How to create sales playbooks in Zoom

Do you have sales playbooks that you're looking for your sales team to adopt? It likely includes guidance on your sales process and running a sales cycle.  

What we typically see within our customer base is sales enablement teams create beautiful assets for their sales team to reference throughout their sales cycles. Unfortunately, they're difficult to access and quickly forgotten in the weeks following sales training.

We believe that sales playbooks are best stored and accessed directly in Zoom. It makes it much easier for sales reps to find the right playbook and encourages segmentation and granularity in how the playbooks are created.

In this blog post, we will walk you through the steps necessary to create a playbook. A playbook is a great way to keep your team organized and on track. It can also help improve communication and collaboration between team members. Let's get started!

1. Map out the call

The first step is to create a map of the call. This will help you understand the different steps involved in a sale, and it will also help you identify any potential areas of improvement. To create a map of the call, start by listing out all of the steps involved in a sale, from start to finish. Then, for each of the call.

For us here at Gondola, it looked a bit like the above photo. We follow MEDDPICC here at Gondola so it's important to visualize the entire sale cycle and all of the information that needs to be gathered. There are two potential routes for segmentation based upon this map - Call specific (top) or Stage specific (bottom). The former, would create five different playbooks and the latter would create three.

The outline that you create of how you'd like your sales cycles to go, will become the backbone for all of the Playbooks you need to create. Lets walk through two call specific examples below for Qualification and Discovery: 

Qualification template

• Opener & Introductions
• Summary of last time + POV
• Question Bank
• What your solution does (30 second)
• Exit criteria for information
• Summary & Next Step

Discovery template

• Opener & Introductions
• Summary of last time + POV
• Question Bank
• How we can help (2-3 minute overview)
• Exit criteria for information
• Summary & Next Step

As you'll see in the gif below, this outline will become the sections that are included in every Playbook. Once you have this outline, you can move to the next phase - attaching questions and additional detail to each section.

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2. Create & attach questions to sections

After you have created a map of the call, the next step is to attach questions to each section of the call. This will help you ensure that your team is asking the right questions at each stage of the sale. To attach questions to a section of the call, simply click on the section and then type in your question. Lets continue to use the Discovery example: 

Discovery template

Opener & Introductions

• Welcome and introductions
• Roles and responsibilities
• How can I make this a great use of time for you today?

Summary of last time + POV

• 2-3 bullets on what we heard last time and a unique POV

Question Bank

• Opener power question based upon research and POV
• If you fast forward 6 months and look back, what would make you disappointed if you did not get accomplished?
• How are you doing that today? Why is that the focus for the next 6 months?
• What do you expect to gain from solving that problem?
• What would it look like if you solved it?
• Why can't you solve it today?

Pitch:

• 2-3 minute overview of what your solution does, catered to the audiences use-case.

Exit criteria for information

• Understand Current State, Future State, Gaps in process, Metrics around the problem and implications if not solved in X timeline
• This should help to clarify - Why this problem, why solve it now, and why are you the best solution to help solve it.

Summary & Next Step

3. Import Deal Essential CRM fields

The next step is to import CRM fields into your playbook. This will help you keep track of important customer information, such as their name, phone number, and email address. To import CRM fields into your playbook, simply click on the "Import" button and select the fields that you want to import. Lets continue to use the Qualification and Discovery examples: 

Discovery template

Opener & Introductions

• Welcome and introductions
• Roles and responsibilities
• How can I make this a great use of time for you today?

Summary of last time + POV

• 2-3 bullets on what we heard last time and a unique POV

Salesforce fields - any account, lead or opportunity information that was gathered by previous parties. This could be notes that a SDR gathered but this should all be easily referenced to avoid duplication of questioning.

Question Bank

• Opener power question based upon research and POV
• If you fast forward 6 months and look back, what would make you disappointed if you did not get accomplished?
• How are you doing that today? Why is that the focus for the next 6 months?
• What do you expect to gain from solving that problem?
• What would it look like if you solved it?
• Why can't you solve it today?

Salesforce fields - Current State, Future State, Gaps, Metrics, Implications of pain, & Champion

Pitch:

• 2-3 minute overview of what your solution does, catered to the audiences use-case.

Exit criteria for information

• Understand Current State, Future State, Gaps in process, Metrics around the problem and implications if not solved in X timeline
• This should help to clarify - Why this problem, why solve it now, and why are you the best solution to help solve it.

Summary & Next Step

4. Know your next steps

Ideally, you had a great call and you're pushing for next steps. It's important to know a handful of standard next steps that can help progress your deal forward. Before reviewing the Next Steps, it's important to gain a commitment from your audience on the alignment. I like to do this by first summarizing everything I heard in the call and how I think we can help out. Then you can ask a question like "did I miss anything?". If the answer is "No", then I'd follow up and suggest the Next Steps to progress the deal forward.

Summary & Next Step

Here are a few suggested next steps that you should keep in mind as you're wrapping up:

- What is topic for the next meeting? Demo, Deeper discovery, POC, etc.

- Who should all be there? Leadership, IT, security, etc.

- Schedule the meeting! Schedule a date and time of the follow up meeting and send the invite!