How do you create a sales playbook that gets used by sales?

A good question to ask before starting a sales playbook is, “what’s in it for them?” Good sales reps welcome support from anyone who can truly help them, and product marketers are well-positioned to provide that type of assistance. But I’ve made the mistake many times of taking the “build it and they will come” mindset, because it was the path of least resistance. The playbooks I’ve seen actually make a difference were created with in-depth sales feedback from the get-go.

Sometimes it seems obvious to us product marketers what sales should need, but it’s easy to forget about factors that we aren’t familiar with. For example, how does the playbook fit into the sales methodology? Is the information in the playbook easy to find and accessible within a typical sales workflow? Is the playbook specific enough to help people selling to different audiences (Startups vs. Enterprises, Finserv vs. Media, and so on)? If not, do we need multiple paths or versions?

• By understanding how deals work from beginning to end. Get to know the SDRs. What research do they do before starting a sequence? How does a meeting get set? Sit in on first calls. Is a first call all discovery or all demo? What follow ups get sent? And so on and so forth including understanding how a customer implements/on-boards.
• Once you see enough of these, you will likely start to see a pattern emerge. Within this pattern is where the plays can emerge. Ok, so for this vertical, this is typically the use case they care about, the questions they ask, the objections we need to handle, etc. Start writing that up. Make that part of the new hiring onboarding. Drop in on more calls to see how the pitch is evolving (or invest in a tool such as Chorus.ai to do this for you at scale). 
• The added benefit of sitting with the sales team to gather this intel, is that they’ll also see that you’re putting in the time and effort to understand the deal process. So when you start writing up these plays, they can actually trust that you understand how the sausage is made.

1. Take the time to understand their needs and paint points

2. Work with Sales leadership on a plan for rep adoption: align on the resourcing, rollout, measurement, and expectations

3. Partner closely with reps and the sales enablement team (if there is a focused one) to define and refine the content and content types

4. Get feedback and continuously experiment and optimize 

Should Sales not create the Sales Playbook?! This seems to be a case where PMM is doing Sales Ops' job. I understand with smaller companies responsibilities stretch across departments. In this case I would have thought the right answer is to work with Sales on the playbook. If they co-authored it or had major input, they are more likely to use it.  

Sales is most likely to use an asset that product marketing creates if they influence the asset as it comes together. I like to create a working team with a cross-section of sellers to provide input and feedback on the playbook. Make sure your playbook is aligned to the sales methodology that your team is using, and keep it structured, with clear expected outcomes and milestones identified for each component. It also helps if the playbook can highlight little success stories or verbatims from sellers so that they feel like they're hearing from one another, versus from marketing. 

Speaking as someone who has created a lot of bad sales playbooks that have collected dust during my career :-), this is a topic that I'm passionate about. Here are the main ingredients that I've found make for a sales playbook that will actually get used by sales teams.

• Market Primer: Particularly for sales reps who are new to your company or space, I've found it useful to 1) define the market in which we play, 2) the market context/dynamics that are impacting our buyers, 3) the market problems that keep our target audience up at night, 4) why traditional approaches to solving the those problems fall short, and 5) to summarize the competitive landscape. I look to do this in 3 paragraphs or less. Keep it tight, but don't resort to pithy bullet points or the context will get lost. Successful knowledge transfer and taking what's in your head and inception'ing it in the minds of your sales team should be the goal.
  

• Ideal Customer Profile: this is different from your buyer personas. Here, you're documenting the characteristics of companies that make a good fit for your products.
  

• Target Audience: The teams and specific roles who buy and use your products. Here, I like to include guidance on example job titles (useful for prospecting), their key responsibilities, the main things that keep them up at night, their tech stack (relevant for B2B), and how our product helps them. I also like to include sample org charts in a persona guide to help sales teams conduct more effective prospecting.
  

• Sales Process: Most sales playbooks are justifiably oriented around messaging. Messaging focuses on what to say, but a good sales playbook should also outline the sales process or buyer's journey, with guidance on what to do at each step. For example, how to research your prospect's key business priorities, how to prospect into an account, what to propose as a next step from a successful discovery call, when to run a demo, how to pull together a proposal, pricing guidance, etc.
  

• Discovery Guidance: What questions to ask, what to listen for, and what to say in order to help your sellers confidently navigate conversations with early-stage prospects. Including guidance on what to listen for is crucial here to help sales teams learn how to pattern match responses to determine good fit/bad fit and also to design the right solution. Just providing a laundry list of discovery questions with no context on why a sales rep should ask them isn't all that useful.
  

• Competitive Differentiation: What makes you unique and/or comparatively better than alternatives in your category? Differentiation is one of the hardest things for a product marketer to nail, but it's one of the most important since the most common question sellers field from prospects is "how are you different from competitor X?".
  

• Use Cases: What are the scenarios or jobs-to-be-done in which a buyer would use your product? I take this a step further by aligning required capabilities (i.e. things your product does) to pay off each of these use cases.
  

• Demo Script: What do you show during a meeting with a prospect to pay off your messaging and prove value / technically validate your product as the solution to the customer's problem? I like to structure demo scripts in two-column layouts, the left column documenting what to say (with clickpaths embedded in the talk track) and the right column showing a screenshot or animated gif of the main capability or workflow you're showing. Also, demo scripts should NOT be feature tours. The best demos tell a story by outlining a relatable scenario that's tailored to your prospect's problems and desired outcomes.
  

• Customer Stories: What are your best customer examples that you want every sales rep to internalize and be able to share with prospects?
  

• Resources: Lastly, it's helpful to curate a list of your most helpful sales tools (sales decks, cheat sheets, prospecting tools, economic value calculators, etc.) and customer-facing content (eBooks, white papers, solution briefs, analyst reports, blog posts, etc.) that reps can share with prospects.