sales converts qualified demand into committed customers. Ask it to build a pipeline forecast and it checks your win rate before it multiplies your pipeline by a fixed number; ask it to run a discovery call, write a proposal, or design your CRM stages and it writes the real artifact, not a script; ask whether you even need an assisted sales motion yet and it answers honestly — often "not yet," naming which of four disagreeing gates would actually decide it. Account selection, cold outbound, discovery calls, demos, objections, proposals and negotiation, CRM structure, forecasting, win/loss learning, and the expansion close — 15 references and two self-testing calculators behind one router. What makes it different: it asks the question the best-known guide in this field never asks. Every stage-conversion number, win rate, and named methodology carries its source, or it doesn't ship.
runs onClaude CodeCodexCursorAntigravityopencodeGrok BuildHermes
when-sales-applies.mdsurface-founder-led-solo.md
2 of 15 loaded · read fully
The gate runs before the apparatus. Outbound infrastructure, a CRM, or a forecast requested before the gate is answered gets the gate first — and a named practitioner test for whichever actually binds, never a silently assumed one.
The gate, then the router. There is no fixed lead-to-close pipeline to run start-to-finish — each job stands alone and enters where your request is, after the gate clears. The animation traces one path (the gate, then the forecasting-honesty check on a coverage ratio); the sections below map the whole surface it routes across.
Win business, and know whether you're actually winning it. sales owns the buying
conversation and the deal system — account selection and qualification, cold outbound, discovery
calls, demos, objection handling and enablement, proposal and pricing presentation and
negotiation, CRM structure and pipeline hygiene, forecasting, win/loss learning, and the
expansion-sale close — and it owns the epistemics that come with them: which forecast signals can
be trusted, and which cannot. sales writes gates, playbooks, policies, pipeline
structures, and forecasts. It writes no production code, and no figure it cannot source.
everything between "will this deal close" and "what can we actually prove about that"
the "Not this skill" table — six asks this skill declines by design
The default reader is a founder selling their own product, not an AE carrying a quota. So the front door is a gate, not a playbook — because no source in this field settles when an assisted motion becomes worth running. Named methodologies (MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, SPIN, Challenger, Sandler) are cited and taught by their evidence, never reproduced — practitioner opinion on each is split, and this pack claims no consensus in either direction.
Before a single outbound sequence, CRM stage, or forecast gets written, this pack asks whether an assisted sales motion is worth running at all. No canonical source resolves that question — instead, four serious, independently arrived-at practitioner positions answer it with four incompatible gates, and the disagreement itself is the finding: a pack that adopts only one will misfire for a reader whose situation fits a different one.
| gate type | who | the rule |
|---|---|---|
| Stage gate (count + ARR) | Jason Lemkin | The founder closes the first 10–20 customers personally; the transition to a sales team happens around ~$1M ARR, and the rule is hire two reps, not one, before any head of sales. |
| Price-tier gate | Christoph Janz | Elephants ($100k+ ARPA), deer ($10k+), rabbits ($1k+), mice ($100+), flies ($10+) — the tier decides whether human sales is viable at all; cold calling "usually doesn't work" at the rabbit tier. |
| Purchasing-friction gate | Patrick McKenzie | The gate is billing approval, not deal size — pricing a plan between $250 and $499/mo specifically to stay under a corporate-card or PO-approval threshold that would otherwise force a sales motion. |
| Founder-effort gate | Paul Graham | Not about motion existence at all — founders must recruit and serve users by hand regardless of channel, whichever gate above applies. |
Each job is one reference, read fully only when its route is selected. Forecasting honesty is the centerpiece because it is the file every coverage ratio, every board update, and every "why did we lose that deal" conversation eventually has to answer to. This is the whole buying-to-close surface, not a headline slice.
