What they are, why they matter, and how to
create them
How to build an effective
B2B sales playbook
Contents
03. Introduction
04. Playbook benefits
07. How to create a sales playbook

08. Step 1. Bring your team together

08. Step 2. Outline your goals

09. Step 3. Audit your existing resources

09. Typical sales playbook sections
13. Conclusion
15. About Qorus
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Introduction
More than anything, your salespeople want to close deals. After all, that’s what
they’re incentivized to do. But if they have to reinvent the wheel each time they
engage with a new prospect, they won’t have enough time to focus on building
relationships and making sales.
How can you make it easier for them to meet their goals? By equipping
them with a sales playbook. Although not a substitute for comprehensive
training, a great sales playbook is a valuable resource for salespeople and B2B
marketing professionals that will help to:
Improve productivity across your sales team
Standardize best practices
Reduce ramp-up time
Make salespeople more autonomous
Enable easy access to approved tools and content
Significantly reduce the risk of salespeople providing a poor experience
for buyers
One study* found that the best-performing companies are nearly twice as likely
to have sales playbooks than ‘laggards.’
Read on to find out more about the benefits of a sales playbook, and how to go
about creating one.
*https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-playbook
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Playbook benefits
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Playbook benefits
As many as 55% of sales people don’t have the skills they need to be successful1.
But with increasing competition, you can’t afford an underperforming sales
team. One of the best ways to them up to full productivity as quickly as possible
is to make sure they follow a well defined sales process. So it’s rather surprising
to learn that 60% of B2B companies don’t have a defined sales process2, given
that companies that do have one grow revenue 18% faster than the rest3.
This is where a sales playbook comes in. Creating a sales playbook obliges you
to document your sales process, and establish a structure through which you
can provide salespeople with the information and resources they need to be
effective. Among the things they need to know are the following:
How many calls they’re supposed to make
How fast they’re supposed to respond to new inbound leads
How your company uses CRM
What’s considered best practice at your company
What proven messages they can use to overcome objections or beat specific
competitors
What content can help deals move forward at various stages
Creating a sales playbook can take time, but it will start delivering results almost
immediately:
Training new salespeople is quicker and easier when you have clear
descriptions of who your customers are, how they buy your products, what their
pain points are, and what to say to them. Otherwise, your salespeople have to
learn this information on the hoof — usually by shadowing other members of
the sales team, who may not even be following best practice.
Sales have more time for selling. Without a sales playbook, salespeople
spend about a third of their day creating content — which may not be on brand
or on message. Even if the content they need exists, they often don’t know
where to find it or how to package it — which is why an estimated 60-70% of
1. Herbert Greenberg: How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer: The Five Qualities That Make Salespeople Great 2. Hubspot https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-process-cheat-sheet-template 3. HBR 2015
https://hbr.org/2015/01/companies-with-a-formal-sales-process-generate-more-revenue
It’s surprising that 60% of B2B
companies don’t have a defined sales
process, given that companies that do
have one grow revenue 18% faster than
the rest.
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marketing-created content goes unused by sales teams. Instead of leaving your
salespeople to develop their own resources to use with prospects, give them
ready-made, pre-approved content that’s easy to find and use, so that they can
focus on selling.
The whole sales team learns the most effective techniques. If, for example,
you notice one rep having success with a specific outreach method, you can
share it with the rest of the team by putting it in the playbook.
What’s more, creating and revising a sales playbook will engage marketing and
sales in a review of assumptions and will drive discussions about where the
best opportunities lie, what barriers there may be to success, and how they will
jointly marshal resources and messages to tackle both. Through this process,
you can gain insights that will help sales to uncover qualified sales leads and
crack tough accounts. And as your marketplace changes over time, you can
review and refine your playbook accordingly.
Although it’s sales and marketing who will feel the immediate benefits of an
effective playbook, the whole business will benefit ultimately, as faster sales
cycles and easier achievement of sales quotas lead to higher company revenues.
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How to create a
sales playbook
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When you set out to create a sales playbook, you need to ensure you:
Involve the right people
Set clear goals
Understand what existing content and resources can be reused, and where
the gaps are
Step 1. Bring your team together
Work out who needs to contribute to the playbook creation process. As a
general rule, you’ll want to involve:
Representatives from your sales team — ideally, the VP or director, and
some of your top-performing salespeople
Members of the product marketing team who are familiar with your buyer
personas, product messaging, market position and so on
Subject-matter experts, whose insights will help to create compelling
sales collateral
Representatives from your sales enablement, sales operations, and
marketing operations teams (if you have them)
Step 2. Outline your goals
Are you creating a new sales playbook, or expanding or updating an existing
one?
If you’re starting from scratch, you might find it less overwhelming to tackle
one part of the sales process first. So if there’s a step in the sales process
How to create a sales playbook
It’s useful to appoint a project manager to take responsibility for
the timeline, as well as for content submissions and approvals.
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that salespeople find especially challenging, you can prioritize it. For instance,
if identifying qualified buyers is a real stumbling block, you could start by
producing a playbook on this topic that includes qualifying questions and
typical characteristics of suitable prospects.
Step 3. Audit your existing resources
Most organizations already have content and tools that can usefully be included
in a sales playbook, even if they’re scattered across servers and storage areas.
Your salespeople will doubtless have developed their own email templates,
calls scripts, presentation decks and other resources, which you should ask
them to bring to the table. There are two main reasons not to let them go to
waste:
Updating and refining them may take less effort than creating new content
