A Playbook is a ready-made structure for your meetings that you prepare once and can then be used as a template for future Demodesk meetings. This makes the meetings repeatable and consistent since every team member can use shared templates. Moreover, it enables optimal preparation to ensure a seamless presentation.
Sounds too good to be true? No worries, this guide will provide you with everything you need to know to become an expert on Playbooks.
1. What is a Playbook?
Playbooks function as a template or script for your meeting. They can be divided into several chapters with notes and clear instructions. Just as a script, they help you never lose track and keep a clear structure.
2. How to create your first Playbook
Demodesk offers Team and Personal Templates, depending on whether your whole company or only yourself should have access to the new Playbook.
Click on Create Playbook to create a new Playbook. First, give your first Playbook a name and add the desired content.
You can preload Websites and upload your existing presentations from Google Presentations or as a PDF. Add Agenda Items to the sidebar to structure your presentation. No worries, these items are only visible to the host and not to the customer.
Users can now edit Google slides directly from within Demodesk, eliminating the need to switch between multiple applications. This streamlined collaboration allows teams to work together in real-time, making updates and ensuring the most recent version of the slide deck is always available. Moreover, Demodesk goes beyond basic editing capabilities by enabling users to customize slides, such as adding customer logos, creating a personalized and professional touch. With its user-friendly interface, Demodesk makes the Google integration a seamless experience, empowering users to deliver impactful presentations with ease.
IMPORTANT: Please note that you must set your page in 16:9 format, no matter which program you use to prepare the presentation.
E.g. when adding an image as a document, make sure that the image has 16:9 aspect ratio so it won't have a black border in the meeting. A regular full HD image (1920x1080) is best, but anything with the same aspect ratio works: 1280x720, 1377x768 etc.
A known limitation to keep in mind when importing Google Slides is that Gslides doesn't support all types of Microsoft PowerPoint animation. Hence we only support Gslides animation. Please upload to the file to GSlides and check how it looks like and if something doesn't work, please try to change to another animation.
When you click on manage website, you can add a subpage, delete the website or move it to the backlog. With the backlog, you can hide content for now and quickly restore it in the future. During a meeting, you cannot access the backlog.
Add Agenda Item (Titles) to your websites in your agenda to recognise the content quickly and easily.
⚡Pro Tip: If you want to add speaker notes to specific subpages of your website, add the subpages of your website as separate slides. Even though the Sales representative might navigate in the main slide, they automatically jump to the corresponding slide in the Playbook and sees the relevant speaker notes.
3. How to use Notes to support your presentation
Adding speaker notes to your templates will push your demo to the next level and ensure that you never lose track during a demo. If you want to know how to set up and use them, check out this article.
You even can include Tokens in your notes. We have a Tutorial on how to create them here. To add them, click on Add Token at the bottom of the text-input field. This is especially useful if you have connected your CRM (HubSpot or Salesforce) with Demodesk. In this case, you can see the current information in your CRM and update the fields during your meeting.
4. How to work with the Playbook during a meeting
During a meeting, you always see your Playbook in the sidebar on the left side. In the sidebar, you have a preview with all the docs added to the Playbook (websites, presentations, documents, videos...), and you can seamlessly switch between the different content.
While the Playbook can contain many contents for different use cases, your customers will only see the slides you clicked on.
At the top of the sidebar, you can also completely change your Playbook during the meeting. If you change the Playbook when you are in the camera-only layout, the customer will not notice the change.
5. How to customise shared templates
Have you ever felt like your Playbook required some fine-tuning for a specific meeting and wished to be able to save all those edits right after?
In Demodesk, it is possible to customize the Playbook only for a specific demo, while your general Playbook stays the same. The major benefit: You can have a parent Playbook and individualize it for every particular demo case before the meeting even starts.
Follow this simple list of the different actions you need to take:
Find the meeting in your meeting dashboard where you wish to modify the Playbook to customize it for that specific case
Click on the meeting as if you want to edit it
On the top bar, select Playbook
Apply all the edits you need
You can either make the changes just for one demo or directly create a new playbook taking those changes into account. Hover over the "Save as" button and select whether you wish to save it as a new personal or company Playbook.
Note: the same list of steps applies when the meeting has already ended and you wish to save the modified Playbook for that specific case. Instead of going into your upcoming meetings, you will find it in the past meetings list.
6. High Level Best Practice
One of our central values is to make your meeting more interactive. To do so, we love to secure our next meeting during the current meeting already.
This is easy to prepare, as you can use Tokens within your booking link to already pre-fill essential information. When the booking page is shown in the meeting everything will be ready for the guest to book his next meeting!