| I need to… | Read | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Decide whether an assisted sales motion applies yet, and which gate governs | when-sales-applies.md |
The Existence Gate. Four incompatible practitioner gates taught as disagreement, the gate eroding from below, the complexity-moat pressure with its own stated breaking condition, and the PLG usage-threshold boundary |
| Select or prioritize accounts, or set up a qualification framework | icp-and-qualification.md |
ICP inherited from marketing, never redefined; frameworks (MEDDIC/MEDDPICC/BANT) vs. methods (SPIN/Challenger/Sandler) disambiguated; the current MEDDPICC trademark and litigation status |
| Design or run cold outbound, or set an AI-outbound policy | outbound-and-prospecting.md |
Cold outbound owned per marketing's own unhedged handoff to sales; deliverability cited, never restated; the disclose-at-first-contact rule; the false-engagement-signal category rule |
| Run or structure a discovery call | discovery-calls.md |
The rapport-evidence-vs-named-method gap: real evidence that question-asking builds liking in ordinary conversation; no published evidence any branded methodology improves win rate |
| Build or run a product demo | demo-and-narrative.md |
Thin evidence stated honestly — no benchmark figure ships without a source; the demo taught as the answer to discovery, not a fixed script |
| Build a battlecard or objection library | objections-and-enablement.md |
Sales enablement owned per marketing's own handoff; battlecard discipline fed by win/loss learning; no evidence any objection framework changes outcomes, stated plainly |
| Present pricing, write a proposal, or negotiate | proposals-pricing-and-negotiation.md |
Pricing presentation, not design; anchor-first taught as a live disagreement with sources on both sides; discounting discipline; the expansion-sale close as a live-deal negotiation against an existing relationship |
| Design CRM stages or audit deal-pipeline hygiene | crm-and-pipeline.md |
The stage/exit-criteria gap — a real process artifact the open CRM tool landscape can't express; CRM structure (sales) vs. sync mechanics (automation) |
| Build or audit a pipeline forecast ⭐ | forecasting-honesty.md |
Centerpiece. Assumption-disclosure is prior art, taught with credit; the four-leg no-accuracy-measurement finding; coverage as a tautology (1/win-rate); the small-numbers gate; the predict-then-score loop that works at n=1 |
| Run or design a win/loss program | win-loss-learning.md |
Nisbett & Wilson (1977)'s validity boundary on stated reasons; the predict-then-score corrective; no authoritative owner anywhere in the field |
Full router table & invariants: SKILL.md.
At most one base surface reshapes every job for how the business is actually run — the same
discovery-call job resolves differently for a founder taking their own calls than for a
buying-committee negotiation. The agentic overlay is additive — it stacks on top of
whichever base you picked, never replaces it — and carries the violet identity throughout this
page, the same convention automation, operate, quality,
data, marketing, growth, and success use for
their own additive overlays.
Ask an agent to build a forecast and it either ships a single defended-sounding number, or a fixed multiple with no derivation behind it. This pack checks first: forecast method is published everywhere — a well-built forecasting pack already ships "name your assumptions or the forecast is theatre," and this pack credits it rather than claiming that idea as its own. Forecast accuracy is published by no one — not a single vendor, analyst, or academic source in this field discloses whether its own stage-weighted probability was ever checked against what actually happened.
Two peer-reviewed studies frame why:
forecasts used as targets get gamed toward the target — sandbagging is documented, not
folklore (Lawrence, Goodwin, O'Connor & Önkal, 2006) — and a 120-forecaster survey found
only 52.8% ever check whether their own judgmental adjustments improved accuracy, with 25%
using no error measure at all (Fildes & Goodwin, 2007). See
forecasting-honesty.md §2–3 for the full citation trail.
What transfers from the best-built forecasting guidance, at no cost: naming the conversion rate, the data window, and the weighting choice behind any number — none of it requires pretending the resulting forecast was ever measured against an outcome.
