Sales Playbook Guide: Examples & Templates for Success

Not every job comes with a step-by-step guide for what to do and when to do it. But with a comprehensive sales playbook, your sales team can have clear direction on how to handle most of the scenarios they’ll encounter while they’re out selling. Beyond reducing ambiguity and confusion, sales playbooks also ensure that your customers experience consistency whenever they engage with your company.

What you’ll learn

What is a sales playbook?

A sales playbook is a comprehensive guide that outlines everything from customer personas and selling strategies to industry-wide best practices and tips from your internal team that have proven successful. It also includes specific sales plays and strategies aligned to different roles, responsibilities, and objectives.A good sales playbook helps your sales reps effectively navigate every stage of the sales process. It can be specific across each touchpoint, acting as a resource sellers can return to as they adapt to unexpected scenarios or approach situations where they aren’t sure how to proceed. Playbooks aren’t a stand-in for leadership, but they can and should be your team’s first reference point — and whether the playbook contains the answer is a good test of how comprehensive a job you’ve done.

What are sales plays?

Sales plays are just one component of a playbook. They offer specific strategies or steps that your sales team can follow during each stage of the selling process. Think of them as practical, easy-to-follow recipes for sales success. Each play is designed to handle a particular situation or challenge your team may face.

For example, say you’re trying to engage a potential client who’s shown interest. A sales play in your playbook might recommend sending a personalized email, followed by making a phone call, and then arranging a meeting. This step-by-step approach helps guide your reps toward higher chances of success.

We’ll discuss sales plays in more detail later in this article.

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Benefits of a sales playbook

An effective sales playbook provides a structured approach to achieving sales goals, which is important for businesses of every size. Here’s what a playbook brings to the table:

• Assists with training for new reps: Your playbook provides a clear, step-by-step guide on everything from conducting sales calls to closing deals, significantly reducing the time it takes for a rep to reach peak efficiency.
• Reduces guesswork: A playbook gives your sales teams ready-to-use methods and tips so they can spend more time selling and less time figuring out or testing their approach. Sellers are then held accountable to what’s outlined in the sales playbook.
• Supports consistency: Sales playbooks help sales reps talk about your products and deal with customers in a consistent way, which helps instill confidence in your brand and ensures that your team is delivering equally high-quality experiences to prospects, regardless of who they interact with.
• Shares success stories: Sales teams can collect tips from top sellers and share the most effective methods through the playbook. Playbooks allow everyone to learn from a team member’s success, boosting the performance of the whole team.
• Contributes to more accurate forecasting: When you can outline each stage of the sales process and define key milestones, you can also track deal progress against these milestones. Standardization of successful processes helps leaders to better allocate resources and more accurately forecast outcomes.
• Aligns go-to-market teams: Playbooks can help teams align on target personas, messaging and positioning, and approaches for interacting with prospects and customers. This allows all go-to-market teams to operate from a single source of truth.
• Provides a flexible way to adopt new strategies, problem-solve, and scale: Whenever there are changes, the playbook is the source of truth your sales team can depend upon. If you keep your playbook updated and provide regular training and communication, your sellers always know where to go for assistance.
• Improves morale: When you can show your team what success looks like, they’re more likely to achieve it. Setting clear expectations sets sellers (especially new hires) up for success and aids job satisfaction.
• Supports compliance: Playbooks are another way that you can help your team adhere to company policies and legal regulations. A seller’s behavior should never risk compliance or damage your company’s reputation.

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What’s included in a playbook?

Playbooks are not a one-size-fits-all solution to selling. Their success depends on their being unique and tailored to your organization. That said, there are common elements that you can use as a framework:

Sales strategies and tactics

This section includes detailed methods for prospecting and engaging with customers throughout the sales cycle, from prospecting through closing. Here, you’ll outline the tactics sellers should use at each stage, such as how to approach cold calls, effective emailing techniques, and tips for successful face-to-face meetings. Sellers should clearly understand the objectives of each strategy and know what the expected outcome from each tactic is.

Customer personas

Provide detailed descriptions of your ideal customers or buyer personas and insights into their buying habits. This information helps sales reps understand and empathize with potential customers’ challenges and pain points and work to form personalized solutions. You may even include qualification frameworks to ensure that your sellers are reaching out to the leads with the highest potential.

