What is a sales playbook?

Think about the last time you tried to learn a new skill. Maybe baking or painting or playing an instrument. (Didn’t we all do at least one of those during the pandemic?) Now think about the results of your first effort. I’m remembering a particularly horrifying portrait I painted a few years back. After quite a few hours of effort, I stepped back for an objective look. Then I laughed out loud and threw it directly in the trash where it belonged. If you don’t have an atrocity of your own to reflect on, just google “Pinterest fails” and try not to spit out your coffee.

Unless you’re a prodigy, you need training and practice to learn anything new. Learning to sell is no exception. Think of all the skills your salespeople have to master. Prospecting, researching, asking smart questions, handling objections, connecting the dots between a customer’s pain and your solution, closing with confidence… Without the right guidance, your new rep’s first attempts can look a lot like that portrait I painted: amateur at best, downright scary at worst.

That’s where sales playbooks come in. They remove the trial-and-error guesswork and create a system for improving sales performance across your entire team. They also flatten the learning curve so reps ramp faster.

Nailing down a sales playbook definition

At its simplest, a sales playbook is a tool that gives reps the knowledge, structure, and resources they need for success. It helps them sell confidently, consultatively, and consistently. Think of it as the master guide that houses every sales play. (And if you’re wondering, “what is a sales play,” it’s a repeatable, step-by-step strategy your team can run in specific selling situations.)

Why do sales reps need playbooks?

With a great playbook, reps can EARN

Educate prospects on what the product does, how it works, what sets it apart, and how it solves real problems.

Accelerate their ramp time with digestible, usable content in formats that match different learning styles.

Resonate with prospects by showing they understand pain points, challenges, goals, and decision drivers.

Navigate objections, complex decision-making, and tough conversations with confidence.

What’s included in a sales playbook?

These pieces aren’t one-size-fits-all. They need to be tailored to meet the specific needs of your sales force. The content will vary, but here’s a solid sales playbook set to get you started:

• An overview of your brand — Ground reps in your company’s mission, values, and story, so they can share it with consistency and credibility. This section reinforces why your business exists and what makes it different.
• Basic selling strategies — Provide a framework for how your team approaches selling. The playbook should outline core techniques that set the tone for every customer interaction. These serve as a foundation for how to improve sales performance.
• Product education — Equip reps with clear, accessible information about what you offer, including features and benefits. The goal is to give them confidence in connecting the dots between customer needs and your product or service.
• Vertical market deep-dives — Offer reps insight into the industries you serve, including trends and opportunities. This helps them tailor conversations to the unique needs of each market and know how to make a sales play that resonates.
• Decision-maker profiles, messaging, and personas — Detail who the key players are, what they care about, and how they make decisions. Pair each profile with messaging, so reps know how to package their pitch to the person. This is a fundamental sales playbook best practice.
• Guidance on objection handling — Document the most common roadblocks reps will face and give them practical, proven responses. This keeps tough conversations from derailing deals.
• Visual tools for spotting opportunities — Include charts, frameworks, calculators, and checklists that make it easy for reps to recognize chances to cross-sell and upsell.
• Sales kits and collateral — You can include PowerPoint slide libraries, email templates, prospecting strategies, social selling guides, and case studies. But we typically treat these as separate components from the playbook itself.

What’s the best sales playbook format?

Many marketing and sales leaders create sales playbooks in-house. They print the content and put it in binders or save it digitally as pdfs.

When we start a sales enablement playbook project for a new client, we ask them to send us as much information as they can, including their sales training materials. And we often receive binders like these — or thousands of digital pages — packed with dense content. This long-form structure definitely has pros and cons.

Pro: It’s comprehensive. You can include everything you might ever want your sales team to know.

Con: It can get overwhelming fast, especially for new reps. They don’t know where to start (or how they’ll ever finish), so they’re less likely to use it.

Pro: Once built, a big pdf or binder creates structure and a single source of truth. (Or, many sources of truth, as you see above.)

Con: It’s notoriously hard to update. A single, static, long-form piece becomes outdated as soon as products evolve, industries shift, or messaging changes.

Pro: It’s typically text only. So it’s easy to create in Word.

Con: Text-heavy formats become “walls of copy” that reps are tempted to skim — or skip altogether. Plus, people often don’t retain much of what they read after a few days unless visuals, structure, and formatting make the message more digestible.

Don’t misunderstand! I love a big binder. We’ve written shelves of them on everything from packaging to pest control to property restoration. But you must write and design them to deliver all the pros above, and none of the cons. And that means thinking outside the binder, too. The fix is in the format.

What are some sales playbook best practices?

Let’s answer this question by addressing each con listed above.

Yes, a comprehensive resource can become overwhelming fast. So give them multiple ways to consume the content. Yes to a big binder for them to read when they have time. And yes to smaller, bite-sized versions like one-pagers, podcasts, e-learning modules, and infographics.

(Here’s a bonus benefit: Once you have the big binder written, the bite-size versions are a piece of cake. Repurposing foundational content is a sales enablement content strategy that pays off again and again.)

Yes, it can be notoriously hard to update. So don’t put it all in one giant bound book that has to be thrown away when stuff changes. Consider a 3-ring binder with tabs. The new leader wants to share their philosophy along with your brand story? No problem! Update that one section and toss the old version. You’re introducing a new product or targeting a new vertical? Right on! Just add a tab with the new content.

Yes, text-heavy formats become “walls of copy.” So get a designer in your corner. Relevant icons and eye-catching photos reinforce the messages in the copy. Bold text and strategic colors draw the eye to the most important takeaways. Ample white space and a clear hierarchy make even complex content consumable.

Are there any watch-outs with sales playbooks?

One big one: Sales playbooks are only useful when they’re actually used. So don’t position them as one-time resources. Playbooks are not like novels you read once and then leave on a shelf. They’re your field guides — distilling the best thinking, experience, and strategies your team has amassed over time, and making them usable in the moment. The best sales playbooks become constant companions: marked up, dog-eared, and well loved.

How do I get started creating sales playbooks?

It’s a commitment. Doing it well takes a lot of time, effort, and collaboration. And you can’t create a great sales playbook in a silo. You have to involve the right people. Ask a lot of questions. And make sure you have alignment. But it’s worth it to give your team a tool they’ll actually use to grow their skills — and your revenue.

Now we’ve talked about what a sales playbook is. In my next post, I’ll answer what to include in a sales playbook. And we’ll talk about how to create a sales playbook from scratch. I’ll even give you a look into our process. Stay tuned!

Want to delegate playbook duty? Get yourself a counterpart for that.

Related:
Fighting objections from sales? Use design as your superpower.
Onboarding sales reps? Help them ramp faster.