The Future of Sales Playbooks: Interactive & AI-Powered

Hey.

Hey.

I am super excited to share this demo with you, which is an interactive playbook that I've built.

Now, I've worked with over 250 B2B SaaS teams with their Outbound and one of the things that I've consistently noticed is if they have a playbook or don't.

And the teams that are more successful and more consistent with Outbound have a playbook that they can trust.

However, even those that do have a playbook, they tend to have these Playbooks saved in Google Drive in slides.

They're often often forgotten about after that, reps have onboarded and also they're not built and maintained in a way that is needed for outbound in 2026 and beyond in this new kind of AI era that we're in.

So I'm going to walk you through something that I've been building in my spare time and weekends.

It's an interactive demo, completely fictional company, but I've based it on the methodology that I work through with my clients when I'm working on a Playbook engagement.

I'm also going to demo some of the features.

So it's got a ask the Playbook fe.

It's also got a draft email feature which actually I'm really impressed with myself, as well as search and editing functionality.

So I'm going to dive right in and show you the demo.

This So the first thing you'll see once you're logged in.

Again, fictional company called Clarion.

It is a B2B SaaS that sells a customer onboarding software.

So the first thing that you'll see is on the left hand side we've got a menu here.

In the menu it's split into strategy, execution, operations.

So from a strategy point of view, we've got a company and product overview, ideal customer profiles, account prioritization, as well as messaging frameworks.

And all of these messaging frameworks are built based on the different ICPs and the Personas.

Then we go down to execution.

Then we have data sourcing and list building, outbound plays, sequences and cadences.

we've got cold calling, scripts, frameworks, objection handling as well.

So everything that you would imagine that your reps need is in one place.

And lastly we've got the more operational side of things which is testing and iteration, handoff and pipeline management, reporting to metrics and then just a breakdown of the tool stack and infrastructure.

I've actually built the Onboarding plans for several B2B SaaS companies.

And this is kind of all the content that is needed for when you are ramping and hiring in your SDR team.

So that's what gives the context to the Playbook.

And you might be thinking, well Mark, that's a lot of content, a lot of detail and I know that.

And actually one of the things when I build out these Playbooks for companies, I produce a doc or some slides and I think, geez, no one's going to read all of this or they'll read it once, refer back to it.

So it's always good to have.

But is that the best delivery method for an actual playbook?

So now I'm going to walk through some of the features that I've built into this interactive playbook.

So the first feature is just over here in the top right hand corner.

It's called Ask, the Playbook.

Not very original, but here's some suggested questions.

So how do I handle the we already use gainsight Objection.

What signals Tell me.

A series A SAS is ready for outbound, so let's just have a look at that first.

Objection.

So what it's going to do is query the context that already exists in the Playbook and then give you the actual ways to overcome that objection.

It's sharing the framework which is acknowledge, neutralize and ask, here's the full script and then why this works.

So giving the rep, not only the framework and the way to handle that objection, but the reasons why that approach is useful.

And all of these can be copied.

It's not that useful for this part but for the email drafts it's really useful.

So what, my Personas for ICP1.

So again, just asking the asking the Playbook.

So here it's pulling through the Personas.

Tier one Head of Customer success, Tier one Onboarding implementation lead, Tier two CEO, Founder and then csm, CSM or CS Operations.

Again this is a customer success software.

So the.

I've got key pain points and primary motivations for the head of customer success, but I could easily ask, I'm going to use Whisper Flow.

What are the main problems we solve for heads of customer success at ICP1?

Going to hit enter and now it's going to again query all of the context in this playbook.

And then here are the main problems.

Onboarding, visibility gap, CS team capacity, Time to value is too long or they can't measure it.

Inconsistent onboarding.

And then we've got secondary problems here as well.

So if I am trying to think about what I'm going to say on my calls, what questions I'm going to ask, how I'm going to write my messaging or LinkedIn messaging, I've got all of the context here which I can query in the Playbook.

So the Ask the Playbook works in the same way.

I could show you lots of examples, but you're going to actually be able to access this demo if you want to.

So that was the Ask the Playbook.

The next one I want to go through is to draft emails from a LinkedIn URL.

So in this scenario, the account that the reps have a book of business, they've got their account list, they've been looking at LinkedIn sales navigator and now they want to draft an email.

They know that they need to customize this email, but they know that personalization mentioning the football team or the World cup at the moment just doesn't quite cut it anymore.

So there's a couple of options to start with here.

It always needs the LinkedIn URL, but you can add in the prospect email the company URL and also you can give it a goal and context if you want, but you don't have to.