Scripts and templates

To maintain consistency in communication, your playbook should include elevator pitches, scripts for calls and meetings, email templates for various scenarios (such as sequence of contacts, or what to do when a lead suddenly goes cold), and guidelines for social media interactions. Scripts should adhere to company messaging and positioning and include clear value propositions.

Product information

A thorough overview of your products or services should also be included, showcasing features, benefits, pricing, and competitor analyses. This section is crucial to ensuring your team understands what they’re selling. It can also help when handling objections about pricing or terms, for example, or to answer other common questions from prospects. You may also want to include customer proof that sellers can easily reference and share.

Sales process

This is where you detail how your team should engage with potential customers from initial contact to closing a deal. The sales process is crucial because it provides a clear, company-specific roadmap, ensuring all team members follow a consistent, effective sales strategy.

1. Define each stage of the sales process: For example, prospecting, discovery, proposal, negotiation, and closing.
2. Next, recommend sales activities for each stage: Prospecting may include activities such as cold calling and email outreach.
3. Outline key milestones: The indicators that a deal has moved to the next stage in the process should be clear to everyone.

Supporting training materials and best practices

To help new and existing team members, your playbook should have training resources, best practices, and tips from top performers. In my experience, weekly team meetings and one-on-ones, particularly, are a good place to collect those best practices or capture how a particular challenge was solved. When reps share their challenges and wins, I make note of them. Then, I bring these back to the team for discussion and add them to the playbook.

Integrating sales and marketing efforts

To work well together, sales and marketing need to be closely aligned. This means setting shared goals and metrics, and working through strategies and processes together. Here’s how you can help these teams collaborate better.

1. Define shared outcomes: Consider whether the outcome should be revenue targets, lead quality, new business, or customer retention. Then, outline how you’ll measure success for both teams.
2. Outline clear roles and responsibilities: What is the lead handoff process? What is the criteria for lead scoring? How can you establish a feedback loop to ensure that sales teams can communicate lead quality or campaign effectiveness so that everyone is on the same page and can continue to learn and iterate?
3. Highlight shared resources: Sales and marketing messaging should be consistent and on brand. Content development, from case studies to sales enablement to marketing collateral, benefits from the sales perspective. What resonates with prospects and what falls flat? Everyone should be aware of where this content lives.
4. Communicate frequently: Whether you hold regular meetings or set up a shared Slack channel, both teams should be aware of what’s happening. Which deals are actively closing? What marketing campaigns are currently running?

Technology and AI

Sales and marketing teams should leverage a CRM system as a single source of truth, integrated with other sales solutions and marketing tools to gain a complete customer 360° view. Be sure to detail the tools at your sales team’s disposal and make clear which tools they must use. In my experience, one way to help sellers keep the CRM updated is to tie the requirement to their commission. This is also a good place in the playbook to outline requirements around using artificial intelligence (AI) or bots to communicate with prospects. Some cutting-edge AI tools, for example, can provide specialized, always-on support for your team, including personalized sales role-plays or sales coaching. Tools like this help sellers refine their skills by allowing them to practice pitching, handle objections, and negotiate. They then analyze performance, highlighting strengths, areas for improvement, and actionable steps to advance deals, all backed by CRM data.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

This is a collection of all sales metrics and goals that reps should aim for. This includes targets expected of sales reps like total deals closed, the number of calls per day, conversion rates, or average deal size. This is not the place to document commission, as commission structures tend to differ based on sales roles.

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Examples of sales plays

Consider the specific challenges and opportunities your sales team faces.

If you’re holding regular team meetings, start with the wins, but then look at things like:

• What’s about to close before the weekend?
• What’s not closing this week and why?
• What have we lost and what should we do about it?

Sometimes, you have little control over things that happen. Perhaps a large prospect suddenly makes headlines in the news and priorities change, for example. Your team needs to know how to proceed or pivot when the unexpected happens — which can include something great, like an unforeseen prospect!

