How does a founder build a commercial playbook after selling the company?

What changes when the playbook is your first job after the sale?

The job moves from recording how you used to sell to agreeing, for the first time, how the new company sells.

One founder described it in a message sent shortly after the sale. "My first task is to create a Commercial Playbook." The new company had two groups selling, one good at selling with very little understanding of the product, the other at home in the product and not as good at selling. "But we have no shared way of selling," the message went on. "Different sales slides even."

So there is no single process to write down. There are two. Each has worked for the people using it. A playbook that picks one and calls it the standard loses the other team on the first day. And a playbook that puts both side by side hands every seller a choice nobody meant to offer.

The playbook's real job is to create the thing that is missing, which is one explanation of why customers buy from the company as it is now. That explanation comes first, and the rest of the document is built around it. And the founder asked for the same thing in other words, a playbook that creates "a shared understanding, language, and process for all people selling."

If the deals are already behind you and the playbook is meant as a reference, for a board seat or for the next company, that is a different job. There is a separate piece on what a commercial playbook is and how to build one after an exit, and another on what a commercial playbook should cover in the first months after an acquisition.

What goes into a playbook for the combined company?

Five parts. The first one decides the other four.

1. The explanation. Why customers buy from the new company, what you say first, and what changes for each kind of buyer.
2. The stages and the qualification rules. What has to be true for a deal to enter and leave each stage, and how to tell a real deal from somebody collecting quotes.
3. The plays. What to do in the situations that keep coming up, such as a competitor already in the account, a first customer in a new segment, or a customer who could buy more.
4. The proof. Which case or number to use with which buyer, filed so a seller can find it in the middle of a call.
5. The escalation line. Who decides what, when legal or product gets pulled in, and which deals still go to a senior person.

The order matters, because each part is written in the language of the first. If the explanation is not settled, every stage definition and every play gets written twice, once in each team's words, and the document inherits the disagreement it was meant to end. So settle the explanation with both teams, then write the rest.

The sales playbook guide Sandler wrote with Playboox makes a related point about the second part. Ask most sales leaders whether they have a documented sales process and they say yes. But what they usually have, the guide says, is one slide of stages and exit criteria, useful but not sufficient.

How do you write the messaging so both teams can use it?

Put three things side by side: a drawing of the argument, the reasoning behind each message, and real deals that show it working.

Messaging documents usually fail in one of two directions. Some are too general to use, because a line such as "emphasize ease of use" does not help anybody halfway through a discovery call. And others are scripts, which break the first time a buyer asks something the script did not expect.

The drawing carries the logic, meaning the problem, what changes, and why the change is worth paying for, in a form a seller can recall under pressure and a buyer can redraw for a colleague. The reasoning says why each message works and where it stops working, so a seller can adapt it instead of reciting it. And the deals, won and lost, show the message in a real conversation, including the moments where it did not land.

The reasoning is the part only the founder can supply. It is also the part founders find hardest to write. You know why one message works with one kind of buyer and fails with another, but you have known it for so long that it no longer feels like knowledge. Chip and Dan Heath called this the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it is hard to imagine not knowing it, and so it is hard to explain it to somebody who does not.

So the reasoning is best drawn out by somebody who does not know it yet. Written by the founder alone, it tends to arrive as the conclusion without the reason, and the reason is exactly what the next person needs.

Where should the playbook live?

Wherever the sellers already work. The playbook is the content and the tool is only the container, so choose the container by asking whether somebody will open it in the middle of a deal.

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

When two teams come together there is one more rule. Keep one playbook in one place that both teams use. Because if each team keeps its own copy in its own system, you will have two playbooks again before long, and they will drift apart the way the slides did.

Who keeps the playbook true once it exists?

One named person, usually whoever carries the revenue number, with a fixed date on which the playbook gets reviewed.

For a while that is often you, because you can still say why each rule exists. That works while you are there. But it stops working when you move on, so write every rule for somebody who cannot ask you what you meant, and hand the ownership over before you leave rather than after.

After that, three habits keep it honest. Deals get marked against the rule that qualified them, so you can see which rules get used and which get routed around. The team flags the plays that failed and the situations nobody wrote down. And at a fixed review, where once a quarter is a sensible start, somebody retires what stopped working and adds what the recent wins taught. When something changes, say so, because people stop opening a playbook they think is out of date.

The Sandler guide draws the same line between written and used. A documented process that nobody monitors or reinforces still counts as informal there, however well it is written.

What goes wrong when two teams get one playbook?

Four things, and the first one is the most expensive.

Crowning one team's way. The team that was there first, or the one that sells more, writes the playbook, and the other team reads it as a verdict on how they work. So build it from both teams' real deals, won and lost, and let the reasons customers buy decide what goes in.

Writing down your own instinct without testing it. A rule such as "always lead with return on investment" may describe your best deals and still fail with different buyers in a different year. Test every rule against deals it was not built from before it goes in.

Building too much too early. Dozens of plays, half of which never come up. Start with the handful of plays behind most of the deals you close, the messages that win in your strongest segment, and the qualification rules that separate a real deal from somebody collecting quotes. Then add what the team asks for.

Keeping it inside sales. If marketing and product are not part of the playbook, they keep describing the company their own way, and a buyer hears three versions before the first call. There is more on that in how to get every team explaining the product the same way.

What does the work involve, and what does it cost?

You can build it yourself, and nobody knows the business better. But the difficulty is that the person who understands the offer best is the worst placed to hear how it sounds to somebody who does not, and after a sale you are writing for people who have never heard it from you.

If you want it done with you, this is the shape of it at Strategem. The extraction runs as structured interviews on your own real cases, won, lost and difficult, using grounded qualitative method from an organizational psychology PhD. With two teams, we take deals from both. We draw while we listen, and the bar is the moment somebody says, that is exactly what I do, I just could never name it.

The Clarity and Roadmap package, which includes a workshop, starts at €8.000.

Strategem was founded by Dr. Fritz Hermann, who holds a PhD in organizational psychology and spent a decade as a CMO, with work across banks, insurers and Premier League clubs. The same work runs on a founder the team keeps pulling into the same sales moment, on a product that takes too long to explain, and on a champion who has to explain it internally.