Playbooks for Sales and Marketing
Concrete agent playbooks for account research, outreach drafts, campaign analysis, and content repurposing — without spamming or making things up.
Sales and marketing teams were among the first to adopt agents, and it shows in everyone's inbox. "I noticed your company is passionate about innovation" is what agent-written outreach looks like when it's done badly: a thousand "personalized" emails with nothing personal in them, and the occasional confident detail about a prospect that turns out to be invented.
Done well, agents give you something different: more time with the right customers, better prepared. They can research an account in minutes, turn messy call notes into a crisp follow-up, read a campaign export without making you build pivot tables, and mine what customers actually say for your next piece of content. This lesson gives you four playbooks for exactly that, built on two rules: never invent anything about a real person or company, and never let volume replace relevance.
Ground rules for customer-facing work
Sales and marketing output reaches people outside your company, often people you want to impress. That raises the cost of every mistake, so set the rules before the playbooks:
| The agent can | You own |
|---|---|
| Research public information about a company, with sources | Deciding which facts are worth mentioning |
| Draft outreach, follow-ups, and content | Pressing send and publishing |
| Summarize calls, campaigns, and feedback | The conclusions and the next move |
| Suggest angles and hypotheses | Every claim made to a customer |
Three more rules apply to everything in this lesson:
- No fabrication. An agent asked to "personalize" will happily invent a detail when it can't find one. A made-up compliment about a prospect's recent launch is worse than no personalization at all.
- No spam. Commercial email is regulated in many places (for example, CAN-SPAM in the US and GDPR and related rules in the EU and UK), and many platforms, LinkedIn among them, prohibit automated scraping and messaging in their terms. Check with whoever owns compliance at your company before running any outreach program, agent-assisted or not.
- Humans send. Agents draft into a queue; a person reviews and sends. The same "propose, approve, act" pattern from the busywork lesson applies, with higher stakes.