A playbook is a framework used by sales teams to guide and optimize their selling process. It provides a set of principles that focuses on a different aspect of the sales journey, for example – identifying prospects, qualifying leads, assessing opportunities, and closing deals. By helping salespeople tailor their approach to various customer interactions, playbooks allow for a more predictable and efficient sales process.
Your company probably utilizes a sales methodology playbook, and Gong can seamlessly integrate this into your deal boards, offering the following advantages:
Seamless inclusion to deal boards: Ready-to-use playbooks, including many popular methodologies or custom-made ones, incorporate directly into your deal board. This lets you and your team track progress where you monitor your deal health.
AI-driven suggestions: AI automatically suggests notes based on interactions with leads. This increases playbook compliance by making it easier for sales reps to track progress, and managers to review the pipeline at a glance. With less administrative work, AE’s can engage with prospects more effectively, while managers can spend more time coaching for success.
Easily identify gaps: Color-coded elements indicate whether each one was completed, allowing early identification of gaps to prioritize action.
By forming part of your day-to-day Gong practices, playbooks ensure that teams follow proven sales processes, resulting in a higher win rate.
Pre-built playbooks
The following pre-built playbooks are available:
MEDDICC
BANT
SPIN
Challenger
SPICED
Solution Selling
Sandler
Start with one of our pre-built playbooks and customize it by adding or removing elements to align with your team's unique sales methodology. These playbooks incorporate pre-trained smart trackers - streamlining setup. Gong also allows you the flexibility to create your own from scratch.
All playbooks integrate into your deal board and each element can be completed directly from here.
This is how the MEDDICC playbook looks on a deal board:
The core logic of AI in playbooks
Each playbook contains a series of elements, representing sales principles that the AE needs to complete on each deal, for example – Identify pain.
An element is represented as a letter and is visible on the deal board.
Every letter has a status to indicate to what extent that element has been fulfilled, and assessment has been completed.
An element can be mapped to a custom or pre-built smart tracker, which determines how it should be identified by Gong AI.
AI finds relevant conversations that meet the fulfillment of that element and generates suggested notes.
The AE reviews the suggested note, updates the element and in some cases can validate the element.
Managers can review and validate the elements.
Element statuses in playbooks
White: No manual notes have been added, and Gong’s AI source hasn't identified anything relevant in prospect interactions.
White with a Star: No manual notes have been added, but Gong’s AI has found conversations where this principle is discussed.
Light Blue: A manual note has been added by the rep, which may or may not have been created using AI suggestions.
Dark Blue: The manual note has been validated by either the AE or manager, depending on your company’s process. The element is now validated.
Using trackers
When setting up a playbook, you have three choices for an AI source:
Pre-trained smart trackers which Gong has designed specifically for playbooks.
Custom smart trackers which let you track any concept, in addition to the ones provided by Gong.
Keyword trackers track conversation areas which include specific keywords, for example – competitor name, which are then aggregated into a suggested note.
Sync with your CRM
The completed notes and status for each element of your playbook can be pushed as two fields to your CRM opportunity record – one for the status and one for the note. Gong provides a two-way sync with the CRM, so any changes in the CRM are reflected in Gong, and vice versa.