stakeholders).

  3. Outcomes (direct/indirect).

• Customer Segmentation

  Outline the different ICP profiles and customer segments you are targeting and how you segment your target market. Include key firmographics and be as specific as possible.

• Buyer Personas

  Summarise the detailed buyer personas that work within your ideal customer companies, including job titles, core responsibilities, demographics, behaviours, personal objectives/KPIs and likely pain points.

• Value Proposition

  Clearly articulate the core value you are offering to your customers (the so what) and how it differentiates you from the competition. This should include your Elevator Pitch, why you win and why you have the best and most sustainable solution for customers/partners.

• Sales Process

  Create a script (to guide and be adapted and adopted) or template for your sales pitch, including key messages and objections you anticipate. This could include an FAQ, killer questions and any other useful supporting guides to aid the sales pitch and presentation.

• Sales Pitch

  Create a script (to guide and be adapted and adopted) or template for your sales pitch, including key messages and objections you anticipate. This could include an FAQ, ‘killer questions’ and any other useful supporting guides to aid the sales pitch and presentation.

• Sales Assets

  List the sales assets (collateral) you will use to support your sales pitch, such as case studies, customer testimonials, presentations, proposals, ROI calculators, etc.

  1. Standard sales deck.

  2. Sales deck slide library (support to standard deck, interchangeable).

  3. Sales Teaser (1-pager).

  4. Proposal template.

  5. Standard T&Cs.

  6. Pricing summary.

  7. Any other relevant Assets.

• Lead Generation

  Describe how you will generate leads, including your approach to lead nurturing, qualification, and scoring, including any software and tools/templates the sales team should use to support this.

• Sales Enablement

  Outline the tools, training and support provided to the sales team to support the sales process, such as CRM software, collaboration platforms, productivity apps, onboarding & training materials, ongoing coaching and skill-building opportunities. Hosted somewhere centrally accessible, like Confluence or Shared Drive.

  1. Table of contents of what is available overall.

  2. Systems

     a) CRM System (see SalesOps section for outline of MVP for expected adoption and usage).

     b) Lead Generation / Outreach Tools (what, why, how)

  3. Tools

     a) Email templates

     b) LinkedIn InMail Templates

     c) Call scripts

     d) Demo scripts

     e) Key Account Plans (KAPs) for existing customers

     f) Battlecards (your product stacked-up vs competition and why you win)

     g) Meeting agenda reperation guide

     h) Killer questions

     i) Your sales dictionary (Terms of Reference)

  4. Resrouces

     a) Sales hiring and onboarding process overview

     b) Sales coaching and training commitment/program

     c) Sales performance management

     d) Sales territory management

• Sales Metrics

  Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will use to track your sales performance and determine areas for improvement.

  1. Key sales metrics (sales overall)

  2. KPIs for sales reps

  3. KPIs for customer success

  4. KPIs for sales managers

• Sales Ops

  General operational (sales administrative) policies and processes.

  1. Sales Administration (MVP expectation for CRM usage – critical path for Lead to Closed Won/Lost workflow)

  2. Sales Reporting (content, format, cadence)

  3. Sales Compensation (commission and/or bonus plan summary).

  4. Sales Forecasting (methodology, format/tools, cadence)

• Roles and Responsibilities

  Key objectives and responsibilities and what is not in scope.

  1. Sales

  2. AM

  3. CS

  4. SDR

  5. Marketing

  6. Ops

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Simply creating the playbook only prepares you so much for the battle. The challenge lies within the embedding of the sales playbook into the team’s daily workflow, making it a part of your company’s sales DNA. I call this the “making it “stick stage. For a playbook to be most effective, it should be implemented in the following areas of your business:

1. Day-to-day sales practices

2. Hiring processes

3. New Sales hire onboarding plans

4. Sales training

5. Leaned on during sales performance evaluations (i.e. how do you relate and live the sales playbook?)

Implementing your sales playbook can be an enjoyable process. You can gamify it by testing your sales team on its content, observing how they use it in practice, and creating role plays and case studies for your team to apply the sales playbook content and guidelines to real-world challenges and specific client problems. This will ultimately bring the playbook alive and help embed it into the core of the company and sales culture. 

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Further reading: The Ultimate Guide to Creating your Sales Playbook by Pipedrive, Upgrading your Sales Playbook Framework by HubSpot, 5 Sales Playbook Examples by Revenue.

Access the google slide templates here:

The J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook — All Template Slides (2023).