Are you confident that every member of your sales team has the ability to engage with prospects, discover their needs, and quickly produce accurate pricing and quotes to meet those needs?
If not, it’s time to discover the advantages of using a sales playbook to guide selling.
According to insights from Deloitte, 78% of B2B leaders say their customers demand a more digitized sales process. At the top of the list of ways to accomplish that: intelligent recommendations and guided workflows.
With guided selling, all sales professionals, whether they are new or seasoned veterans, are able to follow the same sales playbook. This not only streamlines the sales workflow, but it also consistently delivers 100% error-free quotes with adaptable pricing structures that support the dynamic sales environment and drives sales productivity.The best part about it?Guided selling works regardless of who the buyer is or what product or service is being sold.
How guided selling accelerates the sales process
Sales teams who provide accurate, personalized quotes in a timely manner consistently close more deals faster. Yet, research shows that 77% of buyers rated their last purchase as “very complex or difficult.”
Salespeople who use a sales playbook aren’t spending time searching for the information needed to personalize a configuration or sales quote. Instead, they’re selling with zero friction (and closing more deals because of it).
Sales workflow with guided selling
The key to closing more sales is to accelerate the sales process. There are several ways in which guided selling helps:
Onboarding new hires faster
With a sales playbook in place, newly hired sales reps have a step-by-step guide to help them engage with customers almost immediately without sounding like the “new guy.” Instead, they’ll understand the buyer’s needs quickly because the system triggers relevant questions to walk them through the sales call.
Personalizing sales calls and subsequent sales proposals
50% of buyers select the vendor who responds first, so it is critical to be the first vendor to get a personalized sales proposal in front of the buyer.
By allowing salespeople to adjust quickly to various sales scenarios, sales playbooks help them to provide a personalized sales call and, later, a sales proposal without spending hours digging for relevant pricing sheets and content assets. They can produce dynamic, personalized sales proposals for customers quickly and efficiently, saving them time and allowing them to be the first to the table with the information their buyers seek.
Helping reps sell more strategically
Sales playbooks enable sales reps to offer products that are better aligned with their clients’ needs. They’ll also automatically remind sales reps of any appropriate upsells and cross-sells that relate to the requested service or product. Selling more strategically drives deals towards closing sooner and, ideally, for a larger amount.
Not to mention, it gives your sales reps more time in their day so they can focus on the needs of their customers and build trusted relationships, instead of wasting hours trying to work through manual processes and disconnected tools.
Shortening the sales cycle
Using a sales playbook to inform guided selling shortens the sales cycle in several ways. First, when everyone on the team is using the same sales technology, the sales process becomes clear, concise, and easy to follow. Everyone is on the same page, and this helps prevent time-consuming missteps. Next, with a standardized sales playbook in place, eliminating poor leads becomes simpler, freeing up more time to spend on qualified leads. Finally, guided selling allows salespeople to truly focus on what’s going to make the sale: solving the customer’s pain points. The faster you can get to this part of the process, the shorter the sales cycle will be.
How to set up a sales playbook
A sales playbook contains all the information a salesperson needs to take a sale from quote to close. This can include everything from an overview of the company, detailed information about the sales process, guidance on the CRM, product offerings, each product’s USPs, customer personas, competitor analysis, messaging templates, resources, key performance indicators, dynamic guided flows, and more. Setting up your guided selling sales playbook is a simple step-by-step process:
To set up a sales playbook with DealHub, do the following:
- Map the buyer journey. What stages do they move through? Where do they get stuck? What key decisions do they make along the way?
- Define user roles. Segment your playbook by user role, region, team, or any other dimension that matters. Your SDRs, AEs, and channel reps each need a different version of “what good looks like.”
- Build persona profiles. Build simple profiles that document buyer needs, common objections, priorities, and motivations. Then structure your plays and guided flows around these insights.
- Create guided questions. This is where guided selling kicks in. Build smart questions that help sellers uncover what really matters to each buyer. Are they budget-driven? Feature-driven? Outcome-driven? The answers should feed your logic engine to tailor the next step.
- Set logic and rules. Now wire it all up. Define if/then logic so DealHub can recommend content, offers, and next steps based on buyer inputs. This is what makes your playbook dynamic.
