When your newest sales rep lands their first big deal using the same approach that worked for your top performer, that’s your sales playbook at work. Rather than leaving outcomes to individual improvisation, a playbook gives every rep the strategies, scripts, and best practices they need to sell—helping new hires ramp up faster and keeping every customer conversation on brand.
For ecommerce teams juggling chat inquiries, shipping objections, and seasonal surges, a documented sales process is especially valuable. Companies with formalized playbooks see measurably higher win rates and shorter ramp times for new reps.
In this guide, you’ll learn what goes into an effective sales playbook, explore the most common types of sales plays, and walk through how to build one that helps your team close more deals.
What is a sales playbook?
A sales playbook is a comprehensive guide to current information, strategies, and best practices that help your sales team sell your product or service. Clearly laying out the steps behind your most effective sales techniques can increase the overall success of your team.
Take Stark Carpet, for example. On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, CEO Chad Stark compares a good sales rep to a doctor. “You go to a doctor because you have something wrong, but you don’t know what, and they give you a solution,” he says. “Our salespeople are kind of the same: You have a project, you have a certain aesthetic, you have a certain price point, you have a certain timeline, and we help you curate and find the right product.”
Just as doctors have a set of procedures for determining how to help you get healthy, a good sales team follows best practices that lead to closing deals. A sales playbook typically includes both big-picture elements as well as practical resources and step-by-step plays that support your sales team, such as:
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Target audience buyer personas (with pain points and preferences)
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Sales cycle stages with role responsibilities and handoffs
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Messaging templates (emails, call scripts, objection handling)
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Key performance indicators (KPIs)
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Competitor information
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Product decks and case studies
Building your sales playbook collaboratively with your sales team and other key stakeholders, like product designers and marketers, ensures it leverages proven best practices. An accessible, living sales playbook not only sets your sales team up for success but ensures existing customers receive consistent, quality treatment at every touchpoint—no improvising each deal from scratch.
Types of sales plays
A sales play is a specific set of instructions that guides your sales team through a particular scenario with a potential customer. While your specific sales strategy and products will inform exactly which sales plays you include, here are common ones you might cover in your sales playbook:
Product demo
A product demo is a way to make your product’s value tangible and tailored to your prospect’s needs and pain points. Strong demos also create space to answer questions and address concerns. A product demo play should specify:
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What format to use (live versus pre-recorded, virtual versus in-person)
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How to personalize the demo for the potential customer
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Who on the sales team leads the presentation
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Any handoffs between team members
Great demos function as a two-way conversation, so the play should emphasize listening and personalization. Include slide decks and presenter notes, answers to frequently asked questions, and shareable materials and links that reps can use during the demo.
Post-demo follow-up
The days after a demo are crucial for keeping potential customers engaged, addressing any objections or concerns, and ultimately winning their business. This play guides your sales reps on how to channel the momentum from a demo into a conversion through personalized outreach—whether that’s a follow-up email, phone call, or social media message.
Imagine you’re a sales rep for a shipping software company and you’ve just demoed your solution to an ecommerce brand that sells spices and seasoning mixes and is looking to lower its quarter-over-quarter operating expenses. Your post-demo follow-up might be an email to the spice company’s rep that cites that goal and includes a case study showing how a kitchen tools brand lowered shipping costs and increased sales after switching to your software.
Match the outreach channel to the prospect’s preferences, and ensure the play includes concrete next steps for both sides.
Competitor mention
If a lead mentions a competitor, your sales reps need to be ready. Who are the most relevant competitors in your space? Make sure this play points to any insights you have on competitors, message points on comparative strengths, and guidance on how sales reps can handle objections depending on the stage of the buying process and customer relationship. A competitive analysis can help you articulate where your rivals fall short and where your brand truly shines.
Closing play
Closing the deal can look and sound different depending on factors like your sales strategy, the customer persona, your product, and the length of the relationship. For instance, if you are trying to get your company’s fair-trade hot cocoa included in gift baskets with a very distinct sales season, you might offer extra units of product or a co-branded product to close the deal before the peak order season begins.
