How to Create Sales Documentation - Examples, Best Practices & Template

When sales reps have the right information to properly engage and respond to prospects, closing deals becomes a cakewalk.

However, winning deals and scaling sales teams becomes challenging without detailed sales documentation.

This article walks you through creating comprehensive sales documentation, its best practices, and more.

What is sales documentation

Sales documentation is the collection of sales collateral and processes that help reps move prospects through the sales funnel and close deals. 

It’s like a single source of truth, where all the right resources are at your sales team’s disposal. This allows them to work efficiently and answer prospect or customer queries without spending hours looking for information. 

These resources can include sales pitches, sales playbooks, case studies, product demos, pricing documents, battle cards, and templates. 

Benefits of sales documentation 

Some of the key benefits of creating sales documentation for your team include:

1. Streamlined sales process

No two prospects are the same. Each prospect or customer needs to be dealt with differently depending on their concerns or needs. 

Proper sales documentation assists your reps in easily answering prospect or customer queries on time and moving them smoothly down the sales funnel, thus streamlining the sales process.

2. Messaging consistency 

Customers and prospects expect consistency in messaging, despite all the switching between doing their own research to speaking to different sales professionals.

Sales documentation as a single source of truth ensures your reps are accessing the same type of information and distributing it in the right manner. 

For example, a comprehensive product guide that highlights key features and recent pricing changes ensures messaging remains consistent across interactions. 

3. Strengthen sales rep knowledge 

Apart from learnings during sales onboarding and other training programs, instant all-time access to sales collateral like pricing documentation, sales decks, outreach templates, and more lets reps refresh their knowledge.

The better the sales documentation, the more confident are your sales reps to support prospects and customers. 

4. Faster responses 

According to Forbes, the average lead response time is 47 hours. However, most studies suggest that the best time to land a hot lead is when a rep responds to them within 5 minutes. 

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Sales documentation is the much-needed toolkit for a sales rep to drastically cut down the time taken to respond or follow up with leads. 

5. Fine-tuned sales pitches

Maintaining sales documentation is an ongoing process, which means all your sales collateral is up-to-date and improved as time progresses. 

Especially sales pitches which need to stay on track with market and customer trends, ensure your sales reps address the latest objections and keep their sales messages fresh.

6. Boost rep morale  

Boost your sales team’s confidence and self-reliance with sales documentation. It helps increase overall productivity and conversion rates and shortens sales cycle lengths.

Types and examples of sales documentation 

Sales documents can consist of a wide range of educational materials used in the sales process to enable seamless communication between buyers and sellers. Also referred to as sales assets, these resources come to client-facing teams’ rescue while moving buyers down the sales funnel.

Here are the most popular types of sales documentation with examples:

1. Sales playbooks 

A sales playbook is a detailed guide full of practical tactics and strategies for salespeople to prospect, follow up, and nurture leads. Its sales-ready content helps build efficient sales teams by freeing up their time from searching or curating information and lets them focus on actual selling tasks.

An example sales playbook for an enterprise consists of the following components:

• The company’s sales strategy explains what problems the products or services solve, the mission statement, sales team hierarchy, etc.
• The latest product pricing and inclusions 
• A step-wise breakdown of a typical sales process and what it entails
• Sales meeting scripts 
• Detailed customer personas
• KPIs sales must be tracking
• And more!

2. Frequently asked questions 

Having an FAQ document or recording frequent prospect and customer queries can save hours of your sales team’s time.

Make this process extra efficient with AI. Docket, for example, is an AI tool that enables your sellers with instant and accurate responses to frequent prospect and customer queries. It learns from your tribal knowledge and digs through information across sources. 

An example of Docket AI answering a frequent seller query:

3. Case studies and use cases 

Documenting case studies is useful in adding social proof and credibility to your sales rep’s claims. Meanwhile, use cases help prospects visualize your products in action and access real-life examples of their usage.

