Key Takeaways
No more outdated PDFs. Playbook creation software optimizes the process, ensuring sales representatives always have immediate access to the latest, most accurate versions of your sales resources.
Make it dynamic, not static. Unlike traditional static documents, modern software creates interactive, easily navigable, and collaborative resources that integrate directly with other essential sales tools.
Boost performance with smart features. These advanced platforms provide customizable structures, AI-powered content generation, and real-time distribution, which collectively lead to unified messaging and improved sales performance.
Top tools to explore. Leading sales playbook platforms include Proshort, HubSpot, Canva, Visme, and Dialpad, all designed to ensure easy, contextual access to critical sales content.
Now that complex buyer journeys have become the industry standard, it is crucial to equip sales teams with the right tools and strategies to expertly navigate this ever-changing landscape. One of the most effective ways to help your representatives improve sales performance is by creating a robust sales playbook.
Even though organizations utilizing a formalized sales playbook are 33% more likely to be high performers, nearly 40% of sales teams lack one. One common reason for avoiding the process is the perceived difficulty of creating a playbook that is both easy for representatives to access and easy for companies to keep perpetually up-to-date.
This article will guide you through the process of creating and maintaining your own highly effective sales playbook without the usual difficulties—and includes a roundup of the best sales playbook software to ensure the job is done right.
What is a Sales Playbook?
A sales playbook functions as the ultimate instruction manual for your entire sales organization. It comprehensively outlines your company’s sales processes, proven techniques, and established best practices, and is specifically designed to help representatives adapt confidently to a wide variety of sales scenarios.
The most effective sales playbooks guide representatives through any potential scenario that may occur across all sales pipeline stages, providing all necessary intelligence (including buyer personas, sales plays, ideal sales scripts, and email templates) to navigate them with complete confidence.
Companies that dedicate the time to define their go-to sales methodologies and best practices—and document them in a centralized, accessible location—experience an 18% difference in revenue growth, compared to those that do not.
Sales Playbook Template Example
Creating a sales playbook from scratch can feel daunting, but you do not need to start the process with a blank page. Leveraging high-quality sales playbook templates is an excellent way to reduce overwhelm, save development time, and ensure your sales enablement materials are as effective and on-point as possible.
Proshort, an AI-powered just-in-time sales execution platform, offers free, ready-to-use sales playbook templates covering essential sales stages, methodologies like MEDDIC, and qualification frameworks like BANT, among others. From sales training content to specific sales plays and best practices, utilize Proshort's templates to rapidly create top-tier sales playbooks. This ensures your representatives have the precise guidance they need exactly when and where sales plays happen, including directly within Salesforce, HubSpot, LinkedIn, and more.
What Is Sales Playbook Software?
Sales playbook software streamlines the process of creating an effective sales playbook, keeping it perpetually up-to-date, and ensuring representatives always have the latest version readily accessible.
Traditional playbooks, which typically take the form of static PDFs or slide decks, make it exceedingly difficult for representatives to quickly locate the exact content they need during an active sale. They are also notoriously cumbersome to update—so much so that 31% of organizations only update their playbook annually, and 12% neglect to update it ever.
In contrast, modern sales playbook software allows you to create an interactive and collaborative playbook that is easy to navigate. This empowers sellers to find precisely what they need at every stage of the pipeline—and enables the enablement team to make regular, immediate updates as sales processes are refined.
Using sales playbook software unifies your sales team and keeps everyone aligned on the same messaging and strategy. You will never again have to worry if representatives are working with outdated iterations of your sales playbook (or, worse, not utilizing one at all).
Must Haves For The Perfect Sales Playbook
While the specific content of a sales playbook is unique to each company, there are a handful of must-have sections every effective playbook should comprehensively contain. Let’s explore each of them.
Overview of the Company
Sales playbooks must begin with a clear company overview. This foundational section provides representatives with a high-level view of what your company does, its core mission and aspirations, a deep dive into its product offerings, and its unique value proposition in the market.
Your company overview should also include a sales organization chart that outlines the team hierarchy—listing names and titles, individual roles and responsibilities, who reports to whom, and how the entire sales organization functions internally.
Sales Process
The sales process section must clearly explain which sales methodologies you employ, justify the choice of those methodologies for your team, and outline how they align with your company’s ultimate revenue goals. Next, detail the precise series of steps that salespeople should follow to move prospects through the sales funnel, including prescriptive guidance on what to do and say in every potential scenario.