Salespeople are more likely to adopt content adapted from familiar resources
Categorize all the existing content and tools by sales process stage. That way,
you’ll be able to see where the gaps are, and where you need to focus new
content creation efforts for your sales playbook.
Typical sales playbook sections
Every company will work out the sales playbook structure that works best for
them. Typical sections for inclusion are outlined below.
Buyer personas
Don’t assume your salespeople know who your buyers are — you need to
clearly express who you’re selling to, what they care about or are struggling
with, and how your company can help them.
Start by mapping out your buyer personas
and understanding how each of them moves
through the stages of the buyer journey. There
will be differences between users, influencers
and decision-makers, which your content will
need to address.
Mapping buyer personas will help your
salespeople identify the most qualified leads.
You’ll want to include information such as:
Typical job titles and reporting lines
Common challenges and pain points that your company’s products or
services can help them resolve; and aspirations you can help them realize
How much power they have
At what point in the buying process they get involved — for example, a
CTO will probably wait until it’s time to make the final choice between two
vendors
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Product and service guides
This section should cover all the products or services your salespeople are
responsible for selling, along with information such as price points, use cases,
core value offerings, and related industries or verticals.
If there are significant differences between your products and services — such
as different target markets, sales processes or sales teams — you may need to
create a sales playbook for each one, for the sake of clarity.
Battlecards (including competitor analysis)
B2B buyers often struggle to see clear differences when comparing similar
products — in fact, only 14% of them manage to do so1. An effective battlecard
should equip your sales team with responses to key questions a prospect might
ask, that will persuade them to choose your company’s product or service.
To produce a useful battlecard, you need a solid grasp of your own market
positioning, so that you can:
Summarize the key differences between your product and your
competitors’ products
Outline the business problem(s) your product solves
Explain the benefits of selecting or switching to your product
Clearly express the key differentiators that salespeople need to convey to
prospects
Your sales process
This section is critical. Use it to describe each step of your sales process from
first contact to closing the deal. Lay out clearly the key activities that define each
step, including who’s involved (such as the rep, their manager, the prospect,
the buying authority), and what the deliverables are.
Outreach plan
How prescriptive the plan is will depend on how much control your salespeople
have over their outreach, which in turn will depend on how experienced they
are, how simple or complex the deals are, and how your company prefers sales
to operate.
Set out the ideal number and timing of touches, and what medium to use.
Here’s an example:
1. Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/promotion-emotion-b2b/
Day
Morning
Afternoon
1
Send an email
-
3
Send an email
Make a call
5
Make a call
Leave a voicemail
7
Send an email
Make a call and leave a voicemail
10
Send an email and make acall
-
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Also, give some guidelines around when to continue pursuing opportunities
and when to let them go.
Value propositions and messaging
Use this section to clearly express the customer value proposition for your
target market(s); and to hold or link to resources such as:
Outreach email templates
Lead qualification frameworks and qualifying questions
Conversation/voicemail guides and sales scripts
Common objections and how to handle them (unless you make this part of
your battlecard)
Suggested meeting agendas
Presentation decks and demos
Collateral and resources
Include case studies, testimonials, and customer references (or links to them)
in your sales playbook, along with other relevant tools and resources, such as
ROI or TCO calculators, and pitch and proposal tools in use at your company.
Making it easy for sales to incorporate pre-approved collateral into their
engagements with prospects and customers — and customize it as needed —
will help to improve their close rates. What’s more, it will reduce the likelihood
of them using DIY content that may not accurately reflect your company’s
branding and messaging.
Company background/overview
This section will help new hires get up to speed with basic facts about your
company. As well as a summary of its history, corporate philosophy, high-level
goals, and organizational structure and hierarchy, you can also provide details
about the sales organization, such as:
How the sales function is split
Who leads each team
How territories are assigned
The career path for salespeople in your organization
How to use CRM
Every company uses CRM differently, and many CRM systems are highly
customizable. So even if your salespeople have used your CRM elsewhere, they
won’t necessarily know how to use it at your company. To ensure correct CRM
usage, use this section to standardize:
What each stage means
When to move opportunities to the next stage
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Which fields are mandatory and which are optional
How to create and analyze reports
How to look at the dashboard
How to use tasks, activities, and other features
What sales should do in the CRM each day, week, month, quarter
Proposal and RFP tools and content
If you’ve implemented a proposal management solution, such as the Qorus
platform, include a section in the sales playbook that explains how to use it
to find content for — and streamline generation of — pitches, bids, and RFP
responses.
KPIs
Your salespeople need to know what’s expected of them. So if you want them
to engage in a certain number of conversations each day, or to follow up with
specific types of leads, use this playbook section to communicate those goals.
If you pair those KPIs with CRM analytics, your salespeople will be able to track
their activities and see whether they’re meeting those goals.
Self-sufficient teams + insightful content = more sales
Our sales enablement software enables teams to quickly build personalized
documents, such as proposals, presentations, emails, contracts and statement
of work as they can discover, use and analyze the best content.
Sales teams enjoy greater self-sufficiency and success when they can build
personalized customer documents themselves. Marketing teams gain superior
insights into the value and usage of the content they create.
With Qorus, all this happens in the familiar world of Microsoft Office and CRM
Here’s why sales and marketing teams love Qorus:
It enables sales teams to quickly generate their own accurate, personalized
pitches and proposals.
Multiple stakeholders can collaborate on a document at the same time,
from anywhere in the world.
It simplifies the task of creating, managing and optimizing business
development content.
It plugs into Microsoft Office or Office 365.