Some examples of sales plays include:

• Prospecting plays: Develop a comprehensive strategy for identifying and reaching out to potential new customers. Focus on innovative techniques like using social media and crafting personalized outreach messages. Highlight the importance of understanding your target audience and tailoring the approach accordingly.
• Lead qualification plays: Provide a detailed guide for evaluating whether a lead is likely to convert. Include a set of qualifying questions and criteria that sales reps can use to assess a lead’s potential. Emphasize understanding the customer’s needs and readiness to buy.
• Ghosting plays: Equip sales reps with strategies for handling unresponsive clients. Offer examples of follow-up messages that show understanding, emphasizing empathy while suggesting actionable next steps.
• Product demo plays: Outline strategies for effective product demonstrations. Emphasize tailoring the demo to the customer’s needs and interests and preparing to address common questions or concerns. If any employees are new to presenting, this is a good chance to outline best practices and tips for public speaking.
• Follow-up plays: Highlight the best practices for follow-up communications. Include references to previous interactions and continually add insights for each contact while addressing any new changes or developments that might affect the customer’s decision.

Closing plays: Outline steps and techniques to help your team close deals effectively, whether creating a sense of urgency, addressing last-minute objections, or getting the deal through procurement.

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7 sales playbook types, plus examples from leading companies

Creating a playbook from scratch can be daunting, but the good news is you can build and refine as you go. Here are a few examples of different types of sales playbooks you might create to fit your team’s unique selling environment, market conditions, customer profiles, and sales goals:

1. Classic playbook

Envision this as the comprehensive guide for your sales team. It includes everything from identifying target customer personas to detailed strategies for each stage of the sales cycle. For example, if your product is an educational app and your target audience is busy parents, the playbook might include specific conversation starters for parent-teacher meetings, tailored email templates for follow-ups, and objection-handling techniques specifically addressing common parental concerns.

2. Start-up playbook

This one’s tailored for emerging businesses, focusing on fundamental sales strategies and innovative marketing. For a new coffee subscription service, the playbook might suggest leveraging social media platforms for brand awareness, using influencer marketing to reach a broader audience, and guerrilla marketing tactics like pop-up events or collaborations with local businesses to create buzz.

3. Product-specific playbook

This playbook zeroes in on effectively selling a particular product, like a high-tech home appliance. It would detail the appliance’s features, benefits, and competitive advantages. Sales strategies might include a comparison guide (a side-by-side look at your product vs. competitors’ products), case studies of satisfied customers, and tailored scripts for in-store demonstrations.

4. Account-based playbook

This is perfect for targeting high-value accounts such as large corporations or specialized sectors, as these accounts typically require more attention. It would outline methods for identifying and engaging key decision-makers, tips for personalizing pitches, and strategies for nurturing these relationships.

5. Solution selling playbook

Designed for complex, consultative selling scenarios driven by an overarching problem. This solution selling playbook would guide sales reps through diagnosing the problem, presenting a tailored solution, and navigating lengthy decision-making processes. It could include questionnaires to uncover client needs, presentation templates for solution proposals, and strategies for effective follow-up.

6. Social selling playbook

This is ideal for teams incorporating social media into their sales strategy. A social selling playbook might include best practices for engaging potential customers on platforms like LinkedIn, tips for creating compelling content on Instagram, and strategies for using Facebook ads to generate leads. It could also cover how to transition online interactions into sales opportunities.

7. Remote sales playbook

Essential for teams that operate primarily in a virtual environment, this playbook covers techniques for effective video sales calls and virtual engagement, including how to set the scene for a professional backdrop during video calls, how to use engaging presentation tools, and how to build rapport over a screen. It might also include recommendations for CRM and sales tracking tools suited for remote teams.

Sales playbook examples

Diving deeper, here are a few examples of industry-specific playbooks:

A tech industry giant’s approach to B2B sales

This playbook will be highly strategic and data driven, outlining the specific types and size of B2B companies that sellers should target. It will include key buyer personas (often different from those who will be using the software), pain points companies are looking to solve, roles to target and tactics for communicating with them. The playbook might prepare sellers to provide executive-level messaging as well as detailed specs about the software, and guidance for tailoring to enterprise clients. This playbook will reflect longer sales cycles and multi-stakeholder decision making processes.