This information ensures representatives have a clear understanding of what success looks like at every single touchpoint—from initial contact to final deal closing.
KPIs and Goals
Clearly defining your short- and long-term goals provides your sales team with precise targets and timeframes to focus their efforts. It is also beneficial to include a snapshot of your current performance against these goals, both as a source of team motivation and a convenient way for representatives to monitor their progress.
The best KPIs and metrics to track are those that serve as reliable measurements for the goals you intend to reach. These might include sales cycle length, win rate, time to close, and quota attainment, among others. This data is critical for pinpointing what aspects of your sales enablement strategy are effective, as well as identifying opportunities for continual improvement.
Customer Profiles
Customer profiles are fictional, detailed representations of your company’s target markets. They typically include essential details like industry, company size, job title, core pain points, goals, and known buying behaviors.
Including these detailed profiles in your sales playbook helps representatives understand the various personas they will encounter, anticipate their specific needs, prepare effective answers to questions, and develop engaging conversation starters and strategies for proactively overcoming objections at any stage of the sales cycle.
Sales Tools
This section of your sales playbook should provide a complete and current list of the software and tools your representatives will utilize, such as sales content management software, CRM tools and integrations, and automated processes.
Include a detailed overview of what each tool is used for, exactly how they support the sales team in moving deals forward, and detailed user guides to ensure representatives are using the correct software in the correct way at every critical touchpoint.
Resources
In this section, you will centralize all of the internal and external content your representatives need to effectively nurture leads and successfully close deals.
Internal resources support your sales team’s work behind-the-scenes, such as:
Battle cards
Email templates
Sales analytics reports
Sales decks
Training content
External resources support sales pitches and actively educate prospects, and might include:
Product brochures
Case studies
Sales sheets
Testimonials
White papers
Time Management
As you continuously refine your sales enablement strategy, you may uncover useful information that can help representatives better allocate their selling time. For example, you might notice specific sales sequences are proving exceptionally effective for your target markets or that top performers are streamlining certain tasks in genius ways.
Including a time management section means representatives can conveniently discover new ways of optimizing their individual working style and focus more time on what they do best—closing deals.
Best Sales Playbook Software
Using dedicated sales playbook software can help you create an effective, dynamic sales playbook for your entire team in a fraction of the time required by manual methods. Read on to discover the best sales playbook software options available today.
1. Proshort
Proshort is the modern AI-powered enablement and execution platform that unifies content management, conversation intelligence, and personalized guidance to help revenue teams automate workflows and close deals quicker. Proshort combines an intelligent content management platform with its AI Assistant, the just-in-time sales execution engine that leverages signals from CRM, call intelligence, and communication tools to deliver personalized guidance, content, and recommendations directly to reps right within their flow of work.
The AI Assistant embeds contextual AI agents into a rep’s daily tasks to anticipate needs and automate workflows like curating and creating content, or building Buyer Hubs. By surfacing personalized guidance and resources directly in their flow of work, the AI Assistant enables reps to prepare for calls, follow up, and launch custom Buyer Hubs in seconds.
Granular execution analytics on performance and buyer engagement show sales leaders which behaviors move deals forward, what content directly impacts pipeline, and where execution breaks down. By combining these insights with AI-driven guidance, Proshort strengthens change management to drive stronger adoption and accelerate execution at scale.
Key features of Proshort:
AI Playbook Creation and Maintenance: This feature allows enablement teams to rapidly build dynamic, stage-specific playbooks using Generative AI. It can synthesize winning talk tracks and effective battlecards directly from successful Conversation Intelligence data (top rep calls). The AI ensures the playbook content is always relevant and automatically linked to the correct CRM stage.
AI Assistant (In-Workflow Guidance): The central AI engine that leverages signals from CRM and call tools to deliver personalized guidance, content (like playbook snippets or battlecards), and next-step recommendations directly to reps in their flow of work (CRM, email, live call).
AI Roleplay Simulations: Provides a safe, scalable environment for representatives to practice pitches, objection handling, and critical sales conversations with an AI-driven virtual buyer that provides immediate, objective scoring and feedback.
Auto Notes Sync: Automates administrative tasks by summarizing calls and automatically updating relevant fields and action items in the CRM (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot) instantly after the conversation.
Conversation Intelligence and Coaching: Automatically transcribes and analyzes sales calls to provide objective AI Coaching Scores based on playbook adherence and best practices. Managers use this data to build targeted coaching plans from real-world call snippets.
