In a sports team, success depends on cooperation and strategy. Each player needs to know their part and how it fits into the bigger picture in order to win the game. That's why all action sequences, roles, and best practices live in a single guide called a playbook.
Well, business operations are not that different! With a document that brings together your company's processes, policies, and resources, your team can reach its full potential and perform well in any situation. Having a business playbook also means you can hold people accountable, make their work routine more predictable, and scale effectively.
In this article, we'll cover the key components and different types of playbooks, and look at some inspiring examples to get you started on your business playbook.
What Is a Playbook in Business?
A business playbook is a practical guide that outlines company policies, workflows, and day-to-day operations. It offers your employees clear insight and direction on what's expected of them and what support system—resources, templates, or other teammates—they can count on. A playbook is a go-to document with the right messaging for customer conversations, key ideas for internal meetings, and game plans for future projects.
💡Playbooks are different from SOPs, or standard operating procedures, in a sense that they don't go into the specifics of every task. They describe work processes, but leave the necessary space for autonomy and flexibility that your employees need to thrive. A good playbook guides, but doesn't dictate; it sets a framework, but doesn't confine.
There are also a couple of subtle differences that distinguish business playbooks from other internal documents like employee handbooks and onboarding guides. While a playbook is focused on supporting your team's decision-making, a handbook mostly covers employee rights, compensation, benefits, and work conditions. Onboarding guides, in turn, are tailored specifically for new hires, helping them get acclimated to their roles.
Creating a playbook is usually a team effort: to gather the content, you would need input from your leadership, HR, operations, and top-performing managers. As for the format, your business playbook can be a digital document like an online flipbook, an intranet section, or even a traditional printed manual, depending on what best suits your company culture.
Have a PDF playbook?
Why Your Business Needs a Playbook
Without a centralized knowledge base to refer to, it's hard to achieve unity or consistency in what your employees do. Think of it as an orchestra where every musician plays their own tune and follows a different lead. In chaos, your team will struggle to deliver quality services or products. Having a business playbook can help you in several ways:
📈 Boost productivity. A playbook clearly defines the scope of duties and deliverables for your teams and managers. It leaves no room for gaps in responsibilities, unmatched expectations, or situations where two people are doing the same thing. As a result, your employees spend less time on redundant tasks, are more confident in what they're doing, know when to seek assistance, and are overall more productive.
📈 Support compliance. Industry regulations, codes of conduct, security policies: your employees face a lot of company-wide expectations. And it's much easier to remember and act on the rules if you have a place where you can find them. Your playbook can have job aids and checklists with compliance already baked in, or you might want to document processes more thoroughly in a dedicated employee handbook.
📈 Facilitate growth. If you plan to grow your business or offer franchise opportunities, scalability is essential. A playbook offers a defined standard to maintain, so you can replicate success across teams and locations without reinventing the wheel. For example, McDonald's has an operations playbook that outlines everything from food preparation to customer service—which helps them open new restaurants quickly.
📈 Enhance onboarding. During the first few months on the job, employees have to cram in a lot of essential information: new names, tools, practices, and KPIs. With a playbook, they can go deeper into understanding what made your business the way it is. Include an overview of company values, shared goals, and lessons learned from past projects to add more context and meaning into each set-in-stone rule.
📈 Maintain quality. While all the benefits of having a playbook start from within your business, they will have a direct impact on your customers' experience—and your brand story. When your team operates with clarity and consistency, adheres to the same standards, and works as one, it naturally leads to higher quality products and services. These little details contribute to how clients see your brand as a whole.
Common Playbook Types & Examples
The content that goes in your business playbook depends on its purpose. Some essentials to start off the document are an executive summary or a letter from your CEO, the company's mission and values, and a short guide on how and when employees should use the resource. Other than that, let's explore playbook examples from different industries and departments and see what sections would be relevant for each case.
Sales Playbook
A sales playbook is usually a collection of strategies that guide your managers through the sales cycle: from finding prospects to presenting the offer and closing the deal. The document can also regulate customer communications, outline your brand values for correct representation, and reference case studies with current clients. Use interactive elements like video tutorials or pop-up images with extra tips to engage your employees and enhance learning.