So I'm going to show you how this works.

So I've got Amanda Perry.

She is a VP of Customer Success.

So it's just an example, but this is an ICP fit based on Clarion and their, target market.

So I'm going to draft the email in the background.

It's going off and it's researching the prospect.

It's going to look at the individual's profile on LinkedIn and then also any company research, it's going to look for company news as well.

So here's the prospect.

She started as a VP, back in 2025.

She's been in the role for a year and a half.

the company fit, it fits squarely in ICP1.

The revenue is 10 to 100 million.

Of course, revenue figures are always guessed.

So key signal, they use Gainsight, which is a competitor, and they have CS infrastructure for health scores lifecycle.

But onboarding is likely a gap.

Amanda owns onboarding explicitly as customer.

Onboarding is listed in her role description.

So it then goes through, an agent that I built which looks for the most appropriate framework to use for a cold email email.

And you can see that it's used the direct competitor Exodus offer to share.

So onboarding gap is the subject line.

Amanda, you've got gainsight handling health scores and renewals.

The gap we usually see in that setup is onboarding still living in spreadsheets and manual effort.

Is that the case at codepad or have you already solved it?

Paysure, which is a social proof it's a customer of Clarion's.

They cut their time to value from 42 days to 18 after adding clarion as the onboarding layer alongside their suitcase platform.

Worth a look Mark.

So you can see here it gives you the justification as to why it kind of chose this particular framework.

And as a rep I can now copy that email and paste it in.

There is a use case to say to connect this to your sales engagement platform as well which would be totally possible.

And then would you like me to generate follow up emails for the sequence as well so I can click draft follow up emails and it will create three additional follow ups or I can try a new prospect.

So we saw that one for Amanda.

Let's try Joseph, he works over at Spring Big let's paste him in here draft email and it's going to go through that same process again.

It's going to look up to see who Joseph is, what role he's in, Anything on his LinkedIn profile that we can relate to the product that we're selling.

and then company fit, are they ICP fit?

There's so many reps are reaching out to non account or non ideal accounts.

So based on the Persona this is the CS leadership ICP1 there's no specific observable signal beyond his recent role starting so if there's no signal what do you do?

This does all that thinking for you.

So this one is a very short email as you can see nine hours per rep per week.

That's how much time ledger CS teams were spending on manual onboarding admin before they fixed the process.

Joseph, is your team in a similar position or have you already solved that?

So these email frameworks are, they exist within the Playbook so it's not going off and creating its own messaging.

It's coming off the back of all of the frameworks that we have in here.

So if we go to messaging framework we can see that we've got a messaging map, Persona, pain angle, onboarding leadership.

So what's their pain?

The core problem, the message angle, the proof and evidence.

So everything is in one place.

A couple more features here.

really important.

A lot of the playbooks that I've seen were last edited in March 2023.

So the playbook is only as good as how up to date it is.

For example, you might be expanding into new markets, there might be new Personas, there might be new influencers of a deal that you want to include.

So you can always come into this playbook and edit.

So for example, in message Principles, I simply click edit.

I'll need to log in, sign in, and now I'm in the messaging framework here and I can now add more information.

I can even put in, different headings, different formatting, add in tables, insert YouTube video or videos that you might have that complement the Playbook that you have here.

So that's very simple.

And you can simply.

It saves that just by clicking it down here.

I'm going to move this button up to the top, but it saves the changes and there's a complete version history.

Last thing to mention is that there is a search as well.

So you can search for objections.

and there's lots of results for objections.

I need to finish off the search here as well.

So that is a quick walkthrough of this interactive Playbook.

How I build this for my clients is that, they send me everything they have.

So some people don't have an actual playbook, but they've got information about their ICPs and the Personas.

They've got their messaging, they've got sequences that they're sending, but it's all in different places.

So I, onboard a client, I take all of that information so they share it with me and then I run my own research and I build out the Playbook based on this structure here.

As I mentioned before, it starts with the strategy.

We then talk through the, execution level and then operations too.

then once I present the very long Google Doc back to my client, they double check everything, make sure it all makes sense.

Once I get the green light, I then build this playbook and then test to make sure that the ask, the playbook is working as well as drafting the emails is working.

So typically, takes me about two weeks to put together as well.

It's amazing what you can do with technology these days.

and this again is just a demo environment, but the clients, have their access to their own, instance of their interactive Playbook.

So if you want me to build this for your team or you want to check out the demo, the links will be in the description below.

and if you have any questions, you can book a call and we can talk through what your interactive playbook would look like.

All right.

Take care