How to Create a Staffing & Recruiting Sales Playbook
Marc Gassó and Marcus Castro, part of our team, offer their advice about creating a sales playbook for staffing and recruiting companies.
By Marcus Castro on June 22, 2022
Wondering how to ensure that your Staffing & Recruiting sales teams are functioning correctly? The first step is ensuring they have a clear idea of your strategy and that the whole team is working towards the same goal. This is what defines the Sales Playbook.
Assembling what constitutes the backbone of your Sales Team can be one of the most challenging and complex projects to achieve. It should include all the steps of our sales process, buyer personas, pain points, qualification criteria, templates… anything and everything that can help the Staffing & Recruiting Sales teams perform at their best.
So to highlight the best practices that high-performing leaders should be paying attention to when building their sales playbook, we sat down with Head of Corporate Strategy Marcus Castro, and CMO Marc Gassó, at Bloobirds. They offered expert advice on what should go in it, where it should live, and everything you need to know about creating and implementing your sales strategy.
Must-know’s about building your ultimate Sales Playbook:
A Sales Playbook is a step-by-step guide every sales team should have to follow the same practices for every possible sales situation. It helps sales reps through all possible scenarios and allows them to make better decisions on what to do next and how to do it, always ensuring the correct and most precise outcome.
Marcus: “The Playbook provides a clear sales strategy that is continuously changing and evolving. It gives the ability to scale and replicate Staffing sales success across various teams. It is beneficial when the recruiting team has a complex focus: multiple industries, staffing functions, and messaging.
Marc agreed, adding that “the more complex your go-to-market strategy is, the more you need a playbook”.
Steps to create your Staffing & Recruiting Sales Playbook
1. Defining your GTM strategy
To define your Go-To-Market strategy, you’ll have to ask yourself, What kind of companies do we want to sell to? Who do we want to talk to?
You’ll be defining:
Target market
Target persona
Value prop by TM and TP
“This is at the core of the Playbook. The following are the building blocks that define the sales team with a defined approach of the ideal targets, calling profile and value proposition”.
Marcus Castro, Head of Corporate Strategy at Bloobirds
Staffing sales reps become more effective when consistently targeting prospects who are the most likely to buy your solution. While most companies already have a solid idea of their ideal customer, this takes it a step further.
2. Establishing Processes
How do I assign leads? When should I send a company into nurturing?
These processes must be followed closely, which can’t be done in a spreadsheet or a stand-alone document. They have to be integrated into the sales engagement tool.
You’ll be defining:
Contactability
Lead management
Pre-qualifying and qualifying processes
Recycled companies policies
Discarded and nurturing accounts management
Marcus explains: “The process provides structure to the sales team. It is the underlying foundation that provides a systematic approach to give the sales team guidance on how to approach prospects”.
3. Creating Content
Finally, ask yourself: What’s the best message to deliver? How do we structure our pitch?
Even the best-trained Recruiter will forget pitches and qualifying questions from time to time, especially when targeting complex markets. Avoid this and suggest the best messaging content in real-time.
You’ll be defining:
Pitches and templates
Snippets
Sales collateral and marketing content
Objection handling
How often should it be reviewed?
Marcus: “One of the beauties of a digital Staffing Playbook is it gives a continuous review process. The sales reps will always be testing new sales messaging and techniques. As one sales rep notices that a specific approach is working well, it can be scaled quickly to the rest of the team. We advise the Sales Manager to review the messaging on an ongoing basis to implement additional content based on feedback from the team”.
If you’re building it for the first time, you should update it all the time, nearly on a daily basis.
Once the process is validated, this can change:
GTM Strategy should be reviewed at least quarterly
The process will constantly depend on feedback from your sales reps, and the team using it
Content should be very proactive. You should keep looking for new pieces to create, thanks to input gathered from the market. What topics are prospects interested in and the trending topics on the target market. It’s essential to absorb that info and review it constantly
Marc added: “It also depends on the stage of the company. Any company that’s starting their sales team will have to do it on a daily basis. On the other side companies that are in growth mode won’t have that need. Taking all of that into account, GTM strategy and content will always be the most updated parts.”
“Revising your playbook TOO often is better than not often enough”
Marc Gassó, CMO at Bloobirds
The key to every successful sales team is scaling best practices. But to repeat your best sales rep tactics throughout the team, you’ll need to understand what on your playbook is exactly helping them to achieve success.
How to integrate your Sales Playbook into reps’ daily tasks?
Marc:“You don’t want to have it in different docs, that makes it more complicated for reps to follow indications and can lead sometimes to reps deciding on their own. The more people in the team, the more challenging it is to make sure they are all following the steps. Having it inside your system instead allows them all to have:
Precision, when it comes to picking up the right companies
Relevance, in order to choose the best messaging and content
Consistency, which means having intensive and systematic teams
Automation, to boost productivity
This is built-in to Bloobirds, and tracking also helps managers understand what is working and what is not and improve reps’ effectiveness.
Best way to implement your playbook?
Marc shared that the most important thing is having the three elements (GTM Strategy, Process, and content) and covering each of them. “As a best practice, I would say it’s answering all the bullet points considered in each element.”
Also, the importance of treating it as a daily tool. It’s obvious that when sales reps are trained they won’t have the need to check it constantly but if they have it inside the sales engagement tool they won’t have to worry about having to search for it somewhere else.
It is essential to have it all documented in one place. Not only that but also being able to incorporate the team into building it. This allows them to understand where all guidance comes from and also helps build everyone as a team.
All of that being said…
It’s important to start having conversations and learning. Sales teams can be a huge help when it comes to building it as they go. When it comes to early-stage, gaining experience first will allow you to then build a playbook.
“Your playbook can’t be based on guesses, everything needs to be proved. Start talking on the phone and building the playbook can get done both in parallel.”
Marc Gassó, CMO at Bloobirds
Now you’ve seen everything you need to know to create and implement your sales playbook, your next step is to implement it in your system and Bloobirds can do that for you. It makes sure reps follow the best plays with the in-app playbook’s help.
