Your way of working, documented so the team owns it without us.
A Sales Playbook is not a collection of templates and not a description of your sales process. It is what you yourselves arrived at in the workshops, consolidated into a way of working that can be used on the next customer without us in the room.
It is developed with you. The content comes from your own deals and your own customers, not from an industry template.
Four parts, and none of them is a template.
A shared language. The concepts the team uses about the customer’s problem, so that two sellers describe the same situation the same way. Without it, every customer meeting is a fresh improvisation.
Diagnostic questions per customer role. What you ask the person who owns the outcome, and what you ask the person who owns the budget. The questions differ because the two are not trying to solve the same thing.
An objection bank. The objections that actually come, with answers that hold up against a well-read counterpart. It is added to after every deal.
Criteria work. How you find out which buying criteria are taking shape at the customer, and how you influence them before they lock.
One concerns every customer. The other concerns one.
A Sales Playbook is general. It describes how your team works, whichever customer is next in line.
An Upstream Playbook is specific. It describes the way into a single named customer, role by role, and it has served its purpose once that deal is decided.
They are often bought in that order. First the way into the customer the work was done on, then the way of working that means the next customer does not require us.
It is built on work already done, not instead of it.
A Sales Playbook written before the team has done the work becomes a binder no one opens. This one is written afterwards, on what the team itself produced.
It is built on at least four completed workshops with different customers. A way of working takes more than one example, and the pattern only shows once the same team has done the same work on several deals.