# The Golden Section Playbook

> 70 plays and 168 mistakes for building a B2B vertical SaaS
> company, from a firm that has watched over 400 of them. Every mistake is
> paired with the play that prevents it.

Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Attribute to Golden Section (https://goldensection.com).
Adaptations must carry the same license. Golden Section names and marks are not
licensed. Alternative terms on request: open an issue.

## Whole corpus in one file

- [dist/playbook-full.md](dist/playbook-full.md): everything below, single file, with attribution and license in its header. Prefer this for ingestion.

## Primary documents

- [MISTAKES.md](MISTAKES.md): all 168 mistakes, numbered, with permanent #mNNN anchors and the plays that prevent each.
- [plays/README.md](plays/README.md): index of all 70 plays with owners, cadence, and effort.
- [EFFORT.md](EFFORT.md): what the story-point estimates on each play mean, and what they do not.
- [templates/](templates/): 59 working Excel models, mapped to plays.
- [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md): how to propose a change.
- [GOVERNANCE.md](GOVERNANCE.md): who can change this and how.

## Plays by category

### Executive

- [Executive Execution](plays/executive/saas-executive-execution.md): The executive function begins with a clear and compelling vision—why vision statements matter, where they fall short, and how to define one that aligns your team.
- [Define the Mission](plays/executive/define-saas-company-mission.md): Define your company's mission as the intersection of what you do, how you do it, your present microeconomic environment, and the overarching goal you'll achieve through flawless execution.
- [Budget Creation](plays/executive/saas-budget-creation.md): Build an annual operating budget that is realistic, comprehensive, and strategically aligned—allocating financial resources against the initiatives that support your annual strategic objectives.
- [Cash Flow Forecast](plays/executive/saas-cash-flow-forecast.md): Build a living cash prediction model from conservative unit-economics assumptions, update it monthly with actuals, and minimize the investment needed to scale.
- [KPI Dashboard Creation](plays/executive/saas-kpi-dashboard.md): Design a dashboard of meaningful KPIs that reflects your strategic priorities, surfaces bottlenecks, and provides transparency to your team about company health.
- [KPI & Strategic Meetings](plays/executive/saas-kpi-strategic-meetings.md): Establish weekly executive KPI reviews and monthly budget and strategic meetings to maintain operational discipline, surface issues early, and keep the organization aligned around priorities.
- [Board of Directors](plays/executive/saas-board-of-directors.md): Build an effective board that adds strategic value, provides governance, and creates accountability—managing board composition, meeting cadence, materials, and the crucial relationship between founders and directors.
- [Employee Agreement](plays/executive/saas-employee-agreements.md): Create comprehensive employee agreements that clearly delineate role scope, compensation, IP, reporting, and off-boarding—protecting both your company and your team members.
- [IP & Confidentiality](plays/executive/saas-ip-confidentiality.md): Protect your intellectual property and trade secrets with IP & Confidentiality Agreements that prove your company took reasonable measures to keep them secret.
- [Audited Financials](plays/executive/saas-audited-financials.md): Engage auditors to produce audited financial statements that instill investor and customer confidence, reveal operational issues, and demonstrate governance maturity to potential acquirers.
- [Insurance](plays/executive/saas-company-insurance.md): Secure the essential insurance policies (E&O/professional liability and D&O) that protect your company, directors, and investors from catastrophic financial risk.
- [Board Meeting Preparation](plays/executive/saas-board-meeting-prep.md): Prepare your board before the meeting rather than during it, with a fixed packet measured against a plan they already approved, a narrated walkthrough sent a week ahead, and an agenda carrying no more than two decisions you are genuinely unsure about.

