An effective sales playbook is essential for any cybersecurity vendor sales team. It’s more than a series of call scripts and selling sheets. It’s a comprehensive guide for prospecting ideal target customers, defeating the competition, shortening sales cycles, and closing deals.

In this blog, we’ll cover the essentials of sales playbooks, including intended audiences, key topics, and what to look for when outsourcing sales playbooks to an outside vendor.

Your Audience

The audience for sales playbooks is anyone in customer-facing sales roles both inside and outside your company, including channel and OEM partners. Playbooks are an excellent resource for your sales personnel to turn to after you’ve completed initial sales training.

Key Topics

Topics will vary depending on a number of variables, including your company’s product and service portfolio, your competitive landscape, whether you have channel partners and/or OEM partners, and more. The following is a comprehensive list of topics you may wish to consider when creating your next sales playbook:

• Elevator Pitch
• Product / Service Overview
  • Product / service descriptions
  • Use cases / customer pain points
  • Key differentiators
  • Key benefits (ROI, TCO)
  • Pricing and packaging
  • Third-party integrations
  • Third-party validations
• Prospecting Strategies
  • Target companies
  • Target buyers (personas)
  • Discovery call questions
  • Qualification call questions
  • Overcoming objections
  • Cold call / email scripts
  • Content recommendations
• Defeating the Competition
  • Competitors at a glance
  • Advantages & disadvantages
  • Responding to competitor FUD
  • Packaging & pricing
  • Sample competitor displacements
  • Planting competitor landmines
• Selling Strategies
  • Working with channel partners
  • Responding to RFPs and RFIs
  • Competitor replacement program
  • Demo strategies
  • Reference customers
  • Closing plays

Selecting the Right Sales Playbook Vendor

Many cybersecurity vendors outsource sales playbook production to vendors that specialize in this area. However, when selecting a sales playbook vendor, be sure they align with the following requirements:

• Deep cybersecurity subject matter expertise
• Consultants with strong technical foundations
• Significant competitive analysis expertise
• Offers content creation services beyond sales playbooks

CyberEdge is the largest marketing and research firm to serve the cybersecurity vendor community. We are your one-stop shop for sales playbooks and all other content creation needs, including white papers, eBooks, survey reports, and more. To learn how CyberEdge can create the ultimate sales playbook for your sales organization, request a 20-minute consultation today!