Buyer Hubs (Digital Sales Rooms): Centralized, branded buyer hubs that reps can create in seconds. Admins track buyer engagement analytics tied directly to pipeline and revenue impact.
Revenue Insights and Analytics: Connect enablement to revenue with dashboards that show influenced pipeline and the specific coaching activities and content that drives impact.
Just-in-Time Delivery: Surfaces playbook content, battlecards, and answers across Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook, Gong, LinkedIn, and Chrome through lightweight extensions.
Best for: Proshort is best for growing teams of 20 to 500+ representatives at mid to enterprise companies that want to turn real-time knowledge access and execution automation into a competitive advantage their reps can leverage to learn, grow, and sell at the speed of business.
💡 Proshort acts as the connective tissue of your sales enablement stack. See how Proshort helps teams like yours spend 90% less time searching for answers and instead, focuses on execution.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot’s Playbooks feature offers sales teams a clear and repeatable roadmap to follow at every stage of the sales process, providing essential step-by-step instructions, actionable checklists, detailed best practices, and more. Whether prospecting, negotiating, or managing follow-up, representatives can access interactive guidance cards directly within the HubSpot platform. This removes hesitation from the sales process and allows representatives to adapt quickly in the moment.
Key Features:
Tailored Playbook Customization: Allows users to adapt playbooks specifically for different buyer personas, sales stages, geographic regions, and unique selling situations.
Optimized Customer Interactions: Provides step-by-step instructions and supporting materials to enhance the quality of customer interactions.
Customizable Note Fields: Playbooks can be customized with multiple-choice options or text fields, making it easy for representatives to capture key notes directly within the guidance.
Instant Team Synchronization: Playbooks can be updated and synced instantly across the entire sales team, ensuring everyone is working with the most current guidance.
Pricing:
Sales Hub Professional: $100 per month per seat
Sales Hub Enterprise: $150 per month per seat
3. Canva
Canva enables your sales team to connect powerfully with prospects, build strong relationships, and close deals faster through access to world-class visual content—all without requiring any prior design experience. From detailed playbooks to impactful pitch decks to demo walkthrough videos, Canva’s Sales Work Kit features a vast library of professionally designed templates that can be quickly customized to be fully brand-ready.
With Canva, representatives can efficiently create visually impactful sales collateral whenever needed and in a fraction of the time typically required.
Key Features:
Template Customization: Templates can be customized in seconds and used as the foundational design for all new sales assets.
Brand Consistency Management: Users can establish and maintain brand consistency by locking logo placement, color palettes, and fonts across all materials.
Design Animation: Offers tools to animate designs, helping to bring sales assets and presentations to life.
Integrated Video Editing: Allows users to create, edit, and publish on-brand demo videos.
Real-Time Collaboration: Supports real-time collaboration from any location, with instant review and approval of designs.
Pricing:
Free: $0 per month
Pro: $12.99 per month per person
Teams: $14.99 per month per person
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
4. Visme
Visme is an all-in-one visual content creation and collaboration platform that empowers your sales team to create branded sales materials, even if they lack specialized design experience. Users can browse an extensive range of sales playbook templates and fully customize them with their brand’s colors, fonts, images, icons, and even interactive videos and audio elements. The platform includes data visualization tools to transform complex data into dynamic graphs and informative charts. Finished playbooks can be downloaded as high-quality PDFs for printing or shared digitally via a simple link.
Key Features:
Customizable Pre-made Templates: Provides a large library of pre-made templates to easily assemble high-quality playbooks.
Automated Branding: The Brand Wizard automatically generates the company logo, color scheme, and fonts for immediate use.
Interactive Content: Tools to make sales assets highly engaging with interactive features and elements.
Collaboration Tools: Includes integrated commenting and annotation features to conveniently collaborate with the team during the design process.
Pricing:
Basic: $0 per month
Starter: $29 per month
Pro: Starting at $59 per month
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
5. Dialpad
Dialpad is an AI-powered sales intelligence software that captures real-time transcriptions of sales calls and generates concise call summaries at the end of each conversation. Its specialized AI Playbooks feature captures user responses and utilizes them to provide real-time insights to sales representatives based on your predefined sales methodology.
This ensures representatives are consistently asking prospects the right questions at the optimal time, while maintaining alignment with your company’s established sales processes.
Key Features:
Custom AI Playbook Templates: Allows users to leverage customizable AI playbook templates or tailor their own for highly specific use cases.
Script Optimization: Helps pinpoint the successful script or talk track that helps close the most deals and uses custom AI playbooks to automate it as the go-to guide.
