I spent two weeks writing a sales playbook for a small to medium business. When I handed it over, the Director looked at me and asked what they needed it for.
I gave him a reasonable answer. A playbook captures your best process and puts it in writing. It gives you something to hold reps accountable against, something to train new starters from, something to build on as you learn what works. It lets you compartmentalise the sales function and identify where things are breaking down.
He nodded. Seemed satisfied. I drove home.
About a week later, the better answer arrived. As it always does.
What I should have said was this. A sales playbook scoops out of the founder’s head how to sell the product, so they can start letting go of sales.
That is the real reason. Everything else is secondary.
The Problem Sitting Inside Your Head
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote ‘that everybody lives by selling‘. He was right, and for founders it is more literal than for most. In the early years of a business, the founder is almost always the best salesperson, often the only one who can close anything reliably, because they carry the whole picture. They know the product at depth. They understand the customer’s problem from experience. They have enough conviction to transfer it to a buyer. And they have done it enough times that they do it instinctively, without needing to think through each step.
That instinct is a commercial asset. It is also a significant structural liability.
Because when the sales process lives entirely inside the founder’s head, the business cannot scale beyond the founder’s personal capacity. Every new deal requires them in the room. Every difficult conversation circles back to them. Every rep who joins the team eventually discovers that the thing they were hired to replicate is undocumented, unteachable, and inseparable from the specific personality of the person who built the company.
The result is what it always is when a critical process has no documented form. Stress, bottlenecks, a revenue line that looks like a sawtooth on the graph because it rises when the founder is active and falls when they are not, and an inability to grow past a ceiling that nobody ever consciously chose.
The Time Maths
A founder should spend roughly eighty percent of their time working in the business, delivering the thing the business exists to deliver. Ten percent on the business itself, meaning administration, recruitment, finance, the operational overhead that keeps the structure functioning. And around ten percent on sales.
In a standard forty hour week, ten percent is four hours.
Four hours is not much. Drive to a prospect, sit in the meeting, drive back, and you have used most of it. Add the time required to book the appointment, prepare for it, write a proposal, and follow up, and four hours is gone before you have done anything that looks like building a pipeline.
The mastery, and it genuinely is a kind of mastery, is figuring out where your four hours produce the most return and then building the entire sales process around that single activity.
Some founders are exceptional in meetings. They read the room, they build rapport quickly, they ask the right questions and they close naturally face to face. For those founders, the goal is to make sure every hour of their four is spent in front of a qualified prospect, with everything else, the prospecting, the scheduling, the proposals, the follow-up, handled by someone or something else.
Some founders are excellent networkers. They build trust through presence and visibility, and the calls they make off the back of a genuine relationship convert at a rate that cold outreach cannot touch. For those founders, the playbook looks different. The process needs to capture how leads move from a networking context into a sales conversation, how referrals get actioned, how introductions get followed up consistently rather than whenever the founder remembers to do it.
Others are strong writers. Their proposals are the moment where the deal is won or lost, and the quality of that document is what separates them from a competitor. Build the process around getting that document in front of the right people as efficiently as possible.
The point is not that there is a universal answer. The point is that there is a specific answer for every founder, and until you find it and document it, you are spreading four hours across too many activities and getting diluted results from all of them.
What the Playbook Actually Does
At Outsold, sometimes we take sales off a founder’s plate entirely. More often, the founder wants to stay actively involved, and that is not a problem. It’ is’s actually an advantage, we love. Nobody is going to sell the product as well as the person who built it. What we do instead is identify where the founder’s sales ability is sharpest, build a documented process around that specific strength, and structure everything else to support it while minimising the time and effort required outside of that core activity.
The playbook is the mechanism that makes that possible. It takes what the founder does instinctively and makes it visible, teachable, and repeatable. It removes the dependency on memory and mood. It gives a new rep something real to learn from rather than a vague instruction to watch how the founder does it and try to pick it up.
Without that documented process, sales stays stuck in the founder’s head indefinitely. The business keeps hitting the same ceiling. The founder keeps feeling like they cannot step back because the moment they do, the pipeline slows. And the gap between what the business could be and what it actually is widens slowly until someone gets tired enough to do something about it.
That is usually the moment we get the call.
If you are sitting somewhere in that gap right now, there is more thinking on how to build a sales function that does not depend entirely on you at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
