What Are HubSpot Playbooks and How Can They Help You Boost Sales?

Discover the power of HubSpot playbooks—a valuable asset for your sales team. These playbooks serve as indispensable tools, providing robust support for your team's daily endeavors, ultimately enhancing their ability to achieve optimal results. By consolidating all essential elements in one centralized platform, professionals experience a newfound efficiency in their workflows. If you haven't explored these game-changing resources yet, this article is dedicated to enlightening you on the myriad benefits they offer, encouraging you to seamlessly integrate them into your company's dynamic operations.

What Are Hubspot Playbooks?

A HubSpot playbook, also known as a sales guide, is a tool that compiles important sales strategies, templates, tactics and documents that are indispensable for sales teams. In short, let's say it's a manual that compiles everything necessary for sales professionals to close sales in the best possible way.

Today, a business approach that puts the customer at the center of the strategy (both their interests and their needs) is more likely to achieve successful results. And playbooks are a tool geared towards that perspective.

What Hubspot Packages Are They Available In?

As of this writing, HubSpot's sales guides are only available in two platform subscriptions: in the Professional and Enterprise versions of the Sales Hub and Service Hub packages.

Types of Playbooks According to Their Use

In HubSpot you can create different playbooks and, depending on the moment the sales professional is in with the customer. Here are three types:

• Playbook for presentations with prospects: Perfect for moments when sales teams are in the negotiation or proposal presentation phase. This type of sales guide is very useful for them at this stage because it can provide them with visual elements to complement their speech and crucial information that should not be forgotten at this time.
• Prospecting playbook: In this case, the sales guide contains all the necessary information that must be available before making the call, such as the organization's priorities, business model, negotiation times, budgets…
• Playbook to define yourself against competitors: In this case, the sales guide specifies details such as the company's star products or services, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. The objective, in this case, is for professionals to know where the organization stands in the market and to be able to develop a successful strategy for qualified prospects.

Essential Information That Cannot Be Missing in Your Playbook

Although, as we have seen, there are different types of playbooks, in general, there are four types of information that should not be missing in these documents:

• What the sales professional needs to know and be aware of, such as what the sales methodology is, what the buyer persona(s) is/are, details about the product or service to be sold, etc.
• What the professional must do, i.e. what tactics to use, what phases to go through, what steps to follow before and after a conversion, etc.
• What is the message to convey, such as what questions are key to ask the customer or what must not be missing in your sales pitch.
• What you need to show the customer, where everything related to visual content and any element that supports the sales professional's speech is included.

Benefits of Hubspot Playbooks

• More successful sales messages: HubSpot playbooks, as mentioned above, put the customer at the center of the strategy and, as such, make the customer's needs more relevant and the sales message more successful.
• Increased credibility and customer trust: by putting the customer at the center, the customer notices and feels more valued, which increases the likelihood that they will trust your brand over others.
• Strengthen the relationship with the customer: again, putting the customer at the center also means trying to forge better and stronger relationships with him that will more likely ensure a future sale.
• Better understanding of customer needs: by focusing the strategy around the customer, you can better understand their pain points and create more effective strategies.
• Increased number of successful sales: a customer-centric strategy has been proven to increase the number of sales for a company, especially over the long term.
• Streamlined sales processes: By having everything they need in one place, sales professionals can carry out their work more smoothly and efficiently. Storing multiple files and spending time searching for documents is a thing of the past with HubSpot playbooks.
• More efficient onboardings: Sales processes are not the only ones that benefit. Onboarding processes for a new team member are also simpler and more agile, as everything they need to know is in one place and at the click of a button.
• Ability to build a library of useful sales guides: in HubSpot you can also have reports that indicate which playbooks and materials are used the most. This way you can know which direction to take when you want to expand the resources available to sales teams and which resources are best to remove or modify.

Steps To Create a Sales Guide

Creating a playbook or sales guide is not difficult. Here is a step-by-step guide to get you started:

1. Log into your HubSpot account and in the Sales section click on Practical Guides.
2. Then, select the option Create practical guide. In this case, you can create a sales guide from scratch or choose from the different templates that HubSpot makes available to you. In the latter case, you can preview them by clicking on the Preview option on the right-hand side.
3. Once you have chosen one of them, it's time to click on the pencil icon at the top of the page to write the title of your playbook.
4. Then click on Create practical guide.
5. Now it's time to write. To do this, click anywhere in the text editor. As in Word documents, you have a toolbar at the top for editing content and inserting resources.

Don't forget that now, thanks to HubSpot's integration with Slack, if you have carried out the installation, you can view the guides from the messaging application without leaving it.

Tips for Creating Effective Sales Guides

As you have already seen, the step-by-step to start creating your playbook is not difficult. However, if you take into account some recommendations from the beginning, the final result will be much better and will make a difference.

Include Varied Resources

If you add videos, images, links or diagrams, reading the playbook will be much more enjoyable and it will be a much easier tool to use. These types of resources support what is mentioned in the text and provide context. But not only that, they can also come in handy for sales professionals as they talk to customers.

Complement Them With Training

A style guide is a great tool, we have already made that clear throughout the article. However, it is not a substitute for the necessary training and coaching processes that every member of the sales team must go through, but a very useful and recommended complement.

Keep Order and Be Concise

It is important that each playbook has its structure and is well organized so that it is easy to read and understand. In addition, the paragraphs should not be too long, since it is important that the ideas are written as concisely as possible so that the documents are not unnecessarily long.

Don’t Forget To Keep Them Up to Date

As the company grows and experiences sales over time, processes are sure to change and improve. It is important that these changes are reflected in these documents so that they do not become outdated. The best way to avoid this is to schedule periodic reviews over time.

Customize the Different Guides

If you're a small company, this point may not be important. But if your company is large enough to host different sales teams with different functions, yes. In that case, it is important that each team has its own personalized playbooks tailored to its needs. Remember: a specific and adapted sales playbook converts better than a generic one.