Imagine the following scenario: Each of your sales reps must contact several prospects daily. Each rep speaks to 5-10 prospects daily between calls and emails. With such an amount of interaction, they quickly forget important pinpoints that could help them close the deal. Even worse, they could make the mistake of confidently making their case around an issue your prospect isn’t facing because their notes got mixed up. Both scenarios could sink the deal. Fortunately, they are easy to overcome if you’re using HubSpot. Introducing: HubSpot Playbooks.
Playbooks are available for Sales Hub and Service Hub with a Professional or Enterprise subscription and consist of interactive cards visible on different records, such as contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. These cards allow sales reps to create a layout of the conversation they’re about to have and to write down the information they obtain during their interactions with prospects and customers.
Let’s explore the versatility of playbooks with an example of discovery calls. In the playbooks tool, you can create a standardized playbook tailored to this specific type of call, containing all the questions that must be answered. To make them easily distinguishable and interactive, HubSpot allows you to format questions in a way that not only facilitates identifying them in the card, but also gives you a box below the question where you can write all the information relevant to each question, or select an answer from a dropdown list created for each one of them.
How Can You Create a Playbook?
To create a playbook, navigate to Sales in the top navigation bar and select Playbooks in the dropdown menu. You will then be able to view all your existing playbooks and create a new one.
You can create a new sales playbook from scratch and customize it as needed, adding the questions, notes, and information you consider relevant to the sales process you’re creating it for, but there’s more to explore. The use cases for HubSpot’s playbooks go beyond just discovery calls. That’s why HubSpot provides you with a list of playbook templates you can use as a starting point to build yours.
But before diving into the templates, there’s an essential thing to note: In addition to adding questions, you can create a record and schedule a meeting directly from a playbook.
This is game-changing in your sales processes for two reasons. First, it makes the sales reps’ work easier, saving them time. They don’t have to go back to their notes to find the name, address, and phone number of a contact to then manually create a record in a whole different process; making notes as they interact with a prospect and creating a record is a single process made possible by Playbooks.
On the other hand, having these options just one click away allows the sales reps to streamline their engagements, have better chances of scheduling further meetings, and progress towards closing the deal. In sales, there’s no time to waste. If you have a single pane of glass to visualize information and turn it into actions that facilitate the path to closing a deal, you must take advantage of it.
For instance, if you want to standardize the information needed to qualify prospects, you can create your playbook from the Qualification Playbook template. Once you select this template, it will be populated with standard questions to ask when qualifying prospects, but you don’t necessarily need to keep it as is. Quite the contrary, think of a playbook as a blank canvas you can fill with text, images, links, snippets, or whatever you find more useful for your interactions.
You will also notice other templates available, such as the Business Review Playbook and the Customer Onboarding Playbook. The latter one is also crucial for sales reps since they play a vital role during HubSpot’s Objective-based Onboarding.
This playbook template contains relevant questions to obtain information that will help the Onboarding Specialist develop the necessary objects and properties in the customer’s HubSpot instance so the customer can start working on the projects established in the kickoff call.
Luckily for users, nearly all HubSpot automation (and tools in general) can benefit from AI. In the case of playbooks, you can use the AI content writer to draft ideas, sentences, paragraphs, or even whole outlines that can be later tailored to meet your needs. But this AI doesn’t necessarily have to be used when you don’t know where to start; it can also improve what already exists.
If you highlight a piece of written content and then click on the bolt icon next to it, HubSpot’s AI will give you the option to rewrite, expand, summarize, or change the tone of what you highlighted. This comes in handy if you’re falling short of ideas or want a new version of your playbook to test it on an actual interaction.
HubSpot automation services are often used to update properties without the need for manual work, but did you know you can update properties from playbooks? That's the not-so-hidden gem Playbooks has to offer!
When creating a question in a playbook, you will have the option to choose between different answer types:
If you select Update a Property, sales reps can choose options that reflect a property's values. You can use properties from any of your objects, whether deals, tickets, or contacts, which will allow you to streamline the process of translating your sales reps' notes to your HubSpot instance. In addition, it's essential to know you can trigger HubSpot automation through playbooks.
Note: If you select the Update Property option, check the box to hide the notes field to avoid mistakes when answering that question. In addition, to use the property update for Tickets, you must have Sales Hub Enterprise and Service Hub Enterprise.
The Ultimate Benefit of Using Playbooks for Sales
So, we established what a playbook is, how to create one from scratch and using templates, how to leverage AI to overcome creative challenges, and how to streamline the process of updating information on properties through playbooks. But what I consider the ultimate benefit of Playbooks is the possibility of using data from them and turning it into actionable insights.
By analyzing the number of playbooks logged, you can evaluate sales reps' performance and gain insights into how useful they find these playbooks in their daily tasks. Furthermore, you can measure team adoption and how each of your sales reps uses the playbooks you created.
Insights like these help you drive changes in your approach to sales and point you in the right direction on what questions should be asked, which insights obtained during your sales reps' engagements are helpful, and ultimately, how you can create a sales process that truly reflects your value proposition to your prospects.
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