A sales playbook is essentially your sales Bible, the single source of truth for how selling happens at your company. Think of it as a comprehensive manual that you should be able to hand to someone completely new, and they’d immediately understand how to continue the sales motion you’ve established. 

As a founder, you’re constantly iterating on your product, your messaging, and your sales approach. What many don’t realise is just how much things change over time. You’re likely talking about your product today in a completely different way than you were three months ago. Without documenting this evolution, you end up “blagging” your way through sales conversations rather than leveraging what actually works. 

I’ve worked with countless founders who neglected this critical step until it was almost too late. Creating a sales playbook isn’t just administrative busywork, it’s a strategic investment that will pay dividends as your company scales. 

When should you start building your playbook? 

The best time to start building your sales playbook was right at the beginning of your company. The next best time? Now. 

However, there’s one absolute deadline you should be aware of: you must have a sales playbook in place before you transition from founder-led sales. This is non-negotiable if you want to maintain consistency in how your product is positioned and sold. 

I consistently advise founders to build out their sales playbook a minimum of six months before making their first sales hire. Why? Because messaging and value proposition can get massively diluted when you’re verbally onboarding someone. Before you know it, your new hire is talking about your product in a completely different way than you intended. 

Those six months give you crucial time to test, tweak, and refine your playbook. You want something you’ve battle-tested in the field, not something hastily thrown together over a weekend. You should be able to look back and say, “Bloody hell, that didn’t work,” make adjustments, and move forward with a proven approach. 

What does the sales playbook need to include?  

It doesn’t matter too much where your playbook lives. It could be Google Docs, your CRM (HubSpot has built-in playbook functionality), or tools like Notion. But what does matter is that it’s documented somewhere easily accessible and regularly updated. 

Here are the key components every effective sales playbook should include: 

• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): More than just who you sell to—include specific details about company size (SMB vs. enterprise), industry focus, and common pain points of your target prospects. 
• Buyer Personas: Who are the decision-makers, champions, and end users? What motivates each? How do you effectively communicate with them? 
• Objection Handling: Document the common objections you hear in sales processes and your proven approaches for addressing them. 
• Competitive Intelligence: List your competitors and include mini SWOT analyses for each, highlighting how your solution differentiates. This section should evolve as new competitors emerge. 
• Sales Process Methodology: Detail your specific sales process, prospecting approaches, and qualification criteria. 
• Call Scripts and Email Templates: Provide a toolkit with proven messaging that works. 
• Demo Structure: Outline the key components of an effective product demonstration, including which features to highlight and which to downplay. 
• Case Studies: Collect success stories that resonate with different buyer types. 

For context, I created a playbook like this when advising an early-stage company a couple of years ago. It became their go-to resource if someone didn’t know anything about the company, they could click through the document and get up to speed quickly with qualification guides, cheat sheets, and all the essentials. 

Keeping your playbook current and relevant 

Your sales playbook should be a living document, not something that gathers digital dust. The key is making it incredibly easy to update.  

At Cosmic, we’re still early-stage and don’t have a fully fleshed-out playbook yet. But when we look back 12 months, it’s astonishing how much our messaging has changed. By documenting and iterating regularly, you’re making marginal gains every month rather than facing a massive overhaul project a year later. 

Think of your playbook as an evolving document that captures: 

• New competitors as they emerge 
• Fresh objections you haven’t heard before 
• Feedback on your product messaging 
• Refinements to scripts based on real call performance 
• Adjustments to email campaigns that aren’t converting 

This isn’t something you update monthly, it’s a living document you might change almost daily. You hear something new? Add it in. Cold call scripts getting pushback? Refine them. Email campaigns underperforming? Look at the data and update the messaging. 

This is a guide, not a straightjacket 

Your sales playbook isn’t meant to be rigid. It’s a guide that establishes best practices while allowing for individual style and approach. When you hire your founding account executive, they’ll bring their own style, but they won’t walk into calls unprepared for common objections or struggling to articulate your value proposition. 

The reality is that nobody will ever sell better than the founder. There will be things that work well for you that might not work for your sales team. Similarly, your account executives might discover approaches that are even more effective than yours. As you transition from founder-led sales to a dedicated team, your playbook should evolve to incorporate these new insights. 

This is particularly valuable for technical founders or those without a sales background. The playbook provides essential structure. For example, ensuring you cover all ten critical questions in a discovery call, even if you end up only asking eight of them. It offers prompts and reminders about driving an agenda, asking key questions, and securing next steps. 

Consider getting expert help 

In my experience, it’s incredibly effective to bring in fractional help or an advisor to assist with your playbook development. This approach helps you eliminate common mistakes before they happen. Rather than learning the hard way how to run discovery calls, demos, or implement sales methodologies like MEDDIC or SPIN, you can leverage established best practices from day one. 

I used to provide this exact service to early-stage founders, and the impact was dramatic. Companies became more mature almost overnight. Founders rapidly upskilled because they had structure and guidance for activities they previously approached haphazardly. 

It’s like buying furniture from IKEA without the instructions. Can you put it together without them? Maybe. But it will take significantly longer, you’ll likely break parts in the process, and the end result probably won’t be as sturdy or straight as it should be. The manual exists for a reason—it’s tried and tested, and following it produces better results faster. 

The cost of not having a playbook 

The biggest mistake founders make? Not creating a playbook at all. Too often, startups approach me when they’re already hiring, and suddenly realise they have no structured onboarding plan. They’re ready to bring on an experienced account executive but have no framework for training them effectively. 

This leads to the second major issue: struggling to transition from founder-led sales. Without a playbook, this critical transition becomes so much more difficult. You’re basically asking new team members to replicate your approach without giving them the blueprint for how it works. 

What happens when once you’ve built the playbook?  

I see it all the time. Founders who invest in creating really solid sales playbooks are noticeably more effective sellers.  

They run structured processes that make their companies appear more mature and professional, even at the earliest stages. This isn’t just perception – by creating the playbook, they’ve been sort of been forced to become experts in topics they might not have otherwise mastered. 

Having a playbook also makes you more agile. Imagine landing a few big deals that suddenly justify hiring a salesperson. Without a playbook, you’re held back: “I’m not ready to hire because I won’t have time to onboard them properly.” With a playbook already in place, you can confidently move forward, knowing they’ll have guidance even when you can’t be directly involved in their training. 

Ultimately, a solid sales playbook helps you mitigate failure rates, learn faster, and build a more mature sales function earlier in your company’s lifecycle, all of which position you for stronger, more sustainable growth. 

Author: Matthew Codd

I’m Matthew, I have 15 years of commercial leadership experience, helping VC-backed B2B technology companies scale revenue and transition from founder-led sales.  

I use my experience to help early-stage start-ups with GTM expertise, sales best practice, and hiring insights.  

I co-founded Cosmic Partners in 2022. We are SaaS sales recruitment specialists for VC backed B2B tech companies.