With a newer relationship, you might opt for a summary close: In this play, you share with the prospect a concise story that encapsulates the needs and gaps they’ve communicated and connect them to your product and its impacts on their company’s future. Then verify whether you’ve captured everything and inquire about their readiness to move forward.
Before closing, set clear guardrails for your team. Define approval limits (for example, reps can approve discounts up to 15%; anything higher needs manager sign-off), spell out which terms are negotiable, and arm your team with value-focused responses to price pressure.
There are hundreds of variations of closing sales plays, so it’s important to define the range of closes you want your sales team to use.
Lost opportunity plays
Not every lead converts. Some drop off or drift to a competitor. This play outlines how you want your team to respond when a prospect heads in a different direction. It might include tactics to keep the door open to future engagement, such as an email that thanks a lead for their time and consideration, a recommended follow-up cadence to maintain the relationship, or feedback methods about why the prospect chose another option (e.g., a survey or debrief).
How to assemble an effective sales playbook
- Gather team insights
- Review current practices and goals
- Assemble the resources
- Share the material with your team
- Revisit and adapt
Here are the key stages to consider as you build or revise your brand’s playbook:
1. Gather team insights
Even though your sales team will be the primary users, your playbook should incorporate insights from contributors across your organization. For example, your marketing team can provide target buyer personas and lead-generation processes, while product designers and technical specialists can share insights about what sets your product apart from competitors and where its value is strongest. Of course, your sales team can help shape the plays and identify any gaps in your current strategy.
Since a good sales playbook builds on your sales team structure and strengths, invite your sales and marketing teams to share successful campaigns and closes, and use these to inform your messaging materials and sales plays. Including select wins as case studies can make the plays concrete for new reps while recognizing great performance among your sales leaders.
2. Review current practices and goals
Developing your sales playbook is an opportunity to review your sales strategy, harness what’s working, and fill in tactics or resources where there are gaps. Interview your sales managers and account executives about proven tactics and plays to include. Also, plan a comprehensive audit of your performance metrics so that the key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals you include in the sales playbook are right for your brand—and achievable for your sales team.
3. Assemble the resources
While a sales playbook may contain a large volume and range of sales enablement materials, you’re probably not starting from scratch. You likely already have most of the ingredients (such as go-to sales plays, KPIs, and email and call scripts), whether they are in a specific document or stored in your team members’ memory and sent folders. Assembling your playbook, then, is really about centralizing them so your sales team has what they need to succeed—and relies on common processes when they run into challenges.
4. Share the material with your team
A sales playbook is only as good as the use it gets, so work with your sales managers and enablement team to plan the rollout, integrate it into onboarding and workflows, and set up regular training and feedback sessions.
Training sessions for your sales playbook serve as onboarding for sales team members as well as opportunities for top performers to engage and learn from one another. If your team works in a remote or hybrid posture, consider modalities and session cadences that ensure everyone has equitable access and time with the playbook.
5. Revisit and adapt
The sales landscape, competition, and industry conditions can shift quickly, so it’s important to build in regular reviews of your sales playbook, messaging materials, and information on competitor brands. All-hands training sessions and regular team meetings make good occasions to seek team feedback about the playbook and review and refresh the materials as needed.
Sales playbook FAQ
What is in a sales playbook?
Your company’s sales playbook contains everything your sales team needs to know about your brand, product, and how to engage with potential leads from prospecting to closing. It typically includes sales plays, product details, customer personas, scripts for sales calls and emails, competitive insights, and the KPIs your team uses to track success.
How long should a sales playbook be?
The length of your sales playbook depends on your sales strategy and the complexity of your organization. But in general, aim for building the most comprehensive sales playbook you can so that your sales team has everything they need at hand. Most brands use a digital format so that their playbook is easy to search and distribute, meaning length is not a limiting factor.
How do you structure a playbook?
While a playbook can be as simple as a digital document, usability and adaptability are important factors. An encyclopedic PDF may be less useful in the fast-paced cadence of your sales team’s day than a searchable online resource integrated into a platform your team already uses to track leads, like a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
