What Is A Business Playbook (Or SOP) - And How To Build It?

Does your business have a clear plan for its operational processes? A well-drafted program that tells your employees how to get things done helps them stay focused, productive, accountable, and organized?

How do you service clients or talk about your organization to customers? How do you onboard or offboard employees in your organization? In short, what framework do you use for ensuring your business' success?

The solution is simple: Make your people's knowledge accessible at all times.
A business playbook helps organizations like yours document how things get done and provide all employees with guidance.

This article discusses what a business playbook is and how to create one yourself.

📖 What is a business playbook?

A business playbook describes a company's policies, workflows, and procedures. A well-drafted manual answers questions ranging from what a company does to how, why, who does what, and when.

Also known as SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), a business playbook helps organizations run efficiently and effectively.

Companies can use business playbooks for various reasons such as onboarding and offboarding, selling a company's USP to organizations, creating manuals for sales and customer service departments, training employees, or even how to launch a new product and sell it.

Examples:

Company-wide:

• Branding guidelines
• Hybrid work policy
• Any kind of training
• ...

Sales teams: 

• Describe the overall sales process at the company
• Introduce everyone to the tools used, such as the CRM tool, and best practices to follow
• Establish the competitive landscape

❓ Why do you need a business playbook?

Imagine running an organization where customer experience teams have no clue how to respond to customer complaints, angry customers, or pass customer complaints along to the necessary department.

The result?

Complete and utter chaos.

Below we've gathered 6 reasons why your business needs a playbook.

1. Helps to scale your business

Clear, carefully crafted instructions make it easy for anyone to produce quality work or perform job responsibilities that align with your company's mission.

This way, you can scale up and hire more people without fear. Business playbooks allow anyone you hire to get up-to-speed immediately.

2. Saves time

Once your playbook is set, you will save hours previously spent on going through the same things over and over again. Instead, you and your colleagues can spend the extra time on truly value-adding activities. 

3. Ensures your organization produces top-notch work

By clearly establishing certain standards and guidelines, you will lay the foundation for quality work. As a result, work output gets better and more consistent.

4. Ensures your organization's vital information is in one place

A business playbook contains all of the information your organization and employees need to operate successfully — all documented in one organized and accessible location. This is particularly valuable with people (and knowledge) scattered across multiple (remote) locations.

5. Employee Independence

Instead of constantly asking their managers for help, employees can easily and quickly refer to the business playbook. Additionally, supervisors can trust their employees to get the job done 

• without compromising quality and accuracy
• without hand-holding or constantly managing them
  

6. Identify areas of improvement

With a business playbook, organizations can easily identify areas of improvement and update them regularly to reflect those changes. For example, if your customer service team identifies a common pain point or challenges your customers have, they can quickly create an SOP on solving or addressing it. This makes it easy for new hires to know what to do should they encounter such issues in the future.

📝 What should be included?

What is included in a business playbook differs depending on the type of playbook you're creating (operations playbook, sales playbook, hybrid policy playbook, etc.)

For example, if you were creating a sales playbook, you'd want to add sections to provide answers to questions such as 

• elevator pitch
• customer challenges
• customer objectives
• product detail
• prospect profile
• customer outcomes
• buyer profiles
• managing objections
• and any other significant questions employees on the sales team might have.

Likewise, a people operations playbook could have answers to different sections such as

• Your organization's vision, purpose, mission, and values.
• Strategy, goals, metrics, and tactics.
• Leadership and organizational structure
• People Operations and the Employee Lifecycle journey
• Talent Acquisition (from attraction to hiring)
• Talent Acquisition (from hiring to departure)
• Talent Management (Onboarding to retaining)
• Employee experience

Note: A playbook doesn't have to span "everything people ops managers need to know." Instead, it can make a lot of sense to break it down into several smaller SOPs. This way, you'll remove redundancies and cut it down to the very thing people want to learn at that very moment.

🛠 How to build a business playbook

Building your playbook can feel like rocket science, but it's easier than you think. One thing is for sure, though: even if your company currently doesn't have any set-in-stone playbooks, they do already exist.

How's that possible?

The only thing you need to do right now is to capture the policies and processes your teams are following and properly structure them in your SOP. Here's how to build your company's playbook in seven easy steps:

1. Start with a structure in mind

Building a new business playbook from scratch, especially for businesses that have not built one before, can seem daunting. Luckily, a quick internet search will provide you with existing templates you can tweak or use as an inspiration to create your business playbook template. 

