Sales Process Playbook
Prepared by Growth Experts · April 2026
Prepared by
Prepared by Growth Experts · April 2026
The objective is a scalable, repeatable sales process that a new salesperson can follow effectively within two weeks of joining — and that experienced reps can use as a measurement baseline.
Frame every conversation around their problems, volumes, and constraints — not your products. 70% listening, 30% talking.
You're a doctor, not a waiter. Ask where it hurts, understand the root cause, then recommend the right solution. Not before.
Lead every engagement with a clear agenda, defined stages, and a booked next step. Never "let's see how it goes." BAMFAM — Book A Meeting From A Meeting.
Share enough to create intrigue. Never give your full strategy in discovery. The prospect needs a reason to come back for the pitch call.
Michiel's knowledge, Gary's instincts, Doug's strategy — none of it should live only in heads. If it can't be written down and followed, it can't be scaled.
A clear cheat sheet and a structured call beats winging it every time — especially for new reps joining the team this year.
Read it once fully, then keep the cheat sheets open during calls. The main playbook is your reference — review it quarterly to stay sharp. The cheat sheets are your daily tool. When you hire new salespeople, this playbook is their onboarding bible. If a new hire can't follow this process in two weeks, the playbook needs improving — not the person.
Before you can lead the conversation, you need to understand where the prospect is in their journey — and what's driving them to act.
Self-assessed by the Connect Mobile team during the Growth Experts workshop, April 2026. Scored out of 10 against each stage's gold standard.
Lead In (3.8) is the single biggest gap — without a stronger pipeline, everything else is limited. Discovery is strong but must be separated from pitching. The Close stage needs a structured follow-up cadence and a buying committee navigation protocol.
A steady flow of qualified prospects who match your ideal customer profile — large B2C customer bases, enterprise employee communications, or businesses scaling their SMS infrastructure.
Largest deals, highest LTV. Require structured outbound. Won't come to you via the website.
Rare but high-value. Referrals from existing enterprise clients. Prioritise immediately.
High effort, low ROI for the volume. Focus outbound energy on enterprise.
Website leads that sign up themselves. Respond quickly, qualify out early if volume is low.
Every enquiry is quickly engaged, correctly qualified, and progressed to a booked discovery call. Speed is a competitive advantage — use it.
Connect Mobile's fast response time is one of its strongest competitive advantages. As Elzabé noted: "Sometimes that is the deciding factor — we immediately tell them how we can help, while others take a week or two." The goal is to convert interest into a booked call on first contact.
| Criterion | Strong Signal | Weak Signal | Disqualify |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Base | 100,000+ end customers | 10,000–100,000 | Under 1,000 |
| Employee Base | 500+ employees | 50–500 | Under 20 |
| Industry Fit | Retail, FSP, logistics, healthcare, gov | Other commercial | Aggregator/reseller seeking bilateral |
| Authority | IT Head, CX Director, CMO, CEO | Department manager with budget | Procurement-only with 3 quotes brief |
| Geography | South Africa, strategic Africa markets | Broader Africa with local traffic needs | International with no SA/Africa traffic |
Personalise this for the specific product or trigger mentioned. Do not paste your product encyclopedia. Create curiosity, establish credibility, book the call.
Take any existing canned product response. Open your LLM of choice. Paste the canned response and add: "Rewrite this as a first reply to a new enterprise enquiry. The goal is to create intrigue, not explain everything. Max 5 sentences. End with a question that leads to a call booking." This turns an information dump into a conversation starter.
The goal is a deep understanding of the buyer's world — their current setup, pain points, trigger for reaching out, decision process, budget, and success criteria. Not a pitch. Not a presentation. A diagnosis.
Open with a brief intro, confirm who's in the room, and set the agenda. Read the room — who has authority? Who is the technical person? Who is the day-to-day contact?
Understand who they are, what they do, and how they currently communicate with customers or employees.
Dig into what's not working. Quantify the pain wherever possible. This is the most important section — everything in the proposal and pitch should map back to this.
Gather the four BANT signals. Do this conversationally — not as a checklist interrogation. You need this to qualify the opportunity and build the right solution.
Understand current spend and openness to invest in a better solution.
Map who makes the decision and who influences it.