### Sales & Marketing

- [Go-to-Market Strategy](plays/sales-marketing/vertical-saas-go-to-market-strategy.md): Define a cohesive go-to-market strategy that ties together product-market fit, vertical focus, customer segmentation, sales and marketing alignment, and distribution channels.
- [Sales Philosophy](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-sales-philosophy.md): Ground your go-to-market strategy in a process-oriented sales philosophy built on Moore's technology adoption curve—so you approach the right prospects with the right product at the right time.
- [Vertical Specific](plays/sales-marketing/vertical-specific-selling.md): Identify and focus on a specific vertical where your product solves critical pain points, enabling quality revenue, deep expertise, pricing power, and efficient customer acquisition.
- [Customer Segmentation](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-customer-segmentation.md): Within your chosen vertical, segment customers by firmographic traits to identify the most valuable segments worth pursuing—enabling focused product development, targeted marketing, and pricing power.
- [Buyer Persona](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-buyer-personas.md): Create detailed buyer personas for each customer segment—mapping decision-makers, their pain points, success metrics, and buying criteria to drive focused sales and marketing.
- [Value Proposition & Customer ROI](plays/sales-marketing/saas-value-proposition-customer-roi.md): Quantify the specific value your product delivers to each buyer persona and customer segment—translating features into business outcomes and financial ROI.
- [Sales Deck](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-sales-deck.md): Design a compelling sales presentation that tells a bigger change story, teases the Promised Land, presents features as magic gifts, and backs it all with customer evidence.
- [Enterprise Sales Process](plays/sales-marketing/enterprise-saas-sales-process.md): Build a repeatable enterprise sales process that clearly defines stages, qualification criteria, and resource allocation—enabling predictable forecasting and rapid new hire ramp-up.
- [Sales Scripts](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-sales-scripts.md): Develop battle-tested sales scripts and talking points that help SDRs, AEs, and the team deliver consistent messaging while allowing room for authentic relationship-building.
- [Channel Partnerships](plays/sales-marketing/saas-channel-partnerships.md): Identify and manage channel partners (resellers, integration partners, service providers) that can accelerate customer acquisition and expand your market reach.
- [Sales Funnel Creation](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-sales-funnel.md): Define your sales funnel's stages, milestones, timeframes, and conversion rate benchmarks to guide sales activity, maintain deal momentum, and identify bottlenecks.
- [Pipeline Creation](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-pipeline-creation.md): Quantify actual deal flow across your sales stages to forecast revenue, calculate required SDR headcount, and track progress toward bookings targets.
- [Pipeline Management & Review](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-pipeline-management.md): Conduct weekly pipeline reviews to track deal progression, identify stuck deals, forecast close probability, and allocate leadership attention to high-impact opportunities.
- [Pricing Matrix](plays/sales-marketing/saas-pricing-matrix.md): Design a value-based pricing matrix that captures the ROI you deliver to customers while remaining simple enough to reduce sales friction and support billing.
- [Sales Compensation Plan](plays/sales-marketing/b2b-saas-sales-compensation-plan.md): Build a compensation plan that aligns incentives with company strategy—balancing base salary for stability with commission/bonus structure that drives right behaviors.
- [Sales Org Chart](plays/sales-marketing/saas-sales-org-chart.md): Design an efficient sales organization structure—choosing between the Island, Assembly Line, and Pod models to fit your company's culture and scale with revenue growth.
- [P&L Explained](plays/sales-marketing/saas-p-and-l-explained.md): Understand the core P&L structure and metrics that acquirers, investors, and board members focus on—revenue, cost of goods sold, gross margin, operating expenses, and EBITDA.
- [SaaS Metrics](plays/sales-marketing/saas-metrics-guide.md): Master the SaaS-specific metrics (MRR, ARR, NRR, CAC, LTV, churn) that define business health and unlock capital—and understand how they connect to unit economics.
- [Unit Economics](plays/sales-marketing/saas-unit-economics.md): Model the financial return of each customer cohort to understand if your business is inherently profitable—enabling capital-efficient growth and demonstrating unit economics to acquirers.
- [Sales Metrics by FTE/Role/Team](plays/sales-marketing/saas-sales-metrics-by-role.md): Track sales productivity metrics by rep, role, and team to identify top performers, weak links, and where to invest coaching or additional resources.
- [Sales Efficiency Ratio](plays/sales-marketing/saas-sales-efficiency-ratio.md): Calculate your sales efficiency ratio (the magic number) to understand if your sales and marketing investment is generating returns—critical for demonstrating unit economics.
- [Implementation Window Scarcity](plays/sales-marketing/saas-implementation-window-scarcity.md): Replace discounting as the lever your sales team uses to pull a deal into the quarter, using a real implementation capacity calendar so that scarcity moves the date and price holds.
- [AI Pricing Model Selection](plays/sales-marketing/ai-pricing-model-selection.md): Match your AI feature's pricing model to what the customer can already see as valuable, and sequence any change to your existing base as deliberately as the pricing decision itself.