Remember that the goal is to have a clearly outlined and organized manual that ensures your employees focus on writing, developing, and updating the playbook's content.

2. Organize your playbook's content

The elements included in your business playbook are hugely determined by your company's objectives and the sole purpose for creating the playbook. Some sections you'd want to consider adding include:

• Company vision
• Workplace culture and values
• Workflows and processes
• Organizational/leadership structure
• Costs
• Performance indicators
• Operational guidelines
• Business plans
• Systems, tools, techniques, and resources
• Company goals
  

Tip: Explain what success looks like for each section or element and define how the company measures that success.

3. Review your information

Gather the information you want to add to your business playbook and organize them in a place. This makes it easy to review any (incoming) incomplete or outdated information.

For example, a manager could list their job responsibilities, including steps and measures for completing tasks and have everyone on their team do the same. 

Fill in every space you can think of in simple, conversational language, but don't be afraid to remove repetitive words or duplicate steps. The goal is to be concise and clear.

Rule of thumb: Usually, you can easily cut out 20% of your written draft content without losing any value.

4. Use the right tone

A good business playbook should command respect without sounding authoritative or dictatorial. How do you achieve this balanced tone? State your expectations clearly, but leave room for your managers to use their intuition or judgment in some situations and for employees to exercise their creativity.

Remember that a business playbook is a guideline that highlights best practices for running a business successfully. They aren't laws and should not be treated as such.

5. Share your business playbook

Start delegating it to critical stakeholders as you finalize drafting your business playbook. The rule of thumb is to send them out to people unfamiliar with the process. This helps you gauge if they are okay with the current procedures outlined in your playbook or if they have additional questions or information to share.

Tip: Assign your company's playbook to your team with a few clicks with Zavvy. You can also set deadlines to review it before a specific date. This ensures your team knows what to check and when to do so it. Learn more about creating your SOPs with Zavvy here.

Remember that your team will most likely have some questions the first time they review the business playbook. Therefore, please pay close attention to their suggestions, as this is a great way to identify potential gaps in your SOP and improve your documentation.

6. Encourage your employees to refer to it

The best playbook can quickly become useless if no one uses it or updates it regularly. Get a process in place to properly communicate and periodically review your Standard Operating Procedures.

For example, you can make them part of role-specific onboarding processes - or have people redo them once a year. 

With Zavvy, you can fully automate this whole process:

• Automatically assign training journeys based on role changes or entry dates
• Automatically have people repeat their compliance training every year
• Track completions at all times
• Engage people via motivating Slack/Teams messages
  

7. Update your business playbook

Keep your business playbook relevant and effective by adding new processes, instructions, checklists, and solutions to problems as they arise. For example, did you launch a new product or update your software?

Ask your employees to add these changes when they occur. Depending on the number of changes and your organization's size, updating your playbook can be scheduled quarterly or annually, especially if you want to add teams' feedback.

Tip: Set yourself (or others) a repeating reminder so that this step won't get lost.

📚 Business playbook template examples

To inspire your own library, we've gathered some of the most common SOP examples below. 

Company playbook

This playbook provides a detailed overview of your company and its history, vision, mission, value statements, purpose, who is your target audience, what you do for your customers, and how you engage with them, plus operations.

Think of it as an intro to your company and a well-documented guide of what your company does.

As an inspiration for this one, you could also have a look at our free employee welcome presentation template.

Or, if you have a Zavvy account, you can use the Company Onboarding Template on the platform to get started in minutes.

Sales playbook

The Aberdeen Group discovered that 56% of reps using sales playbooks meet their sales goals compared to only 44% of sales reps who do not have a playbook in their organization.

A sales playbook is a cheat sheet for your company and its product or services.

It's a guide that educates anyone or your sales team selling your product or service about the challenges your potential customers face, positioning your product and aligning it to customers' pain points, and managing any common objections.

Again, depending on the size of your organization, you could either have a playbook for each product you sell or just one Sales playbook. These examples of HubSpot and Pipedrive sales playbooks are a nice inspiration.

Operations playbook

An Operations playbook explains how services are delivered to a company's customers.

For example, suppose you operate an e-commerce business. In that case, your Operations playbook could explain your employees' steps when tracking and executing customers' orders.

It's basically a playbook for how your organization operates!

Sweet process has 25 downloadable templates you can pick from, while ProProfs has an Operations manual template you can customize immediately.

Hybrid work policy playbook

A hybrid work policy outlines your flexible work policies.

