Sales Documentation: Benefits and Examples

Example H2

Creating sales documentation ensures your whole team is on the same page regarding best practices, processes, and providing a consistent sales experience to your leads.

But, where do you start?

In this guide, you’ll learn what sales documentation is, three reasons why you need it, and see five actionable examples of documentation you can create.

Let’s jump in.

What is sales documentation?

Sales documentation is any resource your sales team can use to help them complete tasks and follow best practices in your organization.

You can have sales documentation such as:

A set of cold email templates
A tutorial for using your CRM in the correct way
An explanation of how to send a proposal to a lead

High-performing sales teams will have sales documentation for every repetitive task in their workflow.

3 reasons you need sales documentation

1. Reduce your time-to-productivity for new sales hires

When a new sales hire joins your team, you must facilitate their learning process. The faster they can learn how your team operates, the sooner they can start taking calls and closing new deals.

Sales documentation acts as training material, and you can include guides that new hires can comb through to learn everything they need to get started.

You can include:

Tutorials for using your sales tools
Explainers on how to approach a sales call
Guides to participating in your weekly sales meetings

The benefits will quickly become clear. For example, companies using Spekit for their digital onboarding process can onboard new hires to Salesforce 80% faster than those who don’t.

Source: The productivity struggle of remote work (and what you can do about it)

This reduces time-to-productivity and ensures every new hire has all of the tools they need to do their job to a high standard.

2. Have one source of truth and improve process consistency

As a company grows, communication can become fractured.

There’s a risk that different team members follow different processes, and no one truly knows the best way to do something.

Having sales documentation creates a single source of truth for your sales team. It includes your SOPs, training guides, cold call scripts, guides to using software, and more.

Source: Introducing Team Spaces and the New Wiki Knowledge Base – Spekit

Whenever a sales rep has a question about a process, they can use your sales documentation to find the right playbook for that task.

An extra benefit to having a source of truth is that it can reduce the number of questions your teams need to ask upper management on a daily basis. They can proactively check the documentation, and solve their problems on the fly.

3. Continuously optimize documentation to improve sales performance

Your sales documentation enables you to continuously improve how your team approaches their work.

For example, you can run a monthly review of your key processes where your team shares feedback and ideas to improve different parts of your documentation.

When a documentation update leads to business improvements, you can implement it and that can be the new way your team runs a process.

Over time, this means you’ll always have consistent and effective processes being followed.

5 examples of sales documentation you can create

1. Prospecting process overview

Your team will be prospecting on a weekly basis to identify new potential leads and opportunities.

This is the perfect process to implement documentation for.

Because your team spends so much time on prospecting, it’s vital to have a repeatable process that anyone can follow.

Examples of information that you can include in your prospecting documentation include:

Tutorials on using different prospecting tools
Overview of how to prospect on your main sales channels
Detail on the type of prospect to contact

There’s no limit to what you can include. The main idea is that it will help everyone on your team — both new and experienced sales reps — prospect more effectively.

For example, you could include a detailed guide to sales prospecting on LinkedIn so new reps who haven’t used the platform before can easily figure out how to approach it.

You could then list the different tools available to your team to help them find and verify email addresses, which is an essential part of any prospecting process.

Ideally, your prospecting process overview will act as a start-to-finish playbook that any salesperson can follow to successfully identify qualified prospects.

2. Cold email and cold call templates

Another type of sales documentation worth implementing is a bank of cold email and cold call scripts.

The goal here is to ensure your team always uses a consistent message when contacting cold prospects, as well as allow them to have a degree of flexibility in their outreach.

For example, you could include several cold email templates that your team can personalize for each recipient.

You could share a cold call script with key talking points and attach a question-and-answer section to help your team deal with sales objections on their calls.

In this section of your documentation, consider including a set of case studies and testimonials that your team can add to their email templates or mention in calls. This will ensure your team always has access to real examples and success stories to tap into and build trust with cold prospects.

3. Actions and each stage of the pipeline

Your sales process includes several pipeline steps:

Cold outreach and initial contact
First meeting
Second meeting
Send proposal
Third meeting to discuss proposal details
Contract signed

In order to move your leads through your pipeline stages, you need a set of actions and tasks at each stage.

This is an essential step: Gartner has found that customers who receive helpful information from potential suppliers during the buying process are 2.8x as likely to buy from you.

Source: The B2B Buying Journey | Sales Insights | Gartner.com

In this section of your sales documentation, create multiple checklists of actions to take depending on the status of your lead.

For example, you could include a checklist for what happens as soon as a prospect books a kickoff meeting with you:

Source a relevant customer case study PDF and attach it to an email
Send the follow-up email confirming the date and time of the meeting
Before the meeting, open a new document with common sales objections
Personalize sales slide deck to the lead’s company
Once the meeting is finished, send a specific email sequence to nurture the lead

By having a fixed process for every step of the buying journey, you ensure that your leads receive a consistent, high-quality sales experience.

It’ll also improve your overall sales productivity, as no one on your sales team will ever have questions about the process to follow or whether it’s the right time to send a particular email or proposal.

4. Sales objection handling script

It’s briefly been mentioned in previous sections, but one essential part of any sales documentation system is a place to store all of your sales objections and answers to each objection.

No matter how good your product or service is, your leads will have objections about features, budget, and decision-making power.

Sales objections aren’t something to shy away from. You need to explain why the objection is valid but prove why it’s not a problem.

By having a sales objection handling document, your sales reps will never get caught out by a tricky question in a call or sales meeting.

For example, if a lead brings up budget concerns, your team can review your documentation and see that:

Your product generates a 200% ROI for similar companies
You have a specific case study to prove this
You can offer a free trial for customers to experience the benefits before financially committing

Having this in place will level up your team’s sales calls and ensure your leads leave every meeting with all their concerns resolved.

5. Pricing and contract documentation

Pricing is a key part of any sales deal.

Your leads need to know:

How much do they need to spend?
What will they get in return?
What are the contract terms?

If your team can’t provide these quickly and accurately, it will hurt your chances of converting a new client.

You can build a pricing section in your sales documentation, which outlines the different pricing tiers available, the different types of payment schedules available, and more.

This could also show reps details on the different types of discounts they can offer.

For example, if they know a lead is ready to convert but they’re holding off because of budget reasons, your lead can see in your documentation that they have permission to offer a 10% discount if someone purchases a yearly plan instead of a monthly plan.

This empowers your team to make decisions that close deals, rather than being slowed down because they need to go back to upper management with pricing questions or requests to offer discounts to highly qualified leads.

Surface the documentation your sales team needs to be successful with Spekit

Selling happens in real-time, and your sales documentation should too. Spekit helps your reps build more pipeline faster with in-app guidance. With Spekit, you can deliver playbook training, easily make changes and adjust documentation as your strategy evolves, and surface your documentation across every sales touchpoint to ensure your sellers are following the correct processes.

Spekit helps your team achieve:

Top-performing sales reps are 2x more likely to report that they can always find answers to questions independently. Help all of your reps become your best rep with Spekit.

Meet Spekit. Schedule a demo today.