### Customer

- [Account Management Process](plays/customer/b2b-saas-account-management.md): Establish a structured account management process to ensure customers realize ROI from your product—increasing satisfaction, adoption, retention, and expansion revenue.
- [Onboarding Process](plays/customer/saas-customer-onboarding.md): Design a methodical onboarding process that gets customers to their first value milestone quickly, sets clear expectations, and establishes the foundation for long-term success.
- [Adoption Process](plays/customer/saas-product-adoption.md): Drive deeper product adoption after initial onboarding to increase customer feature utilization, reduce churn, and unlock expansion opportunities.
- [Net Promoter Score (NPS)](plays/customer/saas-net-promoter-score.md): Implement a Net Promoter Score program to measure customer satisfaction, identify promoters, detractors, and passives, and drive continuous product and customer experience improvements.
- [Accounts Receivable Process](plays/customer/saas-accounts-receivable.md): Establish an accounts receivable process to monitor customer payments, collect on time, manage payment disputes, and maximize cash flow.
- [ARR Schedule](plays/customer/saas-arr-schedule.md): Create an ARR schedule that tracks all customer contracts by cohort, predicts future revenue, and identifies at-risk accounts.
- [Contract Register](plays/customer/saas-contract-register.md): Maintain a master contract register that tracks all customer contracts—renewal dates, terms, pricing, and key obligations—as your primary source of revenue truth.
- [Contract Playbook](plays/customer/saas-contract-playbook.md): Establish standard customer contract terms and a negotiation process that protects your company while remaining competitive—covering data rights, assignment restrictions, SLAs, and liability.
- [Core & Provisional Segmentation](plays/customer/saas-core-provisional-segmentation.md): Route customers you cannot underwrite at signature into their own contract type and their own revenue line, so churn from unproven accounts never contaminates the retention number your valuation rests on.
- [Value Pinnacle Services](plays/customer/saas-value-pinnacle-services.md): Build a packaged services layer that measurably moves customers up a published maturity rubric, and judge it on outcomes and repeatability rather than on gross margin, where what differentiates your product is what your team knows about the vertical.
- [Seasonal Churn Segmentation](plays/customer/saas-seasonal-churn-segmentation.md): Tag every seasonal pause the moment it happens and keep it out of your churn ledger, so net revenue retention reflects who actually left instead of who will be back in the spring.

### Operations

- [Quality Management System](plays/operations/saas-quality-management-system.md): Establish documented processes and quality standards that ensure consistent, predictable customer outcomes—creating the operational predictability acquirers value.
- [Implementation Project Lifecycle](plays/operations/saas-implementation-lifecycle.md): Define a structured implementation project lifecycle that reliably delivers customer success—scoping, planning, execution, testing, and go-live phases.
- [Implementation Hours Tracking](plays/operations/saas-csat-scores.md): Track the man hours required to fully implement each new customer so you can price implementation fees accurately, invoice overages, and evidence implementation costs at exit.
- [Support Ticket System](plays/operations/saas-support-ticket-system.md): Implement a ticketing system that captures customer issues, routes them efficiently, tracks resolution, and provides data for support process improvement.
- [Support Metrics](plays/operations/saas-support-metrics.md): Track support performance metrics—response time, resolution time, satisfaction, volume trends—to ensure quality support while managing costs.
