The Sales Playbook That Actually Gets Used

Coaching isn't the solution. It's the final step. And most companies skip everything that comes before it.

Here's a pattern I see constantly: a sales team underperforms, leadership gets concerned, and someone suggests the obvious fix. "We need better coaching."

So they invest in coaching. They send managers to workshops. They implement one-on-ones. They buy conversation intelligence software. And six months later, nothing has changed.

The coaching didn't fail because it was bad coaching. It failed because coaching was the wrong intervention for the problem they actually had.

The 2025 State of Sales Coaching report surveyed over 1,600 sales professionals and found that 39% feel their coaching is "too generic," 50% want it to focus on actual skills instead of just reviewing KPIs, and 29% say it lacks any practical, actionable advice. Meanwhile, a SHRM/Globoforce study found that 93% of managers believe they need more training on how to coach in the first place.

That's not a coaching problem. That's a foundation problem.

The Hierarchy Nobody Talks About

Think of sales development like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can't address self-actualization if someone's basic safety needs aren't met. The same principle applies to building a sales team.

Here's the sequence that actually works:

Recruiting → Orientation → Training → Feedback → Coaching

Skip any step, and everything that follows becomes exponentially harder.

But this hierarchy isn't just a building sequence—it's also a diagnostic. When a rep is struggling, leadership has to make tough decisions. Work through these in order:

• Is this the right person for the job? (Recruiting)

• Do they understand their role and goals? (Orientation)

• Do they know HOW to do the job? (Training)

• Have we given them constructive feedback on how to improve? (Feedback)

• NOW can we coach them to excellence? (Coaching)

The first "no" tells you where to intervene. Coaching someone who never received feedback won't work. Giving feedback to someone who was never trained on your methodology won't help. Training someone who doesn't understand their role is wasted effort. And all of it fails if you hired the wrong person.

The Center for Sales Strategy puts it simply: "Sales Performance = Talent + Training + Tactics." They call it a three-legged stool. If just one of the legs is weak, the stool falls. And here's the uncomfortable truth: "Hiring for Talent and Fit is an important piece of the Growth Formula, and without it, our training efforts may be futile, no matter how well we plan them out."

RAIN Group's research confirms this through regression analysis of 242 sales professionals. They identified three key drivers of training effectiveness: skills assessment, effective onboarding, and regular coaching. But here's what matters: organizations with highly effective training are 4.9 times more likely to have onboarding programs that get sellers productive quickly. The coaching works because the foundation exists.

Coaching is powerful. But it's the capstone, not the cornerstone.

Where the Playbook Fits

So where does a sales playbook enter this picture?

A well-built playbook serves two critical functions in the hierarchy: it delivers orientation and training. It tells new reps what their role actually looks like. It explains how your company sells—not in theory, but in practice. It captures the undocumented expertise that lives in the heads of your best performers and makes it accessible to everyone else.

And when those foundations are solid, coaching finally has something to build on. The coaching sticks. You see results.

But here's the paradox: research from Salesforce and The TAS Group shows that teams using playbooks or a defined sales strategy are 33% more likely to close sales. Yet research from SiriusDecisions shows that 60-70% of sales enablement content is never used. High-performing organizations are 48% more likely to use dynamic playbooks than static PDFs—but most companies are still distributing 50-page Word documents that gather digital dust.

The playbook exists. Nobody opens it.

Why? Because most playbooks are built wrong from the start.

Reference Documents vs. Decision Tools

Here's the distinction that changes everything: most playbooks fail because they're built as reference documents instead of decision tools.

A reference document says: "Here's everything you might need to know."

A decision tool says: "In this specific situation, here's what to do next."

Reference documents are comprehensive. They cover every contingency. They include scripts for scenarios that happen once a year. They're impressive to build and satisfying to finish. And they sit unopened because when a rep is live on a call and needs help now, a 50-page PDF is useless.

Gartner's research on the forgetting curve makes this painfully clear: sales reps forget 70% of training information within one week, and 87% within one month. Your beautifully crafted playbook content? Most of it evaporates before anyone uses it.

The solution isn't more content. It's better delivery.

Seismic research found that sellers spend an average of 10 hours per week tracking down, comparing, or revising content. That's not a knowledge problem. That's an access problem. The information exists; it's just not where reps need it, when they need it.

