Building the Playbook While Flying the Plane: A Guide for Founding AEs

Building Systems While Closing Deals

Most salespeople get access to preexisting systems that include the existing process of selling, a clear sales cycle, email campaigns, and other techniques. Founding AEs usually don't have such luxuries.

The expectation is for these individuals to create a system that others will later use when closing deals.

There is nothing in a guidebook or a book of strategies that one can copy and implement. Every step forward represents yet another attempt to build an effective system out of experience.

That is what makes founding AEs special. They are not only salespeople, but they are also builders.

Full-Cycle Mavericks understand that closing a deal isn't enough to achieve success at their companies. They have to document everything that works and turn this success into processes. In simple terms, they write a playbook by flying the plane.

Why Process Creation is Important

At the outset of the journey, time is of the essence. Resources are constrained, goals change quickly, and it is very easy to concentrate on selling and putting off the process creation for later.

However, it never happens later.

If there are no process-related systems in place, information will be trapped within the sellers. Once organizations begin growing, new sellers have no chance of reproducing successes since there is nothing to rely on.

Process creation addresses this issue.

Capturing experience and lessons learned, Full-Cycle Mavericks create an environment where the results achieved through hit-and-miss strategy become institutional knowledge.

The businesses that grow the quickest are the ones that started creating systems far before they actually needed them.

Why Early Sales Teams Operate Without Playbooks

Startups and young firms never start with mature sales operations.

The product is constantly changing. Customer personas keep getting updated. The messaging shifts. Objections get new answers. Thus, fixed systems don't typically exist.

Experimentation reigns supreme.

What used to work a year ago is obsolete. Salespeople need to be flexible as well as figure out what works. With each customer, they can perfect their messaging and positioning and understand how to overcome their objections.

Such an environment seems to be messy, but it also means there is room for improvement.

Young AEs have the opportunity to design the future of the sales operation. They don't need to rely on someone else's playbook since they're making one of their own.

This is one of the core tenets of Full-Cycle Maverick.

Documentation of What Works

Among the things that highly successful founding reps develop is a habit of documenting what works.

For starters, discovery frameworks. The questions that always work in identifying pain points should be documented. These will later form repeatable discovery frameworks for future hires to follow.

Then there are email sequences. Those messages that get replies from prospective customers should not remain within one individual's emails. By documenting those sequences, consistency in replicating success can be achieved across several sellers.

A qualification process is equally essential in ensuring the identification of quality leads, which would mean saving time on less viable leads.

Not even the objection handling process should be overlooked. The way you handle objections in order to win customers' minds is something worth documenting in order to strengthen the organization as a whole.

This is the essence of full-cycle mavericks.

Turning Individual Wins Into Team Processes

Winning on an individual level is great. Systematically winning consistently takes you much further.

Most organizations suffer because their best employees work based on their instincts, which cannot be taught easily. The minute such employees leave, all the knowledge goes out with them.

By contrast, Full-Cycle Mavericks solve this challenge through the development of team systems based on individuals' wins.

Sales meetings are turned into systems. Successful email copywriting strategies become systematized. Qualification approaches transform into systems.

This process makes everything consistent in your business.

The ramping period for new employees will be shorter because there won't be anything they need to create. Your managers will be able to coach better because everyone knows what to expect from each other.

The value of documenting successful sales practices extends far beyond preserving knowledge. Research from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) found that 77% of organizations reported faster productivity after implementing a structured sales onboarding program, highlighting how documented processes help new sellers become effective more quickly.

Why Founding AEs Become Builders

Founding AEs are not only quota-fillers.

Given the proximity of these sellers to the customer and to revenues generated, they are often privy to information that nobody else in the organization knows about. These individuals are aware of what customers think, what competitors do, and how to speak to them.

This is why founding AEs turn into builders.

Through documenting processes, they build organizational capabilities that can continue generating positive results even years later, as they facilitate onboarding for subsequent hires and empower leadership teams to scale.

There are many reasons why founding reps turn into architects of sales organizations.

Building a system is as important as building revenue.

Why Perfect Processes Are the Enemy of Progress

A common reason for putting off documentation is the perception that processes must be perfect in order to be documented.

Such an approach is unnecessarily holding companies back.

The initial sales process will always be changing. It's easy for important insights to get overlooked when striving for perfection.

Full-Cycle Mavericks recognize that even flawed documentation is better than nothing at all.

Even basic documentation, templates, call recordings, and playbooks offer incredible value. These documents can then continue to improve as the company scales up.

Perfection isn't what matters here. Progress does.

Conclusion: Build the Plane While Flying It

Founding account executives must contend with a unique situation.

They are tasked with closing business, but at the same time, laying the groundwork necessary for future sales teams to flourish. There is no predefined path because there are no systems yet.

Full-Cycle Mavericks are the type of sales professionals who meet this challenge head-on by documenting their success, developing repeatable systems out of their victories, and setting the stage for future scalable success.

The truth is that successful salespeople know that their value goes beyond securing business today.

Success lies in developing the systems that will secure future business.

Top founding AEs are the kind of individuals who don't wait around to develop a system. They fly the plane as they build it.