The founder-does-sales playbook, built on Claude

The problem. You’re doing sales because there’s no one else to do it, you’ve never been trained for it, and it eats time you’d rather spend building. Most sales advice assumes a team, a CRM, and a quota — none of which you have.

The play. A weekly rhythm, not a one-off script: research a short list of real prospects, draft outreach against your actual ICP.md, and follow up on what didn’t get a response — each step a small, specific Claude session rather than one giant “do my sales” prompt.

Setup (10 min). Write ICP.md if you haven’t (see what is ICP). Pick 5-10 real prospects for the week — quality over volume while you’re still calibrating.

The three-part weekly prompt:

Part 1 — Research: Here's a prospect: [name, company, whatever public info
you have]. Read ICP.md. Tell me in 2-3 lines whether this looks like a good
fit and why, and one specific, real thing about them worth referencing.

Part 2 — Outreach: Using that research, draft a first-touch email under 100
words. Specific opener, one clear ask, no template language.

Part 3 — Follow-up: It's been [X] days with no response to this email:
[paste it]. Draft a short, non-needy follow-up — add new information or a
different angle, don't just repeat the ask.

What you get. A rhythm you can actually sustain solo: qualify, reach out, follow up, without a giant time investment or the guilt-driven “I should really be doing outreach” spiral.

What to watch for.

• Compare drafts against your own gut for the first couple weeks before trusting volume — this is true of every outreach workflow, and doubly true when you have no sales background to sanity-check against.
• A follow-up that just repeats the original ask reads as needy. It should add something — a new angle, new information — or it’s better skipped.

Make it repeatable. Same list size, same day each week, and track replies by hand for a month before you consider automating any part of the send. The judgment stays yours; the drafting is what Claude buys back. See the cold-email playbook for the fuller version of the Part 2 prompt above.