For sales leaders, a great sales playbook provides clarity around the most critical aspects of running a high-performing sales team. You can’t vacillate on your sales methodology or be wishy-washy on what makes a qualified lead when you’ve put it in writing for your organization. To be more clear about the importance of a great sales playbook, here are several little-known facts:

• “Best in Class” sales teams (top 20%) are more than twice as likely to deploy sales playbooks compared to Laggards (bottom 30%).

• Research by the Aberdeen Group reveals that 54% of salespeople using Sales Playbooks are likely to meet their sales target versus just 46% when no Playbook is available to the sales team.

• The average Selling Price increases 3.9% when using playbooks because you transition from selling a product to selling a solution.

A great sales playbook can increase performance and efficiency by allowing for faster onboarding, more effective sales training, and skill development. Great sales playbooks support team culture, promote repeatable processes. A great sales playbook can identify gaps in your sales, marketing, and product by highlighting why opportunities are not progressing in the pipeline.

When executed properly, sales playbooks can have a tremendous impact on your revenues, sales efficiencies, and profits. Sales playbooks create healthy interactions between Sales, Sales Engineering, Services, Product Management, and Marketing. Using it as a starting point, these units will be better able to work together to systematically review assumptions, discuss where opportunities lie and distill best practices.

Watch any team sport and someone on the sidelines has a playbook in their hands. The coaches and players have worked continuously on this book since the beginning of the season focusing on executing their plays flawlessly. Sometimes, things don’t go the way they had planned, but they don’t just throw out the whole book.

Players and coaches review the plays they’ve run during time-outs and half-time and make whatever adjustments they deem necessary. They try again and make further adjustments continuing the process until the play is successful. Top teams’ playbooks are living, breathing documents that they work on and practice every single day. Follow their example with the way you approach your playbook, and your sales team will be well on its way to new heights!