Industry playbooks
Sales sales call playbooks
The people you dial run their own quota, their own connect-rate reports and their own coaching sessions — they have been pitched by everyone and they can hear a bad discovery question three words in. Practise here and you get a buyer who interrupts, asks what your last customer's ramp actually looked like, and tells you exactly which line lost the meeting.
Every call type for Sales
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 Sales, the people who pick up are sales leaders and revenue operators (the people who sell for a living and now buy for a living). The titles you will actually reach:
- VP of Sales
- Director of Sales Development
- Head of Revenue Operations
- SDR Manager
- Chief Revenue Officer
- Director of Sales Enablement
- Managing Partner / Founder (outsourced SDR agency)
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
Connect rates fell off a cliff and the dial math stopped working
Connects sit under 3% on cold lists. A rep burns 120 dials to have four real conversations, and two of those are 'how did you get this number.' Spam-likely flagging, carrier filtering and mobile-first prospects broke the model the team was staffed against. The leader is either buying more numbers, more data, more parallel dialers — or explaining to a client why meetings-booked is under SLA again.
Five-month ramp on a rep who might not last nine
Time-to-first-meeting is 4-6 weeks, time-to-quota is closer to five months, and roughly half wash out before they get there. Every wash-out is a burned $18-25k in salary, tooling seats and manager hours, plus a territory that goes cold. Leaders describe it as 'hiring to fill the hole the last hire left.'
Call quality is a black box — managers review a handful of calls a week
A manager with eight reps has maybe 90 minutes a week for call review. That's four calls out of the 2,000 the team made. Coaching is anecdotal and retroactive: you find out the talk track broke three weeks after it broke, usually from the pipeline number, not the recording. Nobody can answer 'is my team actually running the playbook' with anything but a feeling.
Pipeline coverage looks fine until you inspect it
3x coverage on paper, but a third of it is stage-inflated, single-threaded, or sitting on a next step of 'following up.' Forecast calls turn into archaeology. The VP is getting asked by the CEO or the board for a commit number they don't actually trust, and the deals that slip were the ones nobody pressure-tested.
Tool sprawl and dead seats
Reps are already in a dialer, the CRM, a sequencer, a data provider, an intent tool and a scheduler. Half the seats bought last year show single-digit weekly logins. Every new tool has to fight for a slot on a screen that's already full, and the leader has been personally burned by a rollout that got great pilot numbers and zero adoption by month three.
Client SLAs on meetings booked (agency-side)
For outsourced teams, the contract says a number of qualified meetings per month per client. Miss it twice and you're in a save call. The pressure runs downhill: from the client QBR to the pod lead to the SDR making dial 140 at 4:45pm. Ramp problems and connect-rate problems become churn problems on a 60-day out clause.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “I sell for a living. This pitch better be perfect or I'm clipping it and using it as a training example for my team.”
- Fair. Then judge it the way you'd judge one of your reps: did I do discovery before I pitched, did I quantify anything, did I ask for a next step. If I whiff on any of those, use the clip — you'd be right to. But that's actually the pitch: your reps get judged on those three things too and nobody's watching. Can I ask two questions and you tell me if they're the right two?
- “My reps already juggle six tools. Adoption of a seventh will be zero.”
- Then don't add a seventh — I'd rather you didn't. What does the workflow look like today between the dialer and the CRM? Because if this only works when a rep remembers to open a new tab, you're right and I'd lose the renewal in two quarters. The question I'd want answered before you buy anything is: does the rep have to change what they do, or does this run off the calls they're already making?
- “We've been pitched conversation intelligence four times. We bought one. It sat there.”
- What happened with the one you bought — did nobody listen to the recordings, or did managers listen and nothing changed after? Those are two different failures and they need two different answers. Most teams I talk to had the second one: great transcripts, great dashboards, and a manager who still didn't have three hours a week to coach off them.
- “My managers are already underwater. This becomes another thing they don't do.”
- Then measure me on their calendar, not their login. If your SDR manager still spends 90 minutes a week on call review after this is in, it failed. What's actually on that manager's week right now — how much is pipeline inspection versus one-on-ones versus covering desks?
- “Scoring calls against a playbook sounds like surveillance. My best rep goes off-script and that's why she's my best rep.”
- Agreed, and if it dings her for going off-script it's useless. The reps you want it on are the ones in month two who don't have a script to go off of yet. What's your top rep doing on discovery that the new class isn't — has anyone ever written that down, or is it in her head?
- “We have no budget until the new fiscal year. Come back in Q1.”
- Understood. What changes in Q1 that makes the ramp math better? Because if you're hiring six SDRs in January, the coaching problem gets bigger in Q1, not smaller. I'd rather scope it now and start when the money's there than have you onboarding a class blind.
- “How is this different from just listening to Gong recordings?”
- Recordings tell you what happened. The gap most teams have is that nobody has time to watch enough of them to spot the pattern, and no rep gets to try the call again before it counts. What does your team do today between 'that call went badly' and the next live dial?
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- connect rate
- pipeline coverage (3x, 4x)
- ramp / time-to-quota
- talk track
- SDR vs. BDR vs. AE
- SQL vs. SAL vs. MQL
- quota attainment (% of reps at quota, not team total)
- no-show rate / held meeting
- dials-to-connects-to-meetings
- gatekeeper and objection at the door
- commit vs. best case vs. upside
- OTE and accelerators
- sequence / cadence / touch pattern
- spam-likely flagging
- wash-out rate
- single-threaded deal
Metrics they are measured on
connect rate (% of dials reaching a live human — 2-5% cold), meetings booked per SDR per month (and held vs. booked), % of reps at or above quota, pipeline coverage ratio against the number, time-to-first-meeting and time-to-full-quota (ramp, in weeks), SDR annual attrition / 90-day wash-out rate, cost per qualified meeting, average calls reviewed per manager per week
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Sales buyer
A live AI prospect with Sales 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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