Notes for owners · Sales management
Sales process or sales playbook: which do you write first
Write the process first when nobody agrees on the stages, and the playbook first when stages are clear but results differ between people. A short test decides which applies to you.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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Write the process first if your people cannot agree on the stages or on who owns each one. Write the playbook first only when the stages are agreed and two salespeople still get very different results from the same enquiries. The process says what happens and in what order. The playbook says how to do one step well. Owners who reverse them end up with forty pages on objections and nobody who knows when to use them.
What is the difference, in plain terms?
Think of a delivery route. The process is the route: pickup, sorting, dispatch, delivery, confirmation. The playbook is what the driver knows about each stop: which gate is open, which customer pays on delivery, what to say when nobody is home.
| Sales process | Sales playbook | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | What happens next, and who does it | How to do this step well |
| Length | One page | As long as needed, in sections |
| Changes when | The way you sell changes | You learn a better answer |
| Read by | Everyone, daily | The person at that step, when stuck |
| Missing, you get | Deals that stall unseen | Results that depend on who took the call |
Which one are you missing?
Take your last twenty enquiries and ask three questions.
- Can your people name the stage a given deal is in, and do they all name the same one?
- When a deal went quiet, did anybody know whose job it was to call?
- Of the enquiries that reached a quote, did your best and your weakest salesperson convert at similar rates?
| Your answers (1, 2, 3) | What it suggests |
|---|---|
| No to question 1 or 2 | The process is missing; a playbook cannot help when nobody agrees where a deal sits |
| Yes, yes, then no | The process runs, but unevenly between people; a playbook may lift the weaker ones |
| Yes, yes, yes | You may need little beyond a tidy-up |
A uPVC window fabricator in Pune who started on the wrong document
Imagine a fabricator in Pune who sells to builders and to flat owners. He spent a month writing a playbook: pitch scripts, a table comparing uPVC with aluminium, a page on price objections. Two salespeople ignored it. When he asked why, one said he never knew when to send a quotation. The other sent it on the first call.
The fault was in the order of work. The firm had no agreed stage called "site measured", so one man quoted before measuring and the other after. With invented numbers, 11 of the 30 quotes in one month had to be revised after measurement, and the buyers who saw two prices in a week were the ones who went quiet. No page on price objections could help with that. The owner wrote a one-page process: enquiry, site visit with measurement, quote, follow-up, order, installation check. Only then did the owner go back to the playbook, and write just the sections for the two stages where the two men differed. The next month 4 of 28 quotes needed revising, not none, because builders still changed their plans.
What counts as proof that a stage is done?
A stage needs a test that anyone can check. "Site measured" is done when a measurement sheet or a photo of the opening sits in the record; "quote sent" is done when the quote has a date and a number.
What does one playbook page look like?
Do not write the whole playbook. Pick the stages where outcomes differ most between people, and write one page for each. A page for the silence after the quote might read:
STAGE: Quote sent, no reply
Who: the salesperson who sent it
First call: [day, set from your own records], ask if the drawing matched the site
Second call: [day], offer to revise one item, not the price
Stop and tell the owner: [day] or a "we chose someone else"
Never: offer a discount before the owner agrees
Words that worked: [paste two lines from won deals]
The days are left blank on purpose. They are your own rule to set, from how long your buyers take to decide, which you will only learn from your own records. A small firm may need only two or three such pages: the first call, the quote and the silence after it. A playbook with three used pages beats one with ten opened once. A longer list of contents is in what an SME sales playbook should include.
When is a playbook the wrong thing to write?
If you have one salesperson, or only yourself, a playbook is a note to your future self. Write the process, run it for a quarter, and add playbook pages only for steps that keep going wrong. If your best seller is about to leave, do the reverse: interview them now about the quote stage, before the knowledge goes out of the door.
A playbook also fails when you hope it will make a reluctant salesperson sell. A person who will not follow the process will not open the page that explains how to do it better. The real problem is elsewhere, and this post on salespeople who ignore the process looks for it.
Settling the order for your own firm
Start with the stage list from the sales process pages: the stages, one owner for each, and the evidence that a deal has moved on. Run it on real deals, then find the stage where two people behave differently and write that playbook page first. If you would like a second reader for either document, sales playbook development is the work, and you can tell us what you need.