Leading retailer’s seasonal sales strategy

This playbook will also be highly strategic and data driven, with objectives for the season that might include revenue targets, inventory turnover, and customer acquisition. It will outline a clear timeline of events (e.g., Black Friday or Cyber Monday and promotions leading up to the key dates), and outline messaging themes and sales and marketing strategies — both in-store and online. The playbook will also highlight promotions, discounts, or loyalty reward programs and cover upselling plays, post-season plans, and anticipate questions or issues around inventory, shipping, and returns.

(You may also want to reference this “Growth and Profitability Playbook for Consumer Goods” as another example of a playbook in action.)

A startup’s product launch playbook

This playbook should be designed to successfully introduce a new product to the market by creating buzz and driving early adoption. It will be vital to clearly articulate the product’s purpose, launch metrics and timeline, ideal customer profiles, competitive positioning, and market trends. Sellers must be equipped with the key value propositions and tailored messaging for different audiences as they are building key relationships and often asking a potential buyer to take a leap of faith.

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Templates for success: Crafting your own playbook

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Leveraging playbook templates saves time and helps get you started. With a basic framework in place, you can concentrate on filling in the specific details. Here are a few examples of flexible templates that you can customize to align with your specific goals, industry, and team:

1. New customer acquisition

This playbook aims to help your team identify, target, and convert new customers.

Key elements include:

• Profiles of your target audiences: This may include demographics, firmographics, and psychographics. It should also contain buyer personas and descriptions of their role, pain points, and motivations.
• Lead generation tactics: Outline the channels you’ll use (e.g., social media, email, PPC, events, and so on), key value propositions, and calls to action or desired outcomes/next steps.
• Criteria to qualify leads: It should also include scoring metrics so that your team can prioritize the leads with the highest potential or value.
• Templates and scripts: Include cold email templates, call scripts, and/or LinkedIn outreach messaging, as well as follow-ups when sellers see engagement. You may also need templates for nurture campaigns, to continue moving leads through the sales funnel.
• Managing the sales pipeline: Document how you intend to move prospects through each stage of the funnel, and how you’ll track this movement in your CRM and other sales automation tools.
• Success measurements: What are the metrics and KPIs that you will measure? These might include conversion rates, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost or the lead-to-customer ratio.
• Post-acquisition onboarding: Assuming success, outline steps for onboarding new customers during their early engagement, including metrics for success, such as tracking time-to-value.

2. Customer retention and upselling

This template aims to help your team nurture and drive loyalty with existing customers — as well as recognize when it’s time to intervene when a customer isn’t fully satisfied.

Key elements include:

• Retention goals: Define your customer success metrics and identify what causes customers to churn.
• Customer segments: How do you categorize customers? By product usage, lifetime value, lifecycle stage? Which customers are best-suited for upsell opportunities? For example, a customer nearing renewal with a scaling business may be a prime candidate for an upgrade.
• Retention strategies and tactics: You’ll need to tailor your strategies and tactics for each segment. Consider how you interact with customers and how frequently, whether through regular check-ins, quarterly reviews, or satisfaction surveys. Outline any loyalty programs that are available. Prepare in advance to address any common issues that customers may raise.
• Upselling and cross-selling frameworks: Define how your team might identify opportunities, considering things like purchase history, usage, or customer interest. Are there opportunities to bundle or discount products? Outline how sellers should personalize messaging and scripts for introducing new products or services. Provide guidelines around timing (e.g., encourage outreach during renewal periods or following successful completion of a milestone).
• Churn prevention: Define the warning signs for accounts that need different treatment. Outline save strategies for when sellers recognize that engagement is declining, usage is tailoring off, or customers have left negative feedback or had many support issues. Tactics here might be to offer incentives, directly address concerns, or offer a downgrade. Right-sizing a customer account is better than losing the customer altogether.
• Customer success actions: There are many ways to work toward building stronger relationships. Identify educational content that provides value to customers, or invite particular customer segments to an event or an advocacy program that encourages them to provide feedback, participate in referrals, or share their success story.
• Success measurements: Define what metrics you’ll track. These may include some combination of: customer retention rate, net promoter score (NPS), customer lifetime value (CLV), net revenue retention (NRR), upsell rate, or churn rate.

3. Competitor analysis and positioning

This playbook aims to provide a framework for analyzing your competition so that you can differentiate your offering and gain market share.

