Industry playbooks
Manufacturing sales call playbooks
Plant leaders are judged monthly on OEE and unplanned downtime hours while capex sits locked until the next AR cycle, the maintenance team runs reactive all day, and the last shop-floor system they bought went unused inside a quarter. Practise against a buyer who tells you the floor won't use it and the money's gone until next year, and you'll stop losing deals to budget timing you could have worked around from the first call.
Every call type for Manufacturing
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Manufacturing, the people who pick up are plant and operations leaders. The titles you will actually reach:
- Plant Manager
- VP of Manufacturing / VP of Operations
- Maintenance Manager
- Reliability Engineering Manager
- Director of Continuous Improvement / Operational Excellence
- Quality Manager
- Production Supervisor (2nd shift)
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
One bad line takes the whole month down
There's always a line 3 — the oldest press or the bottleneck cell everything routes through. When it goes down unplanned for six hours, the plant manager is on a call with the customer's supplier quality guy, running Saturday overtime to catch up, and explaining to corporate why throughput missed. They can usually tell you the downtime hours by asset, but not why the failure happened — the downtime code says 'mechanical' and the tech who fixed it wrote three words on the work order.
The people who know the machines are retiring
The 30-year millwright who could hear a bearing going bad from across the aisle retires in eighteen months and there's nobody behind him. They can't hire CNC machinists or maintenance techs at the wage band corporate approved, so they're running open reqs for months, backfilling with temps, and paying 12-15% overtime. The tribal knowledge isn't documented anywhere — it's in one guy's head and a laminated sheet taped to the machine.
Escapes reaching the customer
Internal scrap they can absorb. A defect that ships is a customer complaint, a containment sort, an 8D, and possibly a controlled-shipping level 1 status that puts a third-party inspector in their plant on their dime. One escape at a tier 1 automotive customer can put a whole program at risk, and the quality manager is the one writing the corrective action at 9pm.
Capex moves at a glacial pace
Anything over the plant manager's signing authority — often $25K or $50K — goes to a corporate AR (appropriation request) with a payback calculation, and it competes with a new press and a roof. The cycle is annual, submitted in Q3 for the following year, and mid-year adds only happen if something is on fire or a customer is demanding it. Reps who don't understand this waste a quarter selling to someone who cannot buy.
Shop floor systems that nobody actually uses
They've bought an MES, a CMMS, tablets at the line, a downtime tracking tool — and half of it is shelfware because operators won't stop the machine to enter data and supervisors don't enforce it. The plant manager has been burned by a pilot that produced a dashboard nobody opened. Any new system gets judged first on 'who on my floor has to do something differently, and will they.'
Lead times and part availability sabotage the maintenance plan
Knowing a gearbox is failing doesn't help if the replacement is 22 weeks out from Germany. Spare parts inventory has been squeezed for working capital, so critical spares aren't on the shelf, and every unplanned failure turns into an expedite and an air-freight charge that hits the plant's controllable spend.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “Capex is locked for the year — come back and see me next budget cycle.”
- Fair, and I'm not going to pretend I can unlock it. Two questions: first, is this shaped like capex or can it run as a monthly opex line under your MRO or controllable spend, because that's usually a different approval path and often inside your signing authority. Second, if we're talking about next year's AR anyway, the work of building it — the downtime baseline on your worst three assets, the payback math — has to happen now or you'll be writing it from memory in August. Let me help you build the number, and if it doesn't clear your hurdle rate you throw it out.
- “The floor barely uses the systems we already have. Why would this be different?”
- That's the most honest objection I get, and it usually means the last system asked operators to enter data. Ask me who has to do something new on the floor for this to work — the answer should be nobody. If the value depends on an operator remembering to log something at shift change, you should throw us out. What I'd want to know from you is which system went unused and why, because if it was a change management failure rather than a tooling failure, we'll fail the same way and I'd rather find that out now.
- “We already have a CMMS and a PM program. We're on schedule with our PMs.”
- Good — most plants I walk aren't. But PM compliance and unplanned downtime aren't the same metric. If you're at 95% PM compliance and still eating unplanned hours on the bottleneck, that tells you the intervals are calendar-based, not condition-based — you're changing bearings that had life left and missing the ones that didn't. What's your MTBF trend on your top three assets over the last year? If it's flat or getting worse while PM compliance is high, that's the gap.
- “You're not putting anything on my network or touching my PLCs. Our IT team will never approve it.”
- Understood, and I'd be worried if you said yes fast. This doesn't touch the control layer — no PLC connection, read-only, and it can run on a separate cellular gateway that never sees your plant network. What I'd ask for is fifteen minutes with your IT/OT security person early rather than late, because if there's a blocker I want to hit it in week one, not after your team has spent two months building a business case.
- “We tried a sensor pilot two years ago. It generated a bunch of alerts nobody acted on and it quietly died.”
- What happened to the alerts — did they go to a shared inbox? That's usually the failure. An alert that isn't a work order in the CMMS with a named owner and a spare on the shelf is just noise, and maintenance learns to ignore it inside three weeks. Before we talk product, tell me what your team would actually do at 2am on second shift if they got a 'this bearing fails in nine days' notice. If there's no answer to that, we should fix that first, with or without me.
- “My maintenance team is already stretched. They're reactive all day — they don't have time for another tool.”
- That's exactly the trap. Reactive teams stay reactive because every unplanned failure eats the hours you'd need to get ahead of the next one. I'm not asking for more of their time — I'm asking whether moving four of last month's emergency callouts into planned weekend work would free enough wrench time to matter. What was your planned-versus-reactive ratio last quarter?
- “Send me some information and I'll take a look.”
- I'll send it, but a PDF isn't going to tell you anything you can use in an AR. What would be worth your time is fifteen minutes where you tell me your top three downtime assets and what a shutdown hour costs you on each — you probably have that number for the bottleneck. If the math doesn't get to a payback under eighteen months, I'll say so on that call and stop bothering you.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- OEE (availability × performance × quality — and they'll argue about how it's calculated)
- MTBF / MTTR
- PM compliance (preventive maintenance, not project management)
- CMMS / EAM
- unplanned vs. planned downtime, and downtime codes
- scrap vs. rework vs. escape
- first pass yield / FPY
- PPM (parts per million defects, not per month)
- changeover and SMED
- takt time vs. cycle time vs. lead time
- PPAP, APQP, 8D, FMEA
- run-to-failure vs. condition-based maintenance
- gemba walk / layered process audit
- AR or capital appropriation request, and hurdle rate
- controlled shipping level 1/2
- MRO spend and critical spares
- the bottleneck / constraint
- tier 1, tier 2 (position in the supply chain, not support levels)
Metrics they are measured on
OEE percentage on the constraint line (world-class is 85%; most plants live at 55-70%), Unplanned downtime hours per month, by asset, Scrap rate as a percent of production, and scrap dollars, First pass yield / rolled throughput yield, MTBF and MTTR on critical assets, On-time delivery / OTIF to customer, Customer PPM defects and number of escapes per quarter, TRIR / recordable incidents and days since last lost-time injury, Overtime as a percent of direct labor hours, Cost per unit / labor cost per piece, Percent planned vs. reactive maintenance work orders
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Manufacturing buyer
A live AI prospect with Manufacturing context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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