There are sample playbooks you can download on this site. Go ahead and take them. I put them there so you can see what one looks like and what’s possible, and they’re a fair teaser.

But I want to be straight with you about what they are. They’re the shape of the thing, not the thing. A real playbook can’t be built as a side project, and it can’t be written after the fact by somebody who wasn’t in the room. It has to be part of the work from day one, or it ends up where most of them end up, which is a drawer.

Let me explain what I mean, because this is the question I get asked most at workshops.

The playbook that gets written afterward

Here’s how most companies get one. Growth stalls, the owner decides the team needs a process, and somebody is assigned to write it down. Usually the best rep, usually on top of his real job, usually over a couple of weekends.

What comes back is a document that describes the steps. It doesn’t describe the judgment. It says “qualify the opportunity” and doesn’t say what the owner notices in the first ten minutes that tells him a deal is real. It says “present the proposal” and doesn’t say which three questions actually decide whether the proposal gets read.

That document goes in a binder. New hires get it on day one. Nobody opens it again, because nothing in it helps anybody win a deal they’d otherwise lose.

That’s not a playbook. That’s a description of a playbook.

Built from day one

A playbook worth having is the record of a real diagnosis, and it starts building itself the first week.

When I begin with a client, the first thing that goes into their shared portal is the assessment: forty questions, answered by everybody who touches a customer, scored across strategy, process, analytics and people. Then the one-on-one interviews. Then the prioritized list of what’s broken and what to fix first.

Those aren’t preparation for the playbook. They are the playbook. They’re the first section of it, and you can watch it grow from there. The five-year growth plan goes in. The competitive analysis goes in. The decision about direct sales versus channel partners, and why, goes in. Every one of those is a deliverable in its own right, and every one of them is also a chapter.

By the time we’re done, the table of contents reads like the growth plan for the company, with the go-to-market detail underneath each part. That’s what a playbook is supposed to be. Not a manual somebody wrote. A record of what the company decided, and the reasoning, and the evidence it was decided on.

Thin playbooks are the ones where nobody did the interviews.

The company that needed five

I’m working with a client right now on the third pass of theirs, and they taught me something.

They sell into five different verticals. On paper that’s one company. In practice the products are so different from one vertical to the next that you’d swear it was five companies sharing a parking lot. Different buyers, different problems, different language.

If we’d built one playbook and sent it to their channel partners, all it would have done is confuse them. A partner selling into one vertical would have to wade through four that don’t apply to find the one that does. Same for a new rep. Same for a customer.

So we’re building five. Five sections, each one a small playbook for its vertical, and then everything that’s true across the whole company, the values, the positioning, the things every rep needs regardless, wrapped around them. One document, five doors into it.

That’s the kind of decision you can only make if the playbook is being built while you’re doing the work. Nobody writing it afterward, from memory, on a weekend, would have caught it.

It keeps working after I leave

The part I enjoy most about this is what happens later.

When a company finishes an engagement with me, I graduate them. I’m not there every week anymore. But the playbook is, and because it was built as a working document rather than a finished one, they keep building it. The five-year plan gets adjusted when year two doesn’t go the way year one suggested. A new vertical gets its own section. A competitive analysis gets updated when a competitor gets bought.

It lives with them. That’s how I take care of clients long after I’ve moved on to working with somebody else, and it’s the reason I’d rather build it slowly and right than hand you a document in week two.

If you want to see one

Start with the samples on this site. They’ll show you the structure and give you a sense of the depth.

Then, if you’re looking at your own team and realizing that what you have is a description of a process rather than a record of how you actually win, email me at dean@salesgrowthimagination.com. Tell me what your current playbook looks like, even if the honest answer is that it lives in your head. That’s where most of them live, and it’s where we’d start.

Dean