From Sales Playbook to Paycheck: How Nethunt CRM Optimizes Your Sales in the Long Run

Originally published November 18, 2024, updated November 18, 2024

Say goodbye to unresponsive prospects with a well-crafted sales playbook.

How many times have you found your sales team unsure how to respond to a tough objection or keep the conversation flowing? You’ve probably lost a lot of prospects… 😐

But hold on! You can get back on track with a sales playbook that will help your sales teams adapt to any selling situation and close more deals. We’ll tell you what is a sales playbook and how to build it from scratch. We’ll also teach you how to incorporate tools like NetHunt CRM to ensure your new sales playbook template drives even greater results with minimum investment.

What is a sales playbook and why is it essential for your business?

A sales playbook is a documented set of actionable, repeatable, and direct guidelines that sales teams use to navigate various sales scenarios. Plays are a set of instructions that sales team members follow. Simply put, they tell a salesperson what is the best thing to do in a specific sales scenario.

The goal of the guidebook is to create a unified approach to selling that reflects the company's best practices and adapts to the buyer’s journey.

As your company’s roadmap to success, sales playbook examples include the following elements:

• Clear description of your ideal customer type
• Key product information and use cases
• Defined sales process stages that are specific to your business
• Ready-to-use email templates and call scripts
• KPIs and other vital metrics for each sales stage
• Success stories and case studies that help sales teams create a compelling narrative

What does a playbook look like?

• PDF
• Word document
• Google Docs
• PowerPoint
• Online knowledge base
• CRM-integrated playbooks (you can access them right within your CRM system)

Sales playbook vs. Business playbook: What's the real difference

A business playbook is a document that outlines your company’s business strategy, including goals, values, processes, and workflows. It’s way broader in scope compared to a playbook for sales and serves as a bigger picture guide for your company.

A business playbook includes the following elements:

• Marketing strategies
• HR practices
• Finance management
• Operational procedures

Meanwhile, a sales playbook is a tool for your sales department. Inside sales playbooks, you’d find everything one needs to accelerate sales performance, whereas a business guidebook has a goal to align and scale your business.

This is why a sales playbook is essential if you want to succeed

A good sales playbook highlights the strategies that work best and ensures they are accessible to all your team members. Not only does it standardize best practices, but it also:

• Speeds up onboarding and training. All use cases, scripts, and scenarios are gathered in one place. So, new sales team members can dive into onboarding from day one and rely on proven approaches.
• Guides teams through every stage of the sales journey. Sales playbooks include qualification criteria, outreach templates, and objection-handling techniques. This helps reps follow a structured approach as they know exactly how to engage prospects, address challenges, and move deals forward at each step.
• Bridges the gap between departments. A sales and marketing playbook ensures everyone is aligned on messaging, positioning, and customer needs.

That’s all great. But if you’re handling your sales processes with simply a B2B sales book (or any other kind of a sales play book for that matter), you’re missing out on automation that can take your reps even further. Let’s find out how one simple CRM tool can turn your sales strategy playbook into actionable results.

How Nethunt CRM turns your sales playbook strategies into results

The best sales playbook examples prove they are the backbone of a high-performing team. But guess what — no company team can perform well without a proper tech backup. Here is where tools like NetHunt CRM come in handy.

#1: NetHunt CRM helps you automatically capture leads from multiple sources

Lead generation is the bread and butter of every sales process. NetHunt CRM captures all leads from your website (yes, you can build a customizable webform with NetHunt), email, social media, and messengers. Let’s say a lead has sent you an email — the system would scrape the available data into a sleek CRM record and store it.

#2: NetHunt CRM helps you reach more customers through multiple channels

NetHunt CRM is built inside Gmail and offers multiple native integrations with LinkedIn, social media (Instagram, Facebook, et.c), and messengers (WhatsApp, Telegram). This means that you don’t have to leave your familiar Gmail surroundings and switch to other tools. You can receive and send messages to all your leads right within the system. Pretty time-saving and convenient, right?

