HubSpot offers a diverse set of tools & features designed to elevate the effectiveness of your sales process and initiatives. The best part? HubSpot keeps releasing new tools and features to improve Sales Hub even further!

Playbooks & Snippets

In May 2023, HubSpot released Playbooks:

With HubSpot playbooks, sales teams can access playbook cards to reference during specific sales milestones. You can include questions, lists, videos, or simply text to help guide your team through their call.

While HubSpot Playbooks are exclusive to users with seats in the Sales Professional and Enterprise plans (as well as Service Pro and Enterprise), if you are only on a Free or Starter Sales Hub plan - you can still use a valuable resource accessible to all users – snippets.

Snippets are reusable blocks of text that can be inserted into email templates, object records (contact, company, deal, tickets), live chat convos, and for the use case of a *makeshift* playbook: logging different activities & notes, as well as being a guideline for your team during their calls and outreach.

So, how do you get to snippets? In HubSpot click on Conversations > Snippets. In the Free Sales Hub tier, you get up to 5 snippets. Once you're in Starter Sales or above, you get access to up to 5 thousand 😎

From there, you can begin to create the snippet as a playbook. Something like this:

**Do you see the shortcut ^? This will allow your team to quickly access the snippet using a little hashtag action.**

So.. picture this: you're a sales rep and you're about to hop on a discovery call. You go to the contact record of your prospect, click on notes, and start typing #disco. Once the snippet is created you can select it here: 

Then 💥bam, you can start filling out as you go:

This is a win-win-win 🙌🏆

Win #1: Your future self will love you from your incredible notes

Win #2: Your manager will love you for not missing any info from the discovery

Win #3: Your prospect will love you for your streamlined process and proactive communication.

Okay enough about how and why snippets can be used as playbooks... let's get into the good stuff.

4 Snippets as Playbooks for Your Sales Team

(or if you have access to playbooks you can use this list too ).

1. Prospecting Snippet - you have a script handy as a snippet, but once your team is comfortable with cold calling, maybe they'll just need some guidance. Either way having a snippet handy will help them remember important things. Plus, why reinvent the wheel when it's already rolled a long way (and then some...)?
   
   For your Prospecting Playbook you may want to include your ICP & buyer persona(s), a section for the research your team does before they pick up the phone, and the info you're trying to collect on the first call. Might look something like:
   • ICP: B2B Software companies with 500+ employees in the US.
   • Buyer persona: Marketing manager with an active website blog, but does not have time to write enough content fast enough
   • Research: 
          Website?
          Top competitors?
          Last blog published?
   
   As mentioned, you may also want to include a script. I found this really great call script resource from Gong for you to download.
   
   
2. MEDDPICC Snippet - the discover call was scheduled... now what? Some say MEDDPICC is outdated, but it really does help cover your bases on a discovery call. It wouldn't hurt to have a snippet handy to provide your team the framework during their discovery calls.
   
   The great things about MEDDPICC is it helps you get a better understanding of the buyer's decision making process & how you can align your offering to their pain points.
   
   Here's what you can use as a snippet:
    
   • Metrics: How are you planning to measure success? What are your specific KPIs?
   • Economic buyer: Who else is involved in this decision making process? What's the best way to communicate with them?
   • Decision criteria: What specific features are most important to you? What are your non-negotiables? 
   • Paper process: Have you purchased a similar solution before? If so, what is the projected timeline from approval to getting this over the line?
   • Identify pain: What are the challenges you're currently facing? What have you done so far to address these challenges?
   • Champion: Who is the most excited/impacted? How can we work with them to get this over the line?
   • Competition:  Who are your current competitors? How do you differentiate? 
   
   
3. Objection Handling Snippet - During the disco/demo, you're prospect brings up a specific competitor (which is fine, you've trained your team on this 100x). But then brings up another one, and another one, and another less common one. Don't fret 🚫😰 You can create an objection handling snippet to help arm them with the knowledge they need to be confident enough to discuss your advantages.
   
   What should you include?
   
   • Competition Values & Pricing: Highlight your unique value prop vs. your competitors in a easy to read breakdown. The goal is to focus on VALUE, remind your team to always bring it back to the prospect's goals or challenges. Listing their pricing wouldn't be a bad idea either, keep your team prepared.
   • Responses: After you've uncovered the most common objections, you'll be able to craft responses to combat them or have your team ask the right questions to guide your prospect past their 'objection'. Include these in the snippet too!
   • Tips & techniques: Remind them what you went through during training! Stay calm, ask questions, MIRROR their question! Check out this guide from HubSpot with 44 common sales objections & how to handle them.
   
   
4. Case Study Snippet - Your team can talk until they are blue in the face about why your service or product trumps your competitors. But you have to share the real life results. Have a few testimonials ready to share. This will make it easier for your team to grab the info they need to share the story. You should include:
   • Client name
   • Industry (try to have one per industry handy)
   • What their initial challenge was
   • How your product/service solved this challenge
   • Their end result
   
   Remember here - less is more. Try to make it easy to read so your team can skim and get the reminder they need.
   

So as mentioned in the beginning of this blog, with Sales and Service Hub Starter, you get up to 5 snippets. Above, I gave you 4. 

For the grand finale (drum roll please)... 

🥁🥁🥁🥁 <- does that look like sushi to you too or am I just hungry?

You can use the 5th snippet for a number of different 'playbooks' for your CS team too! Here are a few examples

• Onboarding:  This playbook can be a guide for your CS team to use when onboarding a new customer. To make sure they are covering their basis, you can create a step-by-step process and include best practices.
• Upselling: Outline the strategies and tactics to identify these opportunities with existing customers. Include info on product features, pricing, and talking points to help expand your relationship and ACV.
• Renewal: This will help your team focus on retaining your existing customers. Another great place to remind your team to focus on the VALUE your product/service provides. 
• Customer Feedback: Guide your team on collecting feedback to help improve your product or service. This can also help get a gauge on who's a great case study candidate. 
• Red Flag or Escalations: Escalations will typically arise, but a playbook can help prepare your team with resolution strategies and even templates on communication.
• Referral Playbook: It's sometimes an awkward question, but referrals are really the best sales opportunity and can help you grow your business. Who knows... maybe you should even incentivize your CS team to actively ask for them 😉

So there you have it! You don't need HubSpot playbooks to have playbooks ready for your team. You can use Snippets just as effectively and give your team the structured guidance that they need.

At Dijy, we like to squeeze all the juice out of the Hubs you already have access to with HubSpot!

Schedule a call for a free audit! We'll see how you can take advantage of your current subscription. ☀️