- Tailor sales guidance. Maybe your enterprise play looks different from your SMB play. Maybe new reps get more coaching prompts than veterans. Once your rules are in place, fine-tune the guidance each seller sees.
- Integrate your content and tools. Now bring it all together. Embed DealRoom assets, CPQ flows, ROI calculators, and contract templates right into the playbook experience.
- Set up approval workflows. This step often gets skipped. Don’t. Define who reviews and approves content, pricing, and discount levels. DealHub lets you automate this so you maintain control without slowing deals down.
- Monitor and optimize with AI insights. Once you launch your playbook, DealHub AI gives you tons of unique insights. Track which plays drive velocity. See where reps drop off. Watch what content actually gets used. Then keep iterating.
Advantages of integrating CPQ into your sales playbook
A sales playbook takes most, if not all, of the guesswork out of the sales process. The purpose of configure-price-quote (CPQ) software is to accelerate deals by quickly producing price quotes based on the right product configurations for each customer. Using a CPQ ensures consistency in pricing, discounting, and approvals.
By integrating CPQ solutions into your sales playbook, you can create a workflow that drives scalable and predictable results. Other advantages of integrating your CPQ solution into your sales playbook include:
Defined roles and responsibilities
When your CPQ solution is part of the sales playbook, everyone understands the process from start to finish, and productivity improves for everyone from new hires to seasoned pros.
Complete buyer personas
The target sales audience is clearly and concisely defined in one place, making it easier for the sales team to ask the right questions to determine the proper sales technique for that customer.
Streamlined product configuration
CPQ software allows salespeople to configure complex products or services based on customer needs with ease. This capability is critical for selling custom-manufactured products, subscription enterprise SaaS products, or bundled services. Integrating this functionality into the sales playbook ensures sales teams can quickly generate accurate and customized quotes, eliminating errors and reducing turnaround time in your sales cycle.
Product and pricing accuracy
Another challenge new hires typically have to overcome is learning the organization’s entire product catalog. CPQ software is linked to current product catalogs and pricing databases. By incorporating this real-time data access into the sales playbook, your sales team can stay up-to-date with product offerings, promotions, and pricing changes, enabling them to provide the most relevant and competitive solutions to customers.
Additionally, CPQ tools ensure pricing calculations and discounts are consistent and aligned with company policies. By incorporating pricing guidelines and rules from the CPQ system into the sales playbook, you can ensure your salespeople always provide customers with accurate and competitive pricing, increasing their trust and improving conversion rates. Additionally, all inventory is tracked to reduce order errors.
Efficient sales processes and planning
When the CPQ solution is integrated into the sales playbook, lead qualification, pitches, and sales quotes become automated processes rather than time-consuming team training needs.
Provides analytics and reporting
Many CPQ tools (including DealHub) offer analytics and reporting capabilities that help organizations gain insights into sales performance and customer preferences. By including these reporting features in the sales playbook, sales teams can leverage data-driven decision-making and continuously improve their sales strategies.
Integrating CPQ within your broader sales framework also enables sales managers to track their sales team’s activities in real time, ensuring that all days are productive and feedback is based on data insights.
Continuous sales process improvement
The data and insights gathered from CPQ software can feed into the sales playbook, enabling you to continually refine your organization’s sales strategies and adapt to changing market conditions. In this way, integrating a sales playbook and CPQ software creates a dynamic and growth-oriented sales environment that fosters improved close rates, increased revenue, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Master the art of guided selling with DealHub CPQ
DealHub’s sales playbook is an integral part of our CPQ solution, offering guided selling flows that adjust to every sales scenario and empowering sales reps to work smarter. It helps sales reps dynamically generate the accurate quotes based on the potential customers’ needs. This guidance ensures new reps and seasoned pros follow the same guidelines when generating quotes. The result is 100% accurate quotes, valid configurations, and approved discounts.
What does this all mean for your sales organization? With guided selling workflows within DealHub CPQ, you’ll reduce the sales cycle, close more business, and grow revenue.
Ready to learn more about how DealHub CPQ can accelerate your sales process and help your sales team close more deals? Request a demo today.
