#54: How To Map Out Your Playbook From Hello To Close

#54: How To Map Out Your Playbook From Hello To Close


Read Time: 4 min

🤝 Announcement

We now offer a self-service model that gives you lifetime access to our playbook. The same playbook that all of our clients scaled up on. The playbook has 8 folders with 30 modules, which include templates, videos, and all the software, and shows you step-by-step how to build a fully fleshed-out, repeatable sales process. If you’re a bootstrapped early-stage founder with little to no revenue and lean on economic resources, then this direction is a no-brainer. Here’s a video of me walking through the playbook you see below.

Today, I will break down from hello to close how you should think about building a founder-led sales playbook. This framework empowers you to do two crucial things: close revenue, get your first base hits, and use the data you gather to refine and improve your sales process.

Both will become invaluable as you find PMF and scale to 1 million in ARR.

 
The first person gets the oyster. The second person gets the shell.

~ Andrew Carnegie

Below is a screenshot of our framework from beginning to end, which we use to help teams find PMF and scale up to 1 Million in founder-led sales.

I will break each part down and provide more context for doing this.

Here is a copy of the chart.

Print it out and put it on your whiteboard. This tells everything you need to know to scale founder-led sales.

We focus on two channels: cold email and LI. Email is the fastest and most economical way to scale top of the funnel (TOFU) because you can go broad and deep. Email will only hit a ceiling when you’ve exhausted the number of companies in your total addressable market (TAM). It is the fastest way to validate your messaging with your ideal customer profile ICP.

Here’s what you need with lead generation.

Lead Generation

• Multiple email domains from which to send emails. Use a tool like instantly.ai to facilitate all of your email outbound.
  

• You need to go broad. By broad, I mean sending out, on average, 5-6k emails. Split test different email copy, subject lines, and ICPs. Based on that output and what comes back, you will know what works and where you need to iterate. Emails should be no more than 2-3 sentences, and the subject lines should be 1-2 words. No emojis, No parenthesis, no characters. 1-2 words, that’s it.
  

Discovery

The goal of discovery is to identify whether the opportunity is qualified. How do you do that? Through BANT. A good discovery call has these things.

• Identified BANT

• Conveyed authority

• Sound polished

• Controlled the conversation

• Used voice tonality and enthusiasm

• Identified use case(s) the prospect was willing to fix

Demo

The demo is designed to show the prospect life before and after using your product. A demo is never a one-size-fits-all presentation. It should be customized based on the use cases they conveyed on the discovery. On the qualification call, you establish where they are, where their challenges lie, and where they want to be (desired situation). The demo should showcase how your product can deliver that experience. The slides should look like this.

• Slide 1: Current situation

• Slide 2: Key objectives

• Slide 3: Demo layout

  • From there, you demo your software. Once completed, you land on slide 4.

• Slide 4: What onboarding looks like

• Slide 5: Start reviewing pricing tiers

• Slide 6: Present offer to get on paid POC

• Slide 7: Schedule the next call (either a scope or follow-up to move forward on POC)
  

Scoping Call

The goal of a scoping call is to drill down on their success criteria. In other words, what boxes need to be checked for them to move forward at the end of a POC? You need to understand these things and ensure they align with what your product can deliver. If they ask for features that do not exist natively within the product, and you feel it’s something you can build, then do so as long as the expectation is conveyed regarding the timeframe and it’s something that works for you. Here’s some of the info you need to understand on the scope.

• How do they define success on a POC?

• What are they looking to validate specifically (use cases)?

• Are they trying to tie outcomes to a specific metric? 

• What features do they need in the product to sign an agreement?

• Define periodic check-in points during the POC with clear milestones.

Proof of concept (POC) 

The goal of the POC is self-explanatory. Here’s what needs to be clearly understood at the conclusion.

• Success criteria were clearly met

• Any and all concerns were resolved

• They are prepared to move forward

Close

• Was BANT identified?

• Was the demo executed?

• Did you drill down on their use cases for POC?

• Were you able to achieve objectives on the POC

• Did you address all of their concerns?
  
  

Closing is a byproduct of every preceding step being executed flawlessly. Customers close for 3 reasons. (1) They believe you are competent. (2) They believe you’re an authority (expert). And (3) they believe your product can deliver on expectation. You reverse engineer and deliver that experience through a process.

Study and implement this framework. It is all you need for founder-led sales. It will help you validate PMF and scale to 1 million in ARR. We’ve successfully implemented this exact framework with hundreds of founding teams.

That’s it for for today!

See you all next week.


Darren

P.S. If you’re ready to level up, you can book a call with me here

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