Sales playbook templates can also focus on a specific tool or medium: for instance, the flipbook example below outlines a strategy for executives that want to discover new sales opportunities on LinkedIn.
Marketing Playbook
Another major department your business can't function without is marketing—and their go-to document is mostly filled with shared team resources that streamline tasks. Marketing playbooks could include checklists for campaigns, a content calendar to keep all the posts in sync, and best practices for social media engagement.
In some cases, a marketing playbook can transcend its role as an internal guide, and actually aid your own marketing efforts. Take a look at this holiday playbook by Microsoft Advertising: it serves both as a source for their staff and as valuable content for potential clients. And if you gate your flipbook with a lead form, you can actually capture leads right from the playbook and follow up on their interest.
Microsoft Holiday Marketing Playbook
Communications Playbook
A communications playbook helps your employees understand the message you want them to convey. It covers both external and internal communications strategies with an overview of the company's mission and values, brand and tone of voice, and dos and don'ts for customer interactions. A playbook like this might be particularly useful for a non-profit organization—to ensure that all team members understand the common goal or vision when speaking with donors and volunteers.
Training Playbook
Designed for specific programs or courses, training playbooks are more of a practical guide with exercises, objectives, and assignments that reinforce learning. You can prepare the playbook design in a digital format, and then print a copy for each employee that participates in the training—like the example below suggests. Alternatively, if your program is remote, you can add an on-page quiz or an online form to test your teammates as they go through the information.
Cassini Business Design Playbook
Finance Playbook
A playbook in finance is very common for businesses in accounting or insurance. These fields often have a lot of regulations, so documenting a clear set of rules and standard procedures is essential for compliance. Startups and fintech firms can also use finance playbooks to develop new products or outline investment strategies. In larger corporations, a business playbook can help with financial reporting, budgeting, or managing employee benefit guides.
How to Create a Business Playbook
Before putting together your business playbook, you should know that the reading experience your employees have with it is just as crucial as the content itself. If your document is hard to access, read, or navigate, even the most insightful information can fall flat. So here are a few points to keep in mind:
- Go digital. You'd want your playbook to be readily available to all employees, wherever they are. At the same time, it has to be easy to update to reflect your latest policies. Sending out new printed copies with each minor change would take a lot of resources. Digital formats are more sustainable and cost-effective.
- Use interactivity. Playbooks usually have lots of charts, graphs, and infographics. Making them interactive transforms a plain document into a dynamic platform for learning. Pop-ups, image galleries, videos, and GIFs can help you structure information effectively and focus reader attention on the most important parts.
- Make navigation easy. A lengthy playbook has to have a table of contents or bookmarks, and a smart search function so that your employees can jump to relevant sections and find the answers they need. You should also think of a way for them to leave notes—that would help jot down key points and share insights with others.
The good news is that all these features—and more—are available with the flipbook format! Flipbooks are digital documents made from PDFs: with a life-like page flip effect, they look just like a print copy that you can share online. A flipbook is interactive, intuitive, and mobile-responsive by nature. So here's a step-by-step guide on how to create your business playbook with our playbook creator, FlippingBook:
- Once you audit all the processes, collect relevant data, and have it all on hand, you can use a graphic design tool like Canva to look for a playbook template and make your own. Put together the content and save the final design in PDF format.
- Start a free trial with FlippingBook, upload your PDF, and wait a couple of minutes for it to convert. Put together a table of contents to aid navigation, customize the flipbook with your own branding to maintain a consistent look, and add interactivity to enhance the content.
- Decide how you want to distribute your playbook. If you want the world to see it, simply copy the direct link and paste it in an email, add it to a social media post, or send it via any other channel you like. Alternatively, you can look into one of the more private sharing options to make sure your content only reaches the people it's intended for: password protection, domain-limited website embeds, or restricted reader access via SSO.
- Now you're all set to share your business playbook with your chosen audience! Don't forget to update it regularly—your flipbook will stay under the same link—and monitor how readers engage with the content via our built-in statistics.
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