4. Scripts, guides, and templates

Ready-to-use scripts for meetings, outreach, and prospecting help your leads maintain consistency in messaging and close deals in less time. 

Guides for deal closure, for example, offer a step-wise approach sales reps can take to seal the deal. 

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Meanwhile, templates are another set of crucial sales documentation that offers your teams a structured, reliable approach to handling the most critical stages of the sales process effectively. For example, you could curate sales email templates for a variety of communication needs like first-touch, follow-up, nurturing, etc.

5. Competitor analysis and comparisons

Having handy, ready-to-share comparisons and competitor analysis encourages undecisive prospects to take the final call in your favor. 

For example, battle cards help sales reps explain how your solution stands out from the rest.

Step-by-step process for creating sales documentation 

Here’s a simple step-wise guide to creating structured sales documentation:

1. List your sales documentation needs

Gather your sales and client-facing teams for a brainstorming session to highlight the kind of content and resources they need to interact with prospects or customers better. 

For example, what are the commonly encountered questions, any potential knowledge gaps, what kind of responses take the most amount of time to gather information, etc.

2. Prepare sales templates, guides, and playbooks

Sales templates and guides can be detailed scripts, such as ready-to-use email and outreach templates, closing guides, objection handling guides, and more that can be reused for every prospect interaction. 

Create an extensive playbook with these templates and guides and train the sales team on how to tweak them depending on the prospect type.

3. Assign sales experts their documentation responsibilities 

Sales documentation needs teamwork. That’s the best way to get the resources you need across domains, such as customer success, product insights, branding, etc.

So, gather experts from product marketing, sales, and development to gather unique insights to keep the sales documentation extensive yet relevant. 

4. Document sales pitches 

Ensure you document all the information your sales reps need to create a compelling sales pitch. 

Your sales document should include various customers’ unique use cases and their individual preferences and pain points instead of any generic information. 

5. Describe ways to handle objections 

Provide a separate document that details how to handle potential objections prospects may have. This way, reps are well prepared with justifications and proofs of concept to turn objections into closed deals. 

6. Track and update your content 

The final step is to continuously optimize and improve your sales documentation. Track how your content is being used on a day-to-day basis and what might be missing.

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That’s the only way to stay relevant with the changing market trends, product features, or pricing strategies. 

Bonus step: 

One of the biggest issues companies face with the traditional approach to sales documentation is the potential mishandling of information due to data overload and scattered resources. However, you can upgrade your sales documentation strategy with AI. Tools like Docket AI enhance sales documents by making them easily accessible via a simple chat-like interface. 

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Sales documentation best practices 

The barrage of information, from tribal to tactical knowledge can feel overwhelming if you create sales documents from scratch. So, here are a few best practices to keep in mind before you begin:

1. Collaborate with your entire sales team

Brainstorm with your sales team to create specific documentation that will be useful for them for a variety of use cases. Involving them boosts adoption rates and makes feedback collection easier as you go. 

2. Start small with what’s important 

Instead of going all in, focus on what’s important for your team and expand it over time. For example, if the most crucial KPI is to reduce lead response time, your documentation could have clear templates or ready-to-use responses to answer potential prospect queries across the funnel stages.

3. Schedule content refresh and updates 

Schedule timely content assessments and updates to ensure information is accurate. As you go, you may find particularly useful content. So, make sure they’re accessible to the team.

4. Ensure content is easy to search 

Sales documentation is best utilized when it’s simple to search and navigate. Technologies like AI help you fine-tune sales knowledge by eliminating the time-consuming manual documentation process. 

Wrapping up

When reps have on-the-go access to the right information to educate, engage, and respond to prospects, winning deals becomes easier.

Structured sales documentation therefore means sales reps meet their selling quotas without wasting time on information searches. 

However, information accessibility is key. Without this, the most detailed documentation can be hard to navigate and retrieve on time.  

AI tools like Docket help modernize your sales documentation process by offering instant assistance to customer-facing teams at every stage. 

Book a demo today!