It contains information like

• Who is eligible for remote work
• How much remote work is allowed
• When people should be available
• Equipment needed
• Best practices for working remotely
• Desired and undesired behaviors
  

Reseller or channel playbook

Suppose your company partners with third parties to sell or deliver products. In that case, you need to create a channel or reseller playbook to ensure that those parties have the information they need to sell efficiently and successfully.

👤 Who should build it?

We can keep this answer short:

It should be your subject matter experts or subject owners.

But, we also strongly encourage that you view building your business playbook as a team sport — an activity that encourages employees to "come together" to document the parts of the business they're ONLY responsible for. 

For example, whoever is in charge of your People Operations team will document your employee engagement and employee enablement process. Meanwhile, your Director of Learning & Development or whoever heads your company's L&D department will establish how to create interactive and fun training content for employees.

Once your business is a bit bigger, it can make sense to have dedicated training specialists in each department: Someone who gathers the essence of every role and process - and creates powerful SOPs out of it.

This ensures that building the business playbook isn't solely responsible but is distributed across all departments.

Pro Tip: With Zavvy's easy setup per drag-and-drop, you can easily assign content to the people responsible for each procedure in your business playbook. This ensures their accountability and guarantees that your playbook is filled with the best and current content.

📈 7 (+1) Best practices for better playbooks

Here are some best practices to make your business playbooks better:

1. Make it accessible

Upload your business playbook in a central location that is easily accessible for your employees at any given time. This is especially important for remote workers who need to access and edit resources or tools from anywhere, anytime.

2. Combine everything you already have so it's always up-to-date

Chances are you'll have some presentations on Sharepoint or Google Drive, other documentation in a place like Notion, your image videos on Youtube, and so on.

If you start recreating all these documentations in yet another place, you'll have to keep all of them updated separately.

Instead of copy-pasting everything into your SOP/training tool, it often makes more sense to embed content from the tools you're using every day directly.

Zavvy, for example, lets you embed content from places like Typeform, Loom, the Google Suite, or Microsoft Sharepoint directly into your playbook journey. This way, everything is in one place without having to maintain multiple versions.

3. Make it scalable and adaptable

Good playbooks should be user-friendly and adaptable in every organization. It gets better when your playbook is integrated with all of your favorite tools to boost productivity and seamless tracking and reporting.

4. Make it engaging and interactive

Who says playbooks have to be boring? Incorporate visuals, websites, digital flip books, and other interactive tools to increase team engagement and encourage playbook use.

5. Avoid information overload

Overloading people with too much information means scaring them off completely - so they won't go through anything at all.

Instead of including all the details, you come across, filter them down to the most relevant essence. Then, you can still offer an "advanced" track on top for everyone who has to know, if needed.

6. Avoid generic content

While it's okay to use online business playbook examples or PowerPoint business playbook templates from another organization for inspiration, copying and pasting is a no-no.

Your playbook should be written in your company's unique voice and specifically for your people.

7. Integrate with onboarding

Whether you're onboarding a new hire or client, use your business playbook to track essential metrics of your company's process, provide instructional coaching for the next steps in every scenario, and mitigate risks.

Significantly when your company is scaling or managing multiple projects. Playbooks allow you to hire, train, and onboard new hires in a streamlined fashion.

8. Leverage AI

Tired of staring at a blank page? Use AI to get to your first draft for any playbook in seconds.

Zavvy's AI playbook software will save you hours - promised!

➡️ Why (and how) to create your playbook with Zavvy?

Zavvy's easy setup per drag-and-drop allows you to create engaging playbooks in minutes.

Get started with our template library, including SOPs for onboarding, preboarding, hybrid work, brand guidelines, and more - or build your own from scratch.

A few highlights:

• Use AI to create playbooks 10x faster.
• Directly embed content from your favorite tools like Loom, Sharepoint, Typeform, Google Forms, Google Slides, Youtube, Vimeo, and more.
• Automatically assign your playbook based on people's roles, hiring date, or time.
• Combine your training journeys with a holistic development framework to make the playbooks more meaningful, targeted, and powerful.
• Integrate your HRM systems like BambooHR or Personio so you won't have to manage user accounts separately.
• Set deadlines, remind and engage your learners on autopilot. 
• Automatically track progress so you will know at all times who finished their compliance training - and who hasn't.
  

If you're tired of constantly putting out fires or attending to complicated and redundant questions in your business, then you'll need business playbooks to keep your sanity and help streamline your business.

Learn how Zavvy lets you create powerful playbooks in minutes, not days.