Sales advice is not scarce — it's confident. Real playbooks cover real pieces of the buying conversation; almost none of them cite a source for the numbers they repeat, and the largest one in this field runs an unlinked stage-conversion table as executable code with its entire provenance in one unsourced sentence. What doesn't exist anywhere else is a pack that puts the whole buying-conversation surface and the honesty layer underneath it in the same repo, and grades every figure it leans on instead of repeating it because it sounds authoritative.
The largest open sales guide found in this research (11,105 lines) cites zero permalinks to any figure it repeats. Several other packs ship win/loss content, forecasting scripts, or objection libraries by name, at single- to low-double-digit installs, none citing a primary source for the practices they teach.
Sales canon repeats a small set of numbers no primary source actually supports. This pack traced each one back and built a rule against shipping it again.
These govern every route, whichever references it loads.
Gates, playbooks, policies, pipeline structures, forecasts, and handoffs are delivered as documents. None is delivered as production code. A sales artifact is incomplete unless it carries the gate verdict (or a statement that a sales motion already applies), every figure with its source and evidence grade, the boundary naming which sibling owns the adjacent half, and what the artifact cannot support.
Computes coverage as 1/win-rate and refuses output without the reader's own win rate and denominator statement — never a borrowed "3x."
A predict-then-score log scorer that refuses a calibration verdict below an honest sample size — the small-numbers gate, enforced in code.
The predict-then-score template with example rows — log a reason before the outcome is known, then check it against what actually happened.
An audit sheet for per-stage exit criteria and negative disqualifiers — the only non-runnable asset, deliberately, since a stage list's own logic needs a human read.
27 activation + 10 traversal + 6 output + 3 compression-ablation cases: does the router reach the smallest sufficient reference set, and does a never-ship figure ever resurface, even inside a correction of it.
sales operates independently when invoked alone, and uses compatible upstream artifacts without
silently overriding them. handoff.md maps every boundary between this pack and the
rest of the family from sales's side — including three rows siblings pre-drew for sales before
this pack shipped, mirrored back exactly rather than re-hedged.
gate_verdict: <applies / lighter-weight / not-yet> job_and_surface: <which one, and any surface assumed> claims: [claim, named proof source, evidence tier] boundary: <sibling pack + filename owning the adjacent half> cannot_support: <what the artifact does not prove>
Pipeline and close-rate signal that feeds positioning and message iteration. Sales consumes qualified demand — a defined fit-plus-intent signal on a named account — and the assets sales pulls from. Sales does not create demand or own the ICP definition; it inherits marketing's ICP-as-a-funnel model, stated exactly as marketing itself states it.
Pipeline and qualification signal shaping which stage of a sales-assisted funnel is worth testing. Sales consumes an experiment readout on a funnel stage; cold outbound, CRM stages, and deal mechanics stay sales's regardless of which funnel stage an experiment touches.
Sales hands success the expansion sale, closed in a sales-assisted motion. Sales consumes the renewal workflow up to a complex deal needing negotiation. Not settled: success's own position holds a CSM renews by default and only genuinely complex renewals route out — sales does not rule on which position is right, and states both sides intact.
A worked example, not a ruling. One public enterprise handbook shows a CSM introduced during the technical-evaluation stage and full ownership transferring at closed-won, with formality scaling by deal size — but its own text states the sales and success roles run parallel, not sequential, and the company is one enterprise, high-ACV instance. It corroborates the contested split above; it does not settle it. product and automation each already give up related work to sales in their own text, without a matching row here yet — a gap this pack notes rather than fills on their behalf.
The rest of the family — each an independently installable pack with its own guide:
Install once. It's a plain SKILL.md router — no flags, no config, no fixed
pipeline — so it activates on natural-language phrasing ("do we need an assisted sales motion
yet," "audit our forecast before we present it," "draft our AI-outbound disclosure policy") rather
than a fixed command.
The same install runs on any Agent Skills
host. Codex triggers with $sales; manual copy into any client's skills directory also
works.
More detail: SKILL.md · SOURCES.md — source attribution, licensing rule, and the numbers this pack refuses to ship.