The objective of a playbook is simple. In a playbook, you design guides that show sales reps or executives the best ways to implement the business processes of their company. HubSpot playbooks place an emphasis on building Buyer’s Personas and tracking their customer experience journey through an inbound framework.
HubSpot Playbooks is a sales management software that enables you to create guides, scripts, and battle cards for sales representatives. Essentially, HubSpot Playbooks allows you to push sales enablement as far as it can go. You can tailor your content to whatever format serves you best. For example, you can create:
- Product and services features and specifications
- Questions to ask during a discovery call
- Pricing guideline charts
- Differences between your company and your competitors
- Negotiating tactics
- Customer support information
- Responses to common objections
HubSpot playbooks also have features that simplify these processes, adapt to the established business rules of the department, and fulfill an essential part of the coaching process. Playbooks provide basic information to more complex guides – all depending on the business model that a company uses.
Each company is in a different growth context, but regardless of the operation of your sales department, the sales force will change at some point. Eventually new account executives or sales reps will come on board. And other, more experienced, members will need to provide advice or coaching to these people.
Here’s a quick peek at the beginning of the playbook we’re using for our own buyer personas here at MINDSCAPE.
Benefits of HubSpot Playbooks
There are many advantages to using HubSpot Playbooks. Implementing this tool will help you run your business more efficiently by setting the stage for:
1. Better Training
Onboarding new hires is time consuming. One of the best ways to streamline this process is by providing your new employees with the resources they need to do their job as effectively as possible. What are common questions prospects raise? What are their apprehensions? How can your new sales reps put together an accurate proposal, or quickly identify upsell opportunities? Having a knowledge base at their fingertips will take away a lot of the stress that comes with learning curves.
2. Standard Procedures
If you have a handful of managers, chances are that they all have different ways of doing things. Maybe they all reach the same end goal, but it becomes a mess when trying to explain the process to someone else. HubSpot Playbooks can help you ensure that you have standard operating procedures (SOPs). This consistency is crucial for sustainability and future training.
3. Time Efficiency
If your sales reps don’t have all of the answers they need when they need them, they can waste time — and likely lose sales opportunities. Pausing a sales conversation or telling a prospect they’ll get back to them can be the end of their opportunity with an impatient customer.
Beyond that, answering questions thoroughly builds trust and shows your prospects that your sales team knows what they’re talking about. An inadequately answered question can often be more unhelpful and time consuming than doing it thoroughly and correctly the first time.
4. Improved Performance
Playbooks can provide proven strategies and tactics that have been shown to be effective and puts them all in one place. This helps your organization achieve better results from their inbound marketing and sales efforts.
5. Better Collaboration
Playbooks can provide a centralized location for storing resources and information that can be accessed by all team members which can help improve collaboration and communication.
Sometimes people use different words to mean the same thing. Playbooks can help define a standard verbiage within your organization.
Ways to Use Sales Playbooks to Close More Deals
Qualifying Leads
Playbooks can be specifically dedicated to lead qualification. Make sure to include all the information on how sales reps can identify highly qualified leads to get in contact with. This can be done with thorough questioning during the acquisition phase of the customer journey through the segmentation of leads.
Product Demonstrations
Your product demonstrations may have a standard process for your sales reps to follow. Make sure they don’t miss any steps or any key features by including all the information they need to demo specific products and features to their prospects.
The actual standards and procedures can vary a lot based on the industry. It’s critically important to find an effective standard for your business and execute on it.
Personalized Content
Use the playbooks to direct your reps on how they can select and share personalized content that fits the buyer’s journey and the prospect’s interactions. This helps to nurture leads and provides them with useful information as they consider their options and your offerings.
For example, let’s say you’re a used car dealer and you have a potential customer who has provided some solid information for you to work with. In this information, you find out their last three cars have been Fords. If you make this information clear within your playbook, your salespeople will know to focus on selling Fords to this customer over any other brand.
Use Cases
Your sales reps may not be able to recall relevant use cases at a moment’s notice. Create a playbook for use cases and detailed case studies that members of your target audience can relate to. This provides them with very specific details that may not have otherwise been on their radar.
Prospecting
Playbooks ensure that your sales reps have all the information they need to identify ideal prospects across a variety of platforms and channels. Using a playbook for prospecting allows you to gain prospects that will convert into qualified leads and then into customers.
Closing
Playbooks can provide your sales team with closing tactics to engage with leads in the closing stages of the buyer’s journey. Considering they should have each prospect’s relevant information from your previous playbook practices, they’ll know which points to highlight in their efforts to get them to sign on that dotted line.
Follow Up
Follow-up processes are essential to the sales process. You can make sure your reps know when to follow up with prospects throughout the buyer’s journey using a sales playbook. You can also note whether the prospects prefer to be reached via phone call or prefer a follow up email.
MINDSCAPE can help you get started
Whether you’re already on HubSpot or would like to get started with a brand new portal, we’re here to help at MINDSCAPE. Our experts are working in HubSpot every day and know how to ask the right questions to address the needs of your business. Let’s make it happen.
Yeah, we do that.
