A Complete Guide to Creating and Using HubSpot Playbooks

Sales and customer service interactions can be time-consuming, and it can be challenging to ensure consistency across your team while delivering exceptional experiences. This is where HubSpot playbooks can be beneficial.

HubSpot playbooks are a powerful tool designed to streamline interactions with prospects and customers. They offer a structured framework for conversations, and through this, they ensure consistency and better outcomes.

Let’s explore in this blog how you can use HubSpot playbooks to improve the effectiveness of your team.

What are HubSpot Playbooks?

HubSpot playbooks are essentially interactive templates or scripts that are used to guide your sales and service teams through their interactions with prospects and customers. Think of them as a playbook for your team. They outline the steps and questions to follow during a conversation.

Playbooks allow you to ensure consistency across your team and guarantee that everyone is following the same process and delivering a unified brand message. This standard not only helps improve efficiency but also allows you to capture valuable information from each interaction. HubSpot playbooks can include scripts and talking points and ensure that all necessary information is gathered and that no crucial steps are missed.

Benefits of Using HubSpot Playbooks

Here are the top advantages of using HubSpot playbooks.

1. Better Training

When you are onboarding new team members for your company, there is a lot of time and resources involved. HubSpot Playbooks offer a structured approach to training. You can provide new hires with a clear roadmap for interactions. Moreover, if the new team members follow the playbook, they can quickly grasp the company protocols related to sales processes or customer service protocols, etc. This would let them become productive rapidly.

2. Standard Operating Procedures

If you are looking to build a strong brand identity, you need to be consistent. With HubSpot playbooks, you can establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for your team and ensure that every team member adheres to the same approach. This also leads to better customer experience, trust, and eventually your brand reputation.

3. Better Performance

Playbooks are repositories of best practices and strategies. If you follow the guidelines, your team can improve their performance and achieve better results. Moreover, HubSpot playbooks can help identify areas for improvement. You can have augmented sales and higher customer satisfaction, which also improves overall business growth.

4. Improved Collaboration

HubSpot playbooks allow you to share knowledge and collaborate within your team. You can use one center for all your practices and strategies and allow team members to learn from each other and build upon existing knowledge. This will help foster a culture of continuous improvement.

5. Time Efficiency

With playbooks, you can streamline interactions by providing a clear structure. Additionally, you can eliminate the need for constant decision-making and save a lot of time. This will enable your team to focus more on building relationships and closing deals rather than figuring out what to say next. Furthermore, HubSpot playbooks can help identify time-consuming tasks, and you can optimize your processes and increase efficiency. 

Types of Questions to Use in HubSpot Playbooks

If you want your sales and service interactions to be successful, you have to ask the right questions. HubSpot playbooks provide a structured framework that will help you incorporate these questions effectively. Make sure that you are crafting your questions carefully so you can gather crucial information and guide the conversation.

Every conversation depends on questioning, as they help build rapport. They guide the interaction toward a desired conclusion. When talking about HubSpot Playbooks, well-crafted questions ensure that your team consistently gathers information and addresses customer concerns.

Types of Questions

There are different types of questions you can include in your HubSpot playbooks. Just make sure that there is a balance of open-ended and close-ended questions. Open-ended questions encourage you to get detailed responses and gather insights. An example of this is how you currently address this challenge. Close-ended questions, on the other hand, provide specific answers and help move the conversation forward. For example, do you have a budget for this project?

Some of the different types of questions to use in HubSpot playbooks are discussed below.

Qualifying Questions

You can use these questions to see if a prospect is a good fit for your product or service. Qualifying questions mainly focus on budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT). Additionally, These help you assess whether a prospect aligns with your ideal customer profile.

Examples:

• What budget constraints do you have?

• How soon are you looking to make a decision?

Discovery Questions

With these questions, you can uncover the pain points, needs, and goals of your prospects. You can get insights into their challenges and aspirations. 

Examples:

• What specific problems are you facing?

• How does this problem impact your business?

• What outcomes are you hoping to achieve?

• How does your team handle [specific process]?

Closing Questions

Closing questions guide the conversation towards a decision or next step. They create a sense of urgency and encourage commitment.

Examples:

• Are there any remaining concerns?

• Would you like to proceed with a demo?

• Would you like to move forward?

• What steps should we take next?

Creating HubSpot Playbooks

Playbooks allow your team to be on the same page and let your customers have a good experience.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create a HubSpot playbook.

Step 1: Create a New Playbook

To create a new playbook, go to the Library > Playbooks section in your HubSpot account. Click on the "Create Playbook" button present on the upper right.

Step 2: Name Your Playbook

There is a pencil icon at the top of the page where you enter a title for your playbook. Give your playbook a clear and concise name that reflects its purpose. For example, you could name a playbook for your sales team "Sales Qualification Call Playbook" or a Playbook for your customer service team "Customer Support Inquiry Playbook". 

Step 3: Choose a Template

HubSpot offers several pre-built playbook templates that you can use as a starting point. If you do not see a template that fits your needs, you can start from scratch. To preview the template, you can click on the preview tab that you can find on the right planet. If you want to make a selection, you will find the playbook type in the left panel. 

Step 4: Add Questions and Scripts

This is where you will add the questions and scripts that you want your team to use. You can use the built-in question types or create your custom questions. When you are done writing your questions, you will have three options for how you can collect the person’s response.

• The open text field only provides your rep with a text box where you can take notes.

• Create a set of custom answer options that also has a text box for taking notes, but here, you can also provide a list of common answers for this question. To add these options, select the “Answer Options” box where you can type out each option.

• The third option, using a set of answers that saves to a property, allows you to choose a CRM property where you can save responses.

Step 5: Add Recommendations

Recommendations are suggestions for other playbooks or content that your team might find helpful. This can help your team to stay on top of the latest information.

Step 6: Publish Your Playbook

Once you are happy with your playbook, you can publish it. Your team will then be able to access it and use it in their interactions with customers.

How to Use HubSpot Playbooks

Now that you are familiar with what HubSpot playbooks are and how you can create them, let’s look at some examples of how to use them.

1. To Prepare for a Call

Videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or Instagram can be embedded into a playbook by uploading them yourself or by using a link. This is excellent if you want your representatives to review certain methods before a call.

2. As a Call Outline

You can walk your representatives through full sales interactions and ensure that they cover all the essential aspects, by combining question-and-answer boxes with bullet points.

3. As Competitive Battle Cards

Make a playbook for every one of your primary competitors. Create a list of the areas where you succeed and the areas where success is unlikely, and use language and visuals to compare the advantages and disadvantages of your product with those of your competitors. Your representatives can open these each time a certain competitor is mentioned.

Conclusion

HubSpot playbooks are a great tool that you can use to improve the performance of your team. They offer a structured framework for conversations that leads to better training, improved efficiency, performance, and collaboration, and helps in establishing SOPs. You can include questions in the Playbook to gather information and address customer concerns. Just make sure that you create different Playbooks for different types of customers and use this to track customer data.