How to build a sales playbook for your startup
This isn’t a “nice to have” - it’s essential for scaling and success
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If you’ve been following along, you know I talk a lot about preparing for your first sales hire and how to transition out of founder-led sales. Another asset that you need to create to make the transition and scale your team is a sales playbook.
And I haven’t (yet) broken that asset down in detail—what it is, why you need one, and exactly what goes in it.
This week, let’s fix that!
Why you need one
A sales playbook is the single source of truth for how your company sells.
It’s where your sales process, messaging, objection handling, and competitive intel all live—documented and accessible to every sales rep—current and future.
Here’s why this matters for early-stage startups:
It’s how you transition out of founder-led sales. No one will ever sell the way you do. You have context, conviction, and credibility that can’t be replicated. But when it’s time to hire your first rep, you need to extract everything that works from your head and document it. What questions do you ask on discovery calls? How do you handle the pricing objection? What stories do you tell to build urgency? A playbook codifies what you do instinctively so as much as possible becomes repeatable for the people you hire.
It accelerates onboarding. Remember that six-week onboarding roadmap I shared? A playbook is where those resources live. Instead of answering the same questions repeatedly or having new reps shadow you for weeks, you point them to the playbook.
It creates consistency. As you add reps, a playbook ensures everyone is telling the same story, qualifying the same way, and handling objections with messaging that’s been tested and refined.
It turns sales into a measurable system. Sales is a never-ending science experiment. The problem is, if you change five variables on every deal, you have no idea which variable impacted the outcome.
It forces clarity. The act of documenting your sales process often reveals gaps you didn’t know existed. You’ll discover you’ve never actually written down your ICP criteria, or that your “discovery process” is really just winging it.
The more you can standardize your process—supported by documentation—the more you can control the variables. And when you control the variables, you can actually measure what’s working and pinpoint where things break down.
This becomes essential as you build your team. When a deal is lost or a rep is underperforming, you need to be able to diagnose whether it’s a person problem, a process problem, or a product problem. Without a documented, standardized approach, everything looks like a person problem—and that’s not fair to your reps or useful for improving your business.
Where to store it
Your playbook needs to live somewhere your team will actually use it. I recommend Confluence (an Atlassian product) or Notion—both offer very generous startup discounts that make them accessible at your stage.
If I had to pick one, I’d go with Confluence. Why? They have a deeper integration with HubSpot, where you can access Confluence directly from HubSpot’s AI chat. That means your reps can pull playbook content without leaving their CRM—reducing friction and increasing the odds they’ll actually reference it in the moment.
Notion is a solid alternative if your team already lives there, but the HubSpot integration gives Confluence an edge for sales-specific use cases.
“Why can’t we just use a Google doc?”
If you must…it’s better than nothing. But it’s much easier to navigate, search, and see when a specific section was last updated etc. in one of the platforms I mentioned.
What to include in your playbook
Building a playbook can feel daunting, so I’ll break it into two phases. Phase 1 is your minimum viable playbook. Phase 2 is what you add once the MVP foundation is in place.
Phase 1: The minimum viable playbook
These are the non-negotiables. Get these documented before day one of your new hire’s onboarding if possible or as soon as possible thereafter:
Mission, vision, and values. Set the foundation for how you operate as a company and how you want your reps to represent your brand in the world.
Founder & company origin story. Include a link to a recording of you telling the story—why you started the company and where you see it going. This gives reps the narrative they need to sell with conviction.
Product overview. Cover your product(s), key features, the pain points they solve, and who the buyers are for each.
Pricing. Detail how you price the product so reps aren’t stumbling over their words on sales calls.
ICP and buyer personas. Go deep here. If you haven’t already, use these frameworks on how to define your ICP and how to refine your buyer personas to get this right. Include real examples of current customers and real people who have bought from you before. Link to a full customer list if possible so reps can study the names and start recognizing patterns.
Competitors. Document who you’re up against, including the status quo of “do nothing”. Explain how you’re different from each.
Positioning. How do you position the product to different ICPs and buyer personas? Sometimes you highlight different value drivers to a CFO than you would to an HR manager—you’re selling the same thing but emphasizing what matters to each. Same goes for industry differences (financial services vs. professional services, for example).
Sales process and deal stages. Map out exactly how a deal moves from first touch to closed-won.
Sales tech breakdown. List every tool in your stack, what license types you have, why you use it, how you use it, and who the admin is for granting access.
Glossary. Define any acronyms, company-specific terms, or industry jargon a new rep might not know.
On-demand demo recording. A video they can watch repeatedly to learn the product and your demo style.
Recent sales call recordings. Include at least three so reps can hear how you actually sell.
Links to key sales assets. One-pagers, decks, proposal templates—everything they’ll need, in one place. (This is sales enablement 101.)
Case studies and social proof. If available, include case studies, customer reviews, or NPS survey results.
Phase 2: Level up your playbook
Once phase 1 is solid, start layering in these elements to make your playbook more comprehensive:
Standard company and product overviews. Two to three sentence blurbs people can use to explain the company or product consistently in emails, on calls, or at events.
Messaging document. Teach reps exactly how you want them to talk about the problems you solve, the product, and the company—consistently.
Written sales pitch script. I love April Dunford’s framework for structuring a compelling pitch.
Discovery questions. A list of the key questions reps should ask to qualify and understand prospects.
Qualification framework. Detailed guidance on how to qualify a prospect and when to disqualify.
Objection handling. Document common objections and exactly how to address them.
Prospecting playbook. What tools should reps use? What signals should they look for—M&A activity, recent funding, layoffs, leadership changes? (And don’t sleep on LinkedIn as an outbound channel.)
Demo best practices. More detailed instructions on how to give a great product demo beyond just watching your recording.
Product deep dive. Cover integrations, implementation process and timeline, security and compliance details—anything reps will get asked about during the sales process. Make it fast for them to find answers.
Email templates. Standardize as much as possible through templates for cold outreach, post-discovery follow-up, post-demo recap, pricing delivery, and any other frequent touchpoints.
Internal process SOPs. Detailed documentation on how to do all of your internal sales processes—updating the CRM, submitting contracts, requesting discounts, etc.
This isn’t a “nice to have” - it’s essential for success
A sales playbook isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s how you scale beyond the founder. If everything that works about your sales process lives in your head, you’re the bottleneck. And every new rep you hire will take longer to ramp, make more mistakes, and require more of your time.
It’s also really hard to hold people accountable to following a process or hitting their quota…if you don’t have the process written down anywhere (or the information is scattered across dozens of Slack threads and documents).
Start with phase 1. Get the minimum viable playbook done—ideally before your first hire starts. Then iterate and expand as you learn what else your team needs to feel confident and close.
Related content: Check out this pre-hire checklist and sales onboarding roadmap. These three pieces together will 5-10x your odds of a successful first sales hire.
Bonus: Here is a template you can use to collate and organize this information.
Questions? Shoot them over. You’ve got this! 🫡
With love and gratitude -
If you want to learn more about working with me directly…
For B2B startups I serve as a Fractional GTM executive or advisor. Learn more about-
When you’re ready, let’s connect to discuss your specific growth goals and challenges.
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