Sales
January 6, 2022

The Ultimate Inside Sales Playbook for SaaS Companies

The Ultimate Inside Sales Playbook for SaaS Companies

Selling a technology product like SaaS is quite a challenge because of its elusive nature. However, you don’t want to miss this excellent opportunity to sell SaaS when businesses need it most. You can help your sales team throughout the SaaS sales process and close that deal with a potential customer by providing them with an essential tool--a SaaS Playbook. 

A SaaS playbook is a compendium of your sales process, tools, templates, sales campaigns, best practices, and everything a sales rep needs to be successful. This tool is your sales rep’s roadmap to tackling their most significant challenges in engaging with customers in each step of the sales process. 

In this post, we’ll look at how you can create an exceptional SaaS playbook that suits your organization.  

Elements of a SaaS Playbook

The critical elements of a SaaS playbook are typically standard across SaaS companies. Still, you can add a few sections that are specific to your company to cover all of your bases. 

1. Company Information

This section outlines fundamental information about your company that includes the following: 

Vision, Mission, and Core Values

These serve as the foundation for your company’s strategic plan. They convey your organization’s purpose, direction, and standards of behavior that your sales team must observe.  

Organization Structure

Illustrate how the organization is structured. This includes:

●      The role and responsibilities of each department;

●      The connection of the sales department the other departments;

●      What each department contributes to the greater whole. 

The Sales Team Structure

Describe the roles and responsibilities of each person on the sales team and define what you expect of them. Add a visual representation of the structure to make the chain of roles and responsibilities clear at a glance. It would also help to include the employee's name in each position to orient new hires and build team relationships. 

Overall Sales Strategy

Your overall sales strategy explains why your company exists and what problems it aims to address. It must clearly define your objectives and guide everyone on your sales team as to how the strategy relates to their jobs. Provide sufficient information to leave no room for questions and help them start on the right foot and focus on their strategic expectations. 

2. Product Overview

The product overview section must include the basic information your sales team needs to describe what the product offers and answer customer questions such as: 

●      What products do you sell?

●      How does your product work?

●      What problems does your product address?

●      Why should customers buy your product?  

●      Why does your product stand out from competitors? 

You can focus on answering these questions and don’t need to include unnecessary technical details. If your company has substantial product offerings, you may need to create a separate playbook to explain the various buying processes, target market, and other essential information. 

3. Target Buyer Persona

This section describes your ideal customer and the market situation. It talks about trends, industry, company size, pain points, goals, solution requirements, etc. Providing buyer personas helps your sales rep screen their prospects to find a good fit for your product. It helps your team anticipate needs, answer questions, and overcome objections. It will also help your sales and marketing teams identify and target qualified leads. 

4. Messaging and Positioning

Messaging and positioning are all about defining the core benefit your product offers and why people should buy it. A brief description will help your sales reps focus on the most significant points to convey your brand’s value proposition to prospects in a limited time. 

Sharing your core message and positioning with marketing and sales keeps them aligned with their approaches, providing potential customers a flawless experience. You may want to add scripts to help them explain your brand's value proposition, products/services, and positioning. 

5. Commission Structure

This section provides a well-defined description of the compensation package for your salespeople. It must explain how your compensation plan works. The more clear and transparent you are, the better you can avoid false expectations or misinterpretations. 

6. Sales Methodology

Your sales methodology describes the principles and best practices that guide your sales team in approaching each step in the sales process. What’s your sales model? Do you use consultative selling? A mix of several frameworks? 

You should explain why this is the best methodology to use and how it aligns with your strategy and overall goals. 

7. Sales Process

The sales process is the heart of the SaaS playbook. While the sales methodology guides your sales team on what approach to take to selling, the process details the stages a sales rep navigates through with the prospect to close a deal. 

It equips your sales team with what they need at every touchpoint, from lead creation to closed-won. Map out the sales process stages, including what’s happening on the buyer’s side. Your goal is to give your sales reps a good understanding of what to do in every potential scenario.  

8. Sales Tools

This section details the effective use of your company’s technological resources, such as the CRM system and other project management software. It would help if you discussed how to use each feature, enabling your sales reps to use the exact tool required to move deals forward at a specific time or situation. 

You may want to use detailed step-by-step workflows or actual cases to help your sales team understand and demonstrate the product's tangible benefits to the customers. Real cases provide practice examples of how the product addresses specific problems. 

9. The Sales Plays

The sales plays are a curation of successful, tried, and tested plays that provide significant insights into the techniques that work for each type of customer or situation. It saves your new sales reps’ time to go through trial and error and end up losing deals. If a sales rep is going through a similar experience recorded in this section, it will serve as a guide to keep the sales process moving forward.  

It would be helpful to include sales plays for each industry, company size, or buyer persona. Organize these plays appropriately so your sales reps can quickly find what they need. 

10. Performance Metrics

You should clearly explain the performance metrics right at the start of the onboarding process. If your sales team has a clear picture of how your company measures their performance against targets, this will help them focus on areas they need to improve. It will also reinforce accountability for each sales stage and create more visibility into how each contributes to the team's success. 

Conclusion

Now that you've learned the critical elements of a sales playbook, you can start building one that is tailored fit for your organization. Putting together the key elements to develop a comprehensive sales playbook is a team effort. Make sure that you consider the voice of your sales team during the process.

Recent Articles