Sales

Founder-run selling from first paid customer to first sales hire, synthesized from nine sales books; buyer signals graded E0–E4.

Start here

1. Read the venture context if it exists: discovery/00-CONTEXT.md, discovery/LEDGER.md and discovery/FIELD-NOTES.md (own numbers beat book benchmarks). Else ask at most 3 questions: what you sell, to whom and at what deal size; paying customers and evidence so far; the deal or decision at hand. If you can't ask, state your assumptions and go on.
2. Name the stage: learning (no paying customers), proving (founder closes, not yet repeatable) or scaling (steady win rate, hiring). Most bad sales advice is good advice at the wrong stage.
3. Route with the table below. Read only the matching playbook(s), two at most. If two rows fit, pick the one matching the buyer's or user's latest action, not their words. Name other relevant playbooks; don't read them.

Router

Principles

1. Score meetings by what the buyer agrees to do next, not what they say; plan each call around one Advance [Rackham] [Fitzpatrick] [Keenan].
2. Size the ask to the trust you've earned: from a stranger, a reply; then one rung per touch, gift first [Cialdini] [Kazanjy] [Rackham].
3. The problem sells, not the product: diagnose, size the gap, show only what closes it [Keenan] [Rackham].
4. Diagnose before you present; price comes after the buyer says they want to buy [Kazanjy] [Ross].
5. Earn credibility as the expert on their problem; rapport follows useful selling, it doesn't cause it [Dixon] [Keenan].
6. Narrow hard and disqualify early; bad-fit accounts are the costliest early mistake [Kazanjy] [Ross].
7. Most of the decision happens without you: arm a champion, map everyone who can say no [Dixon] [Voss] [Rackham].
8. Prevent objections; most come from offering solutions before the need is built [Rackham] [Voss].
9. Trade every concession, make each one smaller than the last, and never meet in the middle [Voss] [Kazanjy] [Dixon].
10. Prove the motion yourself before you hire anyone to repeat it [Kazanjy] [Ross].
11. Treat effect sizes as directional; most come from the authors' own firms (Huthwaite, CEB, Tethr).

When the experts disagree

Output contract

Every answer ends with:

• Recommendation: the call, specific to their business.
• Deliverable: the artifact (ICP, sequence, call plan, script, concession plan, forecast), filled in.
• Why: the framework(s) behind it, credited [Author].
• Assumptions to log: each as a ledger item (A#, [ASSUMPTION, E0]) with the cheapest test and evidence bar; hand off to /experiments or /customer-discovery. Grades: E0 opinion · E1 told story of past behaviour · E2 observed behaviour/artifact · E3 commitment (time, intro, next step) · E4 money.
• Next action: one thing this week.

Research

Web-search only for current, external facts (competitors, prices, CPMs, trademark/domain availability, platform rules, market data). Cite URL + date as [FACT — url]. Never web-search for "what the books say"; the playbooks are the method. No source → [UNKNOWN] + research step.

Beyond the books

The sources are US B2B, 1980s–2010s. Product-led sales, security reviews and MSAs, partner channels, AI-written outreach, services firms and relationship-first or WhatsApp-first markets (much of India) fall outside them: say so, adapt, and log the adaptation as an assumption. In relationship-first markets, start with warm rings (first-customers-founder-led-sales.md) [Lavingia].

Hand-offs

• Before: /customer-discovery, /problem-discovery, /jtbd, /value-proposition-canvas.
• Elsewhere: positioning, pricing and launch timing (Product Hunt, launch sites) /gtm; offers, copy and founder posts /marketing; names and voice /branding; running the push day by day /outreach-sprint.
• Alongside/after: /secondary-research, /experiments, /facts-assumptions-unknowns, /business-model-canvas, /startup-scorecard, /learn.

Go deeper (optional)

If the business-books MCP is connected, search_library / read_passage give the original passages behind a playbook. Not required.