Confirm the specific use case and volume requirements.
Understand urgency and any constraints on timing.
Close the discovery call by booking the pitch meeting. Do not leave the call without a date in the diary. This is BAMFAM in action.
The highest-scoring stage. Connect Mobile produces value-led, tailored proposals. The focus now is ensuring they're consistently built from discovery insights — not reconstructed from memory.
Open the proposal by reflecting the prospect's exact problems back to them — using their language. This proves you were listening and frames everything that follows.
Quantify what staying in their current situation costs them — financially and operationally. Make inaction feel expensive.
Map the recommended product combination directly to their stated problems and volume requirements. One problem → one solution. Lead with outcome, not feature.
Show the return on investment. Use their numbers from discovery wherever possible. Conservative estimates are better than none.
2–3 relevant proof points. Match the proof to their specific problem. Not a logo wall — a story that resonates with their situation.
End with clarity. What happens after they say yes — onboarding timeline, go-live date, first campaign. Make the path forward obvious and low-friction.
All stakeholders understand the solution, believe in its value, and are aligned around the recommended path. The pitch is a live experience — not an email with a PDF attached.
Taylor's principle from the workshop: "I'm a massive fan of doing the entire pitch for them seeing pricing and value for the first time when we get to present it — because then you can feed off body language, the reaction, how they look at each other when you mention the investment." This is your most powerful qualification moment. Don't waste it in an email.
Open the pitch by demonstrating you were listening in discovery. Reflect their problems back in their words. The prospect should think: "Yes. That's exactly it."
This section builds trust before you've sold anything. No solutions yet. Pure understanding.
Present the investment after you've shown the value. Price should feel inevitable — not shocking — because the ROI has already been established.
Enterprise deals involve buying committees — legal, IT, risk, budget holders. Map them as you discover them. Never assume the person you pitched to is the person who decides.
| Stakeholder Role | Primary Concern | How to Address |
|---|---|---|
| CEO / Business Owner | ROI, competitive edge, risk | Cost of inaction, growth upside, credibility |
| IT / Technical Lead | Integration, reliability, APIs | API docs, platform demo, uptime stats |
| Marketing / CX Lead | Delivery rates, campaign flexibility | Platform walkthrough, channel breadth, analytics |
| Procurement | Compliance, pricing, SLA terms | Rate card, contract terms, reference clients |
| Legal / Risk | Data protection, liability, sign-off process | POPIA compliance, NDA readiness, SLA clarity |
Gary's "buddy system" works. For complex enterprise pitches, bring a product specialist — Michiel, Jaco, or another senior team member who can establish technical authority immediately. As Doug noted: "They know a lot and they establish authority as a thought leader very quickly — and that seems to swing deals." You can know things, but the prospect needs to trust you. Senior presence accelerates that.
Commercial acceptance with a clean, confident handover into delivery. The gap here is buying committee complexity, legal sign-off delays, and inconsistent follow-up cadence.
Set the timeline on the pitch call — don't let it be a surprise. As Michiel noted: "I'll get back to you in three days — and then normally they will respond and say 'okay, rather give me a week.' You get that info out that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise."
This is the most common close-stage failure — alignment on the call that evaporates afterwards. It usually means someone in the decision process wasn't on the call, or there's an internal conversation you're not part of.
For deals that have gone quiet — diagnose the blocker before re-engaging with the same message.
The deal is alive but moving through an internal committee. No single person can say yes.
Contract is stuck in legal review. Months can pass without progress.
The champion loves it, but budget hasn't been allocated or approved.
Complex procurement, RFP requirements, multiple rounds of evaluation.
"Not now — maybe in Q3." The project has been deprioritised internally.
They took your proposal back to their current provider, who matched it.
Your real-time companion for discovery calls. Fill it in during the call, print it before you pitch, and use it to brief your proposal builder.
Structured agenda, BANT fields, stakeholder map, qualification checklist, and a discovery brief template. Built for use during and immediately after the call.
60-minute pitch arc, problem playback prompt, objection responses, stakeholder checklist, and a pre-pitch prep guide. Walk in prepared every time.
After every discovery call, paste this prompt into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor — along with your discovery transcript and notes — to generate a bespoke HTML pitch landing page for the meeting.