#3: NetHunt automates sales routines in alignment with your sales playbook strategies

Let us tell you how to automate sales and make sure they correspond to your guidelines.

You can build automated workflows that reflect every rule and requirement of your sales strategy. Let’s say your enterprise sales playbook suggests follow-up emails two days after a first interaction. You can automate this task, and NetHunt CRM will send a follow-up at the right time.

Wait, things get even better from here. You can build a workflow that runs different actions depending on your customer behavior. If your customer hasn’t opened the email sent after the interaction, you can schedule a reminder email that a system will automatically send to them in a few days or weeks  — everything depends on your requirement. And if the customer responded to the email or requested a meeting (you can set any condition, obviously), the system will automatically move them to the next stage in the pipeline and notify the deal manager.

Please keep in mind that these are just examples, and you can customize your workflows in a way that suits you best. You can set up tasks for managers, send notifications about important changes, update records as needed, and more.

Sales Automation Playbook for Small and Medium Business | NetHunt

This downloadable resource is a full playbook for automating sales processes, featuring triggers, actions, and ready-made sales process sequences for your CRM system.

NetHunt CRMValerie Kakovkina

#4: NetHunt CRM centralizes, tracks, and analyzes your sales data

Your data — including each interaction with your leads, email, message, and call — gets stored in one place. You can also attach files, track changes made by managers, leave comments, and more. You can view all interactions with a lead in the Timeline section of their Record. This is especially useful if a rep hasn’t interacted with a lead in a while and needs to quickly refresh their memory on the entire conversation history and be confident during the meeting.

Plus, you can store all your playbook samples in one place so everyone in your team has 24/7 access to them and an opportunity to edit.

As time goes on, your data grows, giving you the opportunity to analyze trends and uncover valuable insights. With NetHunt reporting features, you can:

• Set goals and track the progress of your sales team (as well as individual performance)
• Assess how long each deal progresses through the pipeline stages and identify bottlenecks
• Pull CRM data into Looker Studio and visualize it with custom dashboards for deeper insights

#5: NetHunt CRM automatically assigns leads to sales managers

Sales playbooks help your team adopt a workflow that optimizes processes and ensures consistency. But what if your team needs a more dynamic approach to handle varying lead types?

If this is the case, NetHunt CRM would take your sales management to the next level. You can customize the system so it automatically assigns leads to the next available manager on the list or ties specific deals to particular team members based on their expertise.

Let’s say you specialize in high-end marketing automation tools, and you’ve got two managers who excel in working with finance businesses. If a lead representing a finance business enters the system, NetHunt CRM can automatically assign the task to one of these managers so the right person handles the deal from the start.

#6: NetHunt CRM’s customizable sales pipelines help you track your progress

A CRM pipeline visualizes the sales process that your team should follow according to the guide. Let’s say, your team works with different clients based on your sales playbook template. In this case, you can create multiple pipelines for different deal types — a separate pipeline for enterprise-level clients and another one for smaller businesses.

Plus, you can forecast your revenue for each deal in the pipeline. This helps your team stay focused on high-priority deals and allocate resources more effectively.

How to keep your sales playbooks fresh and relevant with NetHunt CRM

• Customize your pipelines to reflect new strategies. A valuable tip — create different pipelines for various deal types.
• Tailor automations to fit the updated guidelines. Your workflows should reflect updated outreach sequences, follow-up times, and lead nurturing strategies. For instance, if your playbook introduces a new follow-up email cadence, you can automate it to trigger the right message at the perfect time.
• Segment leads for more targeted approaches. Use NetHunt’s custom fields and filters to organize your leads based on specific criteria from your updated playbook examples.
• Monitor your team performance with reporting and analytics. Identify bottlenecks and make changes to pipelines, stages, or automations as soon as you spot opportunities for improvement.

Now you know why a tech stack, along with sales playbooks, is a backbone for your business if you want to succeed. So, let’s move to the heart of the matter — how to build a sales playbook from scratch.

How to create a sales playbook that drives more conversions

Creating a sales playbook that works and reflects the elements of a sales process unique to your business requires careful planning and collaboration with your team.

Let’s break down how to craft a SaaS sales playbook that helps your team win.

Step #1: Interview your sales team

Your reps work with customers on a daily basis and know which practices work and which don’t.

You can create a comprehensive questionnaire, gather feedback, and analyze the answers to identify overlapping trends and problems.

Here are the areas that your questionnaires should focus on:

• Sales techniques and tactics — What techniques consistently drive the best results in sales calls and meetings?
• Challenges in the sales process — What are the most common bottlenecks and how do reps navigate these challenges?
• Lead qualification criteria — What are the most common characteristics of your high-potential leads?
• Customer objections and pain points — What are the most frequent objections your reps encounter, and how do they address these concerns?
• Feedback on sales tools — Are there specific tools your reps find particularly useful, or others they find cumbersome?

Once you’ve gathered valuable insights from your sales team, the next step is to take this feedback and apply it to a structured process.

Step #2: Map out your buying & selling processes to create a sample sales playbook

Deep dive into your buying and selling journey:

1. Find out how your customer decision making process unfolds and visualize the customer journey.
2. You can use tools like Miro to literally draw the customer journey with its stages (awareness, consideration, decision), customer objections, and bottlenecks.
3. Add practices and link resources to each stage that your reps can incorporate.

Step #3: Add the vital sales playbook elements

Start writing your guide with the following elements in mind:

• Brand introduction. This is where a brief overview of your company, its mission, and values reside. With proper brand introduction, your team can get a better grasp of the company’s vision and develop a more effective messaging.
• Product messaging. Define your product’s unique value proposition, key features, benefits, and what sets it apart from competitors.
• Ideal customer profile. Outline your ideal customer, their needs, and how your product meets those needs.
• Call and email scripts. The best sales playbook templates include various scripts for different stages of the sales process. They help reps navigate conversations and address objections.
• Objection-handling techniques. Gather the most typical sales objections from prospects and add sample responses for each one.
• Training section. Create a sales training playbook section for newbies to make the onboarding smooth.
• Key competitor insights. Know who you’re competing against (strengths, weaknesses, product positioning) to help your team highlight what makes your product unique.
• Metrics and goals. Add this section to your sales playbook outline to help reps align individual performance with broader business objectives.
• Sales playbook software guidelines. If you’re using a software like NetHunt CRM to manage your sales and help teams refer to the playbook in real-time, please ensure that your teams know how to use it.

Step #4: Organize a user onboarding

It’s time to put your sales playbook best practices into action. So we advise you to schedule a few training sessions with your team in order to explain how each section works and how they can use the sales handbook in their daily activities.

Step #5: Update your sales playbook regularly

A sales operations playbook is a living document. After you’ve chosen the format of your digital sales playbook, ensure that team members with credibility and knowledge can contribute to its improvement. As an alternative, to keep your guidebook clean from messy comments, you can create a separate document or brainstorming dashboard (like Miro) where everyone can share their ideas without touching the actual guide.

As your business grows, your sales process will evolve, and the changes are inevitable. So, regular updates will ensure your playbook is relevant and help your team tackle the emerging challenges.

Voila! You’re ready to hit the ground running with an actionable and transparent guide that helps you close more deals.

Final thoughts

Congrats! Now you know what is sales playbook and how the best sales playbook examples look like.  A good sales guide is dynamic, aligns with real-time data, and integrates into your daily workflow.

But with NetHunt CRM, your guide becomes much more. With automated follow-ups, multi-channel outreach, ultra-customizable workflows, and multiple integrations, NetHunt CRM smoothly aligns your playbook guidelines with your business processes.

NetHunt CRM ensures your strategies don’t just sit on paper — they come to life.

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