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Conclusion
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A great sales playbook will make life easier for your salespeople, and will
help drive improved results for your company. But for it to remain useful,
you need to treat it as a work in progress — one that you can update as your
company’s sales process evolves, its product and service range expands,
and its strategy and target markets develop.
Keeping the playbook up to date will be easier if it’s online and accessible
to the whole team at any time, using an app such as Qorus. The Qorus app
lets you work as a team when creating or updating a sales playbook, and
makes it easy to find and link to relevant content. Best of all, you can do it all
without leaving your familiar Microsoft Office environment.
Qorus for Office 365 offers similar benefits for your salespeople, too. They
can import sales playbook content and resources directly into their emails,
presentations and proposals — confident that it’s accurate and up to date;
and easily personalize it for the prospect they’re engaging with.
The Qorus app also enables you to gain valuable insight into how salespeople
are using the content provided, helping you to understand which resources
are more or less valuable, and make adjustments accordingly to ensure your
content investments deliver the best possible returns.
Conclusion
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About Qorus
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and very easy to use. Even the most untechnical of users can quickly create
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Our clients include law firms and organizations that want to streamline their
bid, sales and content management processes.
Qorus Software has offices in Seattle, London and Cape Town.
About Qorus
If you’d like to find out more about Qorus and how we can help
your company, visit the Qorus website at www.qorusdocs.com or
contact us on info@qorusdocs.com
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