Key elements include:

• An overview of the competitive landscape: Identify your primary and secondary or indirect competitors, their product offerings, pricing strategies, and distribution of market share.
• Detailed analysis of primary competitors: For each primary competitor, consider employing a SWOT analysis to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Define your market position: State a unique value proposition in relation to your competitors, and bullet your key areas of differentiation.
• Competitive sales insights and tactics: Based on industry or customer reviews, outline the areas where competition has been called out and craft rebuttals or positioning tactics (both offensive and defensive) sellers can use when engaging with prospects. Also consider whether a seller is engaging with a net-new customer or someone open to switching from a specific competitor.
• Monitoring tools: Document the competitive intelligence tools you’re using, as well as the social media and review sites you’re listening in on. Consider how you track a competitor’s product launches, pricing changes, or marketing campaigns and how often you’re reviewing and updating your analysis.
• Messaging and battle cards: Going head to head with competitors requires precise talking points. You’ll need to offer scripts and email templates aligned with your tactics and talking points.
• Success measurements: Typically, you’ll want to measure things like market share growth, win/loss ratio against competitors, and changes in customer perception (through surveys or reviews).

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How to write an effective sales playbook

Before you begin, I recommend meeting with your sales team and collecting their input. Make it interactive and ask questions like: What do we want to achieve? What is our company and team culture? What’s our vision for successful selling? You don’t need to incorporate all feedback into the playbook — the goal is to listen.

It’s also helpful to assign a “playbook owner” — not someone who should be out selling — to help document and pull together all the pieces. A really great playbook might be 50-80 pages long. It’s a lot, but the effort goes a long way. Here are 10 steps to ensure your playbook covers everything you want your sales team to know:

1. Assemble a diverse team

Form a group that includes sales leaders, frontline sales reps, marketing experts, and customer success and service staff. This team should represent different aspects of the customer journey and sales process. For example, sales leaders can offer insights on overall strategy, while frontline reps can share hands-on experience about customer interactions.

2. Define your sales philosophy

Clarify your company’s sales methodologies and values. This is where that early feedback from your sales team comes into play. Consider how company and team values should drive sales interactions, in addition to how you can differentiate your approach from competitors. These considerations can help crystallize your sales philosophy.

3. Align sales goals with business objectives

Sales leadership should establish clear performance metrics and goals that are aligned to overarching business objectives. These should be specific, measurable, and aligned with both individual sales role objectives and the company’s broader objectives. Goals might include sales quotas, conversion rates, or customer satisfaction scores.

4. Identify and segment your target audience

Gather data on your existing customer base as well as your ideal customer. This will help you to create buyer personas (see below) and will inform your approach when it comes to messaging and tactics, allowing for more personalized outreach.

5. Create customer personas

Work with the marketing department to develop detailed customer/buyer personas. These should be based on market research and existing customer data. For example, a B2B software company might have personas like Tech-Savvy Startup Owner or Cost-Conscious SME Manager.

6. Document the sales process

Collaborate with sales representatives to outline each stage of the sales cycle. This process might include steps like lead generation, qualification, proposal generation, negotiation, and closing. Document tactics that have been effective at each stage, such as using case studies in proposals or specific negotiation techniques.

7. Develop and document sales plays

Use brainstorming sessions to develop sales strategies and plays for specific products and scenarios. This might include handling objections or unique selling propositions for different products. For instance, you might create a strategy for upselling additional services to existing clients.

8. Craft templates, scripts, and outlines

Develop practical tools like call scripts, email templates, and proposal outlines. These should be based on successful past communications and refined through team feedback. For example, create an email template for follow-ups after an initial meeting.

9. Create tools enablement materials

Select the most effective tools and resources, such as CRM systems or sales enablement platforms, to enable your reps to sell and draft enablement materials to help them use these effectively. Your playbook should incorporate educational materials and training resources. Ideally, fold these into your CRM so they’re easily accessible as your reps go about their work.

10. Train your team on the playbook

It’s important to host formal trainings to introduce your playbook, explain the benefits of using the playbook to the team, and to walk through key sections. You’ll want to train at the time of roll-out, but also each time you update the playbook. Your sales playbook should be easy for the team to access and referenced frequently during meetings.