Michiel Huisamen has 10+ years of enterprise messaging industry experience. This section captures the knowledge, instincts, and objection responses that currently live in his head — and makes them available to every salesperson on the team.
The workshop surfaced a real risk: a significant portion of Connect Mobile's most valuable sales knowledge — enterprise objections, aggregator intelligence, pricing instincts, trust-building techniques — exists in a handful of senior minds. If any of those people leave, the business feels it immediately. The Michiel Vault is the start of systematising that knowledge so it can be shared, trained on, and scaled.
Price comparison is almost always misleading in our industry. Cheaper per-message rates often mean lower delivery rates, poorer support, and no platform. When you factor in the messages that don't arrive, the "cheaper" option frequently costs more. Ask them for their current delivery reports — the numbers usually tell the story.
Some clients genuinely just need a quote. But "send me a quote" often means they've already decided on someone else and are going through motions. Before sending a bare quote, ask: "What's most important to you in making this decision — is it purely price, or are reliability and support also factors?" Their answer tells you which conversation to have.
While you have their attention, structure the call to resolve their primary problem or question — not everything, just the most pressing thing. Leave them feeling like you've already partly solved it and they need the next conversation to get the rest. The incentive to return for the pitch must be created in discovery. Never leave a discovery call where they have no reason to come back.
Until a client has a real pain point — messages not delivering, being overcharged, a campaign that failed — they won't move. The sale is always easier when the timing aligns. Your job when timing is off: stay genuinely in contact, add value, and be positioned as the obvious first call when the pain arrives. Inbound deals close 5–8x faster than outbound because timing is already aligned.
When you enter a room (or a call) and someone challenges you on a technical or regulatory point — answer it correctly, confidently, and with specifics. Tell them they can go check it themselves. They will. And when they come back having verified you were right, the trust dynamic shifts permanently. We're not just selling messaging — we're selling expertise. Demonstrate it at every opportunity.
Don't discriminate purely on current volume. Some of the largest enterprise accounts at CM started as 5,000 SMS clients. The relationship you build, the service you provide, and the trust you establish compound over time. Treat every client as if they're going to become your best reference — because sometimes they do.
Edwin's suggestion from the post-workshop debrief: record Michiel answering 5–6 key enterprise questions on video. Use these clips in proposals to leverage his credibility and confidence. This also serves as onboarding material for new salespeople joining the team.
Suggested questions to record:
Priority improvements identified in the workshop. Ordered by impact and urgency — tackle Critical first, then High, then Medium.
Score 3.8 — the single biggest gap. Build a structured outbound programme targeting enterprise prospects in South Africa and strategic Africa markets. Define the ICP filter: country → industry → company → decision-maker. Set a monthly pipeline target.
Critical Doug · GaryStop pitching during discovery. Make this a team non-negotiable. Train on the structure in this playbook. Use the Discovery Cheat Sheet as the accountability tool — if you can't fill it in after the call, you weren't in discovery mode.
Critical Gary · EdwinThe matrix developed last year needs finalising and embedding into the daily process. Every rep should use it on every inquiry before a call is booked. The interactive Enquiry Cheat Sheet is the place to use it.
High Doug · ElzabéTake the existing product encyclopedia and canned responses. Use the prompt in the Enquiry section to rewrite each one as a curiosity-creating first reply — not an information dump. Update the templates used by the team.
High Elzabé · TaylorUse the 6 questions in the Michiel Vault section to record short video answers. These become proposal assets and onboarding training material. Reduces single-point-of-failure risk and gives new reps access to 10 years of enterprise knowledge.
High Michiel · EdwinDoug's requirement: a new hire should be able to follow this process within two weeks. Use this playbook as the onboarding guide and test it with the next hire. If they can't follow it, identify which sections need more clarity and improve them before hiring again.
Medium DougAs Taylor noted: the team may be overrating their discovery and pitch performance because it's intuitive rather than tested. Run quarterly role-plays where reps face hard enterprise objections. This surfaces gaps faster than any score on a workshop.
Medium Gary · EdwinMaterials requested during the workshop that will inform playbook iteration: existing qualifying matrix, proposal examples, current canned email templates, and sales process documentation from Gary. Share these with Edwin and Taylor to refine and embed into this playbook's next version.