B2B Sales Playbook: How We Helped a Client Build a Scalable Sales Process

When you're a fast-growing startup, scaling your sales team isn't just about hiring more reps. It's about building a repeatable, structured, and effective sales process that your team can follow confidently. That’s where a well-documented B2B sales playbook becomes essential.

At Clariant Creative, we recently partnered with a well-funded startup in the retail execution space. They had strong momentum, a great product, and ambitious growth goals.

What they didn’t have was a standardized sales process that could scale.

In this post, we’ll walk through how we helped them create a comprehensive, CRM-integrated sales playbook. We’ll also show you how you can use the same approach to document and standardize your own sales process.

The Challenge: Shifting from Founder-Led Selling to a Scalable Sales Team

Our client had been selling successfully for several months, largely driven by a small team of experienced founders and advisors. But as they prepared to expand their sales team, they realized they couldn’t rely on informal knowledge-sharing and ad hoc communication anymore.

They needed a documented, repeatable sales process — a framework their growing team could follow with confidence. Sales leadership didn’t have the bandwidth to build it from scratch; they needed a partner who could guide the process, align stakeholders, and deliver a polished, professional outcome. We were delighted to work with them to accomplish these goals.

Our Solution: Build Accurate Sales Process Documentation

At Clariant Creative, we bring both structure and strategy to every engagement. For this project, we used a three-phase approach:

Let’s explore the work we did in each of these phases.

Phase 1: Identify Goals and Align Stakeholders

We began with a structured discovery process to evaluate the client’s current sales efforts. This discovery included:

We ultimately agreed that, at a high level, their sales process would look like this:

However, our discovery also uncovered multiple friction points and inconsistencies across this process. To brainstorm solutions, we gathered the key stakeholders into a live workshop, where we meticulously broke down what needed to happen at each of these sales process stages.

For every stage, we identified specific buyer activities that would act as signals for the sales rep, along with corresponding sales rep activities and assets the sales team would need. We also clarified the goals for each stage in the process, along with clear criteria for moving the deal to the next stage.

Here’s what that workshop process looked like for the first stage in the process — Identify Opportunity:

By the end of the workshop, we had fully aligned the team around:

• Buyer and seller activities at each stage
• Clear definitions of pipeline progression
• Necessary support materials and enablement tools

 Phase 2: Visually Map the Sales Process

Once we understood what our client’s sales process needed to include, we created a flowchart to fill in the details of every step in this new sales process, from start to finish. This became the blueprint for their scalable, CRM-integrated sales system.

Key elements of our flowchart included:

We also strived to make the flowchart as complete as possible — but also easy and quick for their new sales team to grasp during training.

For example, as you can see in the chart below for the Identify Opportunity stage, orange boxes indicated when in the process the rep needs to update a HubSpot record, with explicit instructions on exactly what to do.

Phase 3: Build the Full Sales Playbook

Our final step was to consolidate all of this information into a detailed sales playbook to support their reps at every stage of the buyer journey. This wasn’t just documentation; instead, it was a full-fledged sales enablement strategy.

The playbook we built for our client needed to be relevant and highly actionable. We focused on four key sections.

1. Key Brand Elements

To make sure everyone on their sales team understood how to talk about their company, we started the playbook by spelling out the company’s ideal customer profile, target buyer personas, and approved brand messaging.

2. Sales Stage Overviews

Next, the playbook dove into the new sales process we had agreed on, with summaries of the most important drivers at each of the sales stages (which we had developed during our stakeholder workshop):

• Buyer and seller goals
• Key activities, milestones, and decision gates
• Required sales enablement assets

3. Meeting/Call Playbooks

From there, we built out detailed templates reps could use to lead the four most common meetings they would hold in this sales process:

• Connect Call: Assessing fit and generating interest
• Qualification Call: Confirming BANT criteria and advancing qualified leads
• Solution Planning Call: Aligning pain points with the company’s offering
• Proposal Presentation: Securing verbal buy-in before contract delivery

Each meeting/call playbook featured:

(Psst…these playbooks can also be built directly in HubSpot!)

4. Sales Enablement Assets Inventory

To further support the new sales team, we summarized a comprehensive list of recommended additional materials to be used at each stage of the process, including:

The Results: Structured, Scalable, Successful

The client was thrilled with their new sales process and playbook, and we were able to deliver clear outcomes:

We’ve found that growth-stage companies often delay documenting their sales process. But the sooner you define a repeatable, CRM-integrated sales playbook, the sooner you can scale your team without chaos. Even if you’re still building your team, documenting your sales playbook now will pay dividends when it’s time to grow.

At Clariant Creative, we specialize in helping companies:

• Create scalable sales processes.
• Align marketing and sales through enablement content.
• Equip teams with sales playbook templates and documentation that works.

Ready to improve your sales consistency, shorten your sales cycles, and scale with confidence? Our sales enablement services combine strategic consulting, playbook development, and conversion-ready content to help your team close deals faster. We’d love to chat with you about the growth goals you’re trying to achieve.