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Implementing your sales playbook

Here’s the thing: It’s difficult to ask teams to read a document of this length, particularly if they haven’t had much say about what goes into it. This is why it’s important to frame the sales playbook as a vital resource. When your team is peppering you with questions, you should be able to confidently respond, “Did you check the playbook?”

If you’ve spent the time to create a comprehensive playbook, take a structured approach to rolling it out:

1. Rollout and adoption of your playbook

The playbook should be aimed at your internal team. Clearly communicate the purpose of a playbook and describe how it will benefit sellers. The ultimate goal of a playbook is to make their jobs easier and more straightforward.

To show a unified front, leverage other leaders to announce and spread the word. Your annual sales kickoff is a great place to spend time on playbook content, and be sure to include it in your in-person or virtual sales kickoff guide. It’s also recommended to host a series of phased trainings or workshops to walk through key parts of the playbook and answer questions in person. In these, provide examples of how portions of the playbook can be integrated into a seller’s daily workflow.

2. Overcome implementation challenges

You’ll know how successful your implementation was if your team is adhering to strategies and using the playbook instead of coming to you with questions. That said, there’s bound to be a few hurdles to scale. These might include:

• Strategies are either too generic or too specific: If you’ve crafted plays that aren’t in line with a seller’s day-to-day experiences or that don’t resonate with prospects, your strategies may be difficult to execute as described. Take seller feedback seriously and adjust as needed.
• Out of sight, out of mind: If sellers aren’t using the playbook, consider whether you’ve made it easy to find and use. If possible, offer the playbook in multiple formats or host in multiple locations. You can also reference the playbook often in meetings and ask for feedback.
• Resistance to change: It’s possible your playbook will introduce new approaches that are different from your seller’s previous methods. This is why it’s important to communicate the value of the playbook and to set clear KPIs that the playbook will help sellers to achieve.

3. Leverage technology

The goal is to make it easy to use the playbook, and technology can help with this. Some CRM systems, AI-driven digital labor platforms, or sales productivity tools allow you to integrate playbook content directly into sales workflows, embedding guidance, scripts, objection handling, etc. into the process, tied to the appropriate stage of the customer journey. When integrated, you can also track adherence and performance. Systems that include AI can be tailored to the exact sales plays you want your sellers to execute and take things a step further to identify patterns or suggest improvements that are aligned with your playbook strategies.

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Maximizing the impact of your sales playbook

To ensure your playbook is as effective as possible, make it a regular affair to review during meetings or workshops with your team. Even better, make team members responsible for walking their peers through certain sections, so that they become the expert. Team members can also share success stories they’ve had from using the playbook to close a deal.

Measure usage

If your playbook is integrated with your CRM or other sales tools and resources, you can monitor how often the playbook is referenced and work to correlate usage to performance metrics. Sales performance management software can help with this.

Integrate feedback

If the strategy you’ve documented isn’t producing results, it might be time to revisit it. Feedback from your team or customers around what’s working (and what isn’t) is valuable and can help you iterate and improve your approach.

Update regularly

A sales playbook is a living document. The world around us is dynamic and the goal is to create a relevant reference point that your sales team can always return to — whether you’re on vacation or bogged down with meetings and unable to answer their questions.

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Keeping your sales playbook updated

Regularly updating your playbook keeps your strategies fresh and relevant for the team you have at any given time. Plus, continuous refinement allows your sellers to stay agile, focused, and prepared for whatever the market throws at them.

Plan to revisit your sales playbook alongside your “playbook owner” each quarter, at a minimum, and make it a best practice to add tips and realign each time there’s a new launch, messaging, or business objective.

When you make changes, be sure to communicate those to your team. The more you can keep the playbook top of mind, the more likely they are to return to it over time.

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The gift that keeps on giving

In the end, it’s about more than closing a deal.

When your team is aligned, they can consistently close deals well and work towards building strong and lasting customer relationships. A playbook isn’t meant to be purely prescriptive; instead, it’s a collaboration between everyone interacting with customers and learning from their experiences. Ultimately, everyone is working to help the customer achieve their goals, which requires a patient and positive mindset.

If your playbook(s) can help your sales team accomplish that, then they are almost certain to succeed.

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