How to build a B2B sales process that scales beyond the founder

In most early-stage Indian companies, the founder is the sales team. That works until it doesn't. The moment you want to grow faster than your own bandwidth, you need a repeatable sales process that others can execute.

Document the current process first — yours, as it actually works. What do you do from first contact to signed deal? What do you say in the first meeting? What objections come up and how do you handle them? What materials do you use? This becomes your sales playbook.

Build the playbook before you hire salespeople. A sales hire without a playbook will either imitate your style poorly, wing it, and burn through leads — or they'll build their own process that you then have to manage. Give them something to work from.

The playbook should cover: ICP (ideal customer profile — who buys from you, and why), lead sources (where your best customers come from), stages of the sales process (with entry and exit criteria for each), talk track for first calls, common objections and responses, proposal templates, and handoff to delivery.

Hire your first salesperson to work the process, not to define it. They should be able to run the playbook independently after 4 weeks of training. If they can't, the playbook needs more work.

Measure: conversion rate at each stage, average sales cycle length, average deal size, and lead source quality. These four metrics tell you where the process is breaking down.