Real-Time Assist Cards: Provides representatives with triggered pop-ups that include essential talking points and best practices during live calls.
Post-Call Playbook Updates: Allows representatives to provide feedback and update AI playbooks immediately after wrapping up sales calls.
Pricing:
Essentials: $70 per month per user
Advanced: $110 per month per user
Premium: $170 per month per user
6. Lemlist
Lemlist is a cloud-based sales outreach tool that employs AI to help users find leads with verified emails, write personalized messages at scale, and successfully send cold emails that generate replies. It also helps users avoid common deliverability issues by staggering how email campaigns are sent to convincingly mimic human interaction patterns.
Additionally, users can enhance their sales playbook strategy with Lemlist’s playbooks library. This library provides free access to actionable playbooks with proven strategies and tips for signing more deals, including resources like, “How to Find and Close Leads with Cold Outreach” and “How to Write Cold Emails That Get Replies.”
Key Features:
Instant Personalization: Allows users to transform a generic template into a highly personalized email in seconds.
Scaled Messaging: Supports personalization of emails and LinkedIn messages at scale across campaigns.
Automated Multi-Channel Outreach: Automates outreach across multiple channels in a way that appears human and authentic.
Deliverability Tools: Features advanced warm-up and deliverability boosters to successfully avoid spam folders.
Pricing:
Email Starter: $39 per month per user
Email Pro: $69 per month per user
Multichannel Expert: $99 per month per user
Outreach Scale: $159 per month per user
More to Know About Sales Playbook Software
There are many factors that contribute to successfully choosing the best sales playbook software for your team. Below is additional intelligence to help you make a fully informed decision.
What is the best sales playbook generator?
If you are looking for a way to instantly generate baseline content for new sales playbooks, the Proshort AI Playbook feature is the optimal solution. Not only does this just-in-time sales execution tool allow you to instantly generate a robust, revenue-generating playbook from foundational inputs, but it is also designed to surface the specific playbooks representatives need when they need them to close deals faster—all without disrupting their productivity.
Proshort allows you to create contextual, agile playbooks that surface across every sales touchpoint, making them instantly accessible in Salesforce, Chorus, Outreach, or wherever your representatives are working.
What format should your sales playbook be in?
Traditionally, sales playbooks have been formatted as a single ebook, PDF document, or a collection of slide presentations. However, lengthy, static documents like these are exceptionally difficult for representatives to navigate quickly when they need specific, actionable content in the moment. They are also inconvenient for enablement teams to update, which puts the sales team at risk of working with playbooks that are ineffective, inaccurate, or obsolete.
With the buyer journey continuously becoming more complex, sales playbooks must be dynamic. With Proshort, you can create contextual, agile playbooks that surface specific content fragments across every sales touchpoint, wherever your representatives are working, ensuring they have the right answer at the moment of need.
What is the difference between a sales play and a sales playbook?
A sales play is a precisely defined set of repeatable steps, actions, and best practices for sales representatives to use during a single, specific selling situation (e.g., handling a pricing objection). Plays guide representatives on what to know, what to say, what to share, and what to do during each customer interaction to move the deal forward, regardless of the buyer persona or stage in the sales cycle.
A sales playbook is a comprehensive collection of multiple sales plays. The playbook is the overarching document that also outlines a company’s entire sales process, core techniques, and established best practices, ensuring representatives can easily adapt to any sales scenario they encounter.
Use The Best Sales Playbook Software For Your Team
The most effective sales playbooks are comprehensive, providing clear, precise, step-by-step instructions designed to increase sales velocity and significantly boost win rates. Today’s dynamic sales playbooks must be agile enough to keep pace with increasingly complex buyer journeys, accessible enough for representatives to find exactly what they need in the crucial moment of need, and flexible enough for companies to make instant updates as strategies evolve.
The premier sales playbook software to help you achieve this level of execution is Proshort. Using Proshort’s generative AI capabilities, specifically the AI Playbook feature, you can instantly generate baseline content for sales playbooks and make those resources instantly accessible within Salesforce, Gong, Chorus, or wherever your representatives are working.
What makes Proshort such a game-changer is its unique support for just-in-time execution in the flow of work. With Proshort, your sales playbooks transition from static documents to interactive, adaptable, and immediately reinforceable guidance right where your sales team lives and sells.
Prospecting happens in real-time—your playbooks and execution processes should too.
Book a demo with Proshort today to transform your sales guidance.
