In short
- A commercial playbook records how the company wins, in a form somebody who was not there can run.
- It is not a sales deck and not an SOP. A deck persuades a buyer, an SOP lists steps, a playbook carries the judgment between the steps.
- Stages, owners, triggers and metrics go on paper easily. The rule that decides a call and the exception that overrides it are the parts that leave with the founder.
- Built before a sale, it lowers the buyer's risk. But built after, it is a reference asset for an advisory seat, a board, or the next company.
- The test is not completeness. It is whether somebody else makes the same call you would have made.
What is a commercial playbook?
The record of how a company actually wins and keeps customers, written so somebody who was not there can run it.
In practice that means two layers. The visible one is the shape of the sale: the stages a deal moves through, who owns each stage, what has to happen for a deal to move, and the numbers you judge it by. And that layer is not hard to produce. Most companies have a version of it already, scattered across a CRM and a shared drive.
The second layer is the reason any of it works. Which problem you lead with and why that one. What an objection is usually about, underneath the words the buyer uses. When a deal is real and when it is somebody collecting quotes. When to walk away. So a playbook that has the first layer and not the second is a description of your process rather than a transfer of it.
How is it different from a sales deck or an SOP?
Different audience, different question, different failure mode.
A deck faces outward and argues. An SOP faces inward and lists. A playbook faces inward and decides. The confusion is understandable, because all three are about communication. But a deck that wins one meeting tells you nothing about whether the next person can win the one after it.
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
| Document | Who it is for | The question it answers | What it leaves out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales deck | The buyer | Why should we buy this | Everything about how the deal is actually run |
| SOP or process document | The team, at the task level | What are the steps, in order | Which step applies when, and who decides |
| Commercial playbook | The team, at the decision level | What do we do here, and why | Nothing, if it is finished. Most are not |
The question an acquirer asks in the room.How did your team run a deal when you were not in it. A deck cannot answer that. A playbook answers it before it is asked, which is also the difference between a short earn-out and a long one.
What actually goes in one?
One list, in two halves. The second half is the one people skip.
- Stage definitions, with what has to be true to enter and to leave each one.
- The triggers that actually move a deal, taken from real deals rather than from a template.
- Ownership and escalation. Who runs each stage, who gets pulled in, and at what point.
- The numbers per stage: win rate, cycle time, and whatever your business is really judged on.
- The rules. If this is true and that is not, do this, unless the following is also true.
- The named exceptions, with the reason each one exists.
- Segment variations, because an enterprise committee and a single technical buyer are not the same sale.
- The deals that broke the rules, and what that revealed.
The first four go on paper without much trouble. The last four are what separate a playbook from a filing exercise. And they are the ones that need the person who made those calls, which is why this work is so much harder six months after that person has left.
Why build one after the sale rather than before?
You should not. Before is better, and it is better for a reason that costs money.
An acquirer is buying next year's revenue, and a commercial process that only runs when the founder is in the room makes next year's revenue a question rather than an asset. So that shows up in diligence, in the structure of the earn-out, and sometimes in the price. There is a fuller version of that argument in the piece on what your sales process is worth when you sell the company.
But after the sale is not nothing, and the job genuinely changes. So the playbook stops being an execution tool. It becomes a reference. The acquirer's team uses it to stop relearning what you already know. You use it in an advisory seat to point at a specific stage instead of offering general impressions. And if there is a next company, you start it with a written account of what worked instead of running the same search again.
One advantage of writing it late.The quarter is no longer on the line, so you can be honest about which things actually worked and which ones you assumed worked. Test every rule you write against deals you already closed. And if a rule does not describe what you did in the last ten, it is a preference rather than a rule.
How do you build one when the deals are already behind you?
Backwards, from real deals, not forwards from a blank structure.
- Pick the deals: five or six you won, three you lost, and the two nobody can explain.
- Walk through each one out loud with whoever ran it, while somebody else interrupts and writes.
- Mark the decision points, the moments where the deal could have gone either way.
- Write what was weighed at each of those points, as a rule with its exception attached.
- Only then lay out the stages, the owners, the triggers and the metrics around those rules.
- Test the whole thing against deals it was not built from, and correct what it gets wrong.
The honest limit is worth stating, because anybody who does not state it is selling you something. Roughly eighty to ninety percent of an expert area can be structured this way. But the rest stays judgment, and the right thing to do with it is to name it as judgment rather than pretend a rule exists. A playbook that admits where it stops is more useful than one that quietly guesses.
There is a companion piece on the mechanics of that extraction, on how to codify a sales process before a handover or sale, which goes further into what a decision rule looks like and how to prove the transfer actually happened.
What is it worth in an advisory or board seat?
It is the difference between having opinions and having a diagnosis.
With a playbook in front of you, a slipping number has a location. Win rate has fallen in one segment, at one stage, and here is the rule that stage runs on and here is what changed around it. But without one, you are the former founder saying it feels like something is off in the mid-market, which is usually true and almost never actionable.
The same thing applies if you are not staying. So write it for somebody who cannot ask you what you meant. Build relationships and demonstrate value are not instructions. A monthly review on a fixed date, against usage against the goal that was agreed, with one expansion question asked every time, is an instruction. And the test for every line is whether a competent stranger could act on it tomorrow.
What does the work take, and what does it cost?
You can run this yourself, and after an exit you have the one thing the work needs, which is time to think. The reason it stalls is not effort. It 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 twenty years of making the call by instinct, naming what you weigh is genuinely difficult from the inside.
A worked example of the result, rather than of the document. A machine manufacturer, two people, a genuinely good and genuinely technical product. Every deal turned into a fresh argument about their machine against a cheaper one, and the founder made that argument personally every time. The rule underneath it, once it was named, was one sentence: you buy the first machine on price, and from the second machine on, you buy service. In the year that followed the company went from two people to twenty-five. The sentence did not do that on its own and it would be dishonest to say it did. What it did was stop the argument having to come out of one person's mouth to land.
If you want it done with you, this is the shape of it at Strategem. Two workshops. The first is diagnosis: the problem, the customer, the stakeholders and how each of them has to be spoken to. Between the workshops we draft the messaging and build candidate models. The second fuses the model into how you actually sell. You then use it in real conversations, and we meet again about three weeks later to correct whatever the field exposed. The extraction runs as structured interviews on your own real cases, won, lost and difficult, using grounded qualitative method from an organizational psychology PhD. 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 price depends on who is buying, because a committee sale and an expert-led sale are not the same job. For a multi-person B2B company with committee buying, the opening workshop is €5.000 and a full engagement starts at €15.000. For a smaller or expert-led company, the workshop is €1.500 and the full engagement is €5.000. The price is fixed before we start, iteration until the agreed acceptance test passes is included, and if we stop early you pay only for the phases that finished.
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 expert judgment that has never been written down, on a founder the team keeps pulling into the same sales moment, and on an argument a champion has to carry without you.