Build a Better Sales Team With a Sales PlayBook

Sales teams are always looking for ways to improve. Especially in a fast-paced environment or one susceptible to change, sales leaders like to be one step ahead.

As a sales manager, you want to make sure your salespeople are productive and happy members of your team.

How do you approach sales team improvement to get the best return on your time, the team's time, or even financial investment?

Here at CFS, we encourage all sales teams to develop a Sales PlayBook, single platform to house selling best practices and promote information sharing across your team. And with most sales teams working remotely, there's no better time than now to develop a Sales PlayBook.

We believe you can can never go wrong with this effort, as it promotes alignment, collaboration, and streamlined strategies, and more. Read on to learn about the in-depth value of a Sales PlayBook.

1. Build stronger selling skills.

A Sales PlayBook serves as a single place to hold all your top performers’ best selling behaviors, tips, techniques, and stories. Your best salespeople know best how to sell your unique products and services – they’ve likely been doing it well for years.

Building a Sales Playbook allows you to harness what these top performers are doing right and share the wealth across the sales team.

A great application of this principle is handling objections. Most salespeople selling for the same company will hear the same objections over and over. Wouldn’t you want to arm your weaker salespeople with the best practice pushbacks your top performers are using?

2. Simplify onboarding for new hires.

Now that all your sales best practices are in one place, imagine what this will mean for your new sales hire!

Instead of winging it after a few days of basic training, a new hire will be able to refer to the Sales PlayBook. There, they'll find the best place to look for more leads, how to communicate the value of your products and services, how to follow up after a prospect meeting, and more. In other words, new hires will be able to achieve solid results more quickly.

Though many would like to think it takes just a few months or weeks to onboard a new hire, the reality is every new hire is different. By having a Sales PlayBook, you have a reliable source that your new hire can refer to whenever they are feeling stuck or lost.

You want people to feel like they are being set up for success, especially those who are new to your team. By encouraging your new hire to become familiar with the PlayBook, you are giving them the opportunity to be proactive, resourceful, and productive.

3. Promote collaboration.

Gone are the days of the lone wolf salesperson. We believe that collaborative sales teams are better placed to adapt to market change and leverage new technology, making working together the way of the future.

Of course, encouraging collaboration can be easier said than done. Busy salespeople want to be selling without interruption, not sitting in a brainstorming meeting. To get your sales team to share more and work together, you have to make it worth their time.

Collaboration should give salespeople new tools, information, or techniques they can use immediately to improve their performance. Whether it’s a new way to get around a common roadblocks, or insight on how to establish quick rapport with new prospects, shared information housed in a Sales PlayBook should help salespeople get their jobs done.

Sales managers can use examples from the PlayBook during team meetings, or incentivize writing down lessons-learned on sales calls.

Developing a stronger, more productive sales team is a long-term project. Establishing a best-practice Sales PlayBook will help you build sales skills among your existing team members; bring new salespeople into a strong system; and nurture a more cohesive team. Start building yours today!

For more CFS updates and insights, follow us on Twitter @CFSPlayBook!