Structure Over Tactics

Here's a belief I've developed over 25 years of building sales organizations: playbooks run the risk of becoming redundant the moment they're created.

Markets shift. Buyers evolve. What worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. If your playbook is a collection of scripts and tactics, it has an expiration date measured in months—maybe weeks.

But if your playbook articulates structure—the framework that underlies how you sell—it can flex with the changes ahead.

The difference matters. A tactic tells you what to say when a prospect mentions a competitor. A structure tells you why competitive conversations happen at certain deal stages, what the underlying objection usually represents, and how to think about repositioning value. The tactic expires. The structure adapts.

Research backs this up. The Brevet Group found that the best reps are "situationally fluent"—they don't rely on one way to sell. They pattern-match to past experiences and deploy the right plays for a given situation. A rigid, script-heavy playbook actually undermines this. A framework-based playbook enables it.

Despite that, I believe having a playbook—even an imperfect one—is almost as important as the content itself. It provides a compass to true north. When everything feels chaotic, when markets shift, when a new rep is drowning in information, the playbook says: "This is how we do things here. This is what matters. Start here."

That compass function requires the playbook to be maintained, referenced, and trusted. Which brings us back to the real challenge.

Making Playbooks Living Documents

Aberdeen Group research shows that best-in-class organizations are 30% more likely to formally collect and share undocumented expertise than their underperforming peers. They're not just documenting processes—they're capturing what their top performers actually do differently and making it transferable.

This is where most playbooks fail quietly. They're created once, usually by marketing or sales ops, with minimal input from the people who actually sell. Then they're distributed with fanfare and forgotten within weeks.

Living playbooks work differently:

They're embedded in the tools reps already use—surfaced in CRM workflows, accessible during calls, present at the moment of need. They're updated regularly based on what's working in the field, not what seemed like a good idea in a conference room. They capture situational intelligence: not just "what to do" but "when this happens, here's why, and here's how to think about it."

And critically, they're built with input from frontline sellers—the people who know which objections actually come up, which talk tracks actually land, which parts of the existing process are friction and which are essential.

The Real Function of a Playbook

Let me bring this back to where we started.

Coaching fails when it's applied to an unstable foundation. You can't coach someone to excellence if they don't understand their role, haven't been trained on your methodology, and aren't receiving feedback on their actual performance.

A well-built playbook solves for orientation and training simultaneously. It answers the questions that new reps are afraid to ask and experienced reps have forgotten they once had. It captures the undocumented expertise that walks out the door every time a top performer leaves.

And when that foundation is solid—when reps understand the why behind the what, when they have frameworks that flex instead of scripts that expire, when they can access guidance at the moment they need it—then coaching becomes transformational.

The playbook isn't the solution to your sales problems. It's the foundation that makes other solutions work.

Build the foundation first. Then coach.

Andrew Devlin is a fractional VP of Sales and Sales Xceleration Certified Advisor who helps CEOs of $10M-$100M companies build predictable, profitable, sustainable revenue. With 25+ years of sales leadership at Cisco, Cloudflare, Splunk, and TELUS, he has generated over $2 billion in revenue and developed 100+ sales professionals to President's Club recognition.

Ready to build your foundation?

Sources

• MySalesCoach and Aircall, "The State of Sales Coaching 2025" (survey of 1,600+ sales professionals)

• SHRM/Globoforce, "Employee Experience as a Business Driver" (2016)

• RAIN Group Center for Sales Research, "The 3 Key Drivers of Effective Sales Training" (2025)

• The Center for Sales Strategy, "Why Sales Training Fails"

• Salesforce and The TAS Group, Sales Process and Playbook Research

• Gartner, B2B Sales Training Research (forgetting curve data)

• SiriusDecisions, Sales Enablement Content Utilization Research (Summit 2013)

• Seismic, "The Value of Enablement Report" (content search time data)

• Aberdeen Group, "Best Practices in Sales Enablement" (undocumented expertise capture)

• The Brevet Group, "Adaptive Methodology: Challenging vs. Adapting"

• Highspot, "State of Sales Enablement Report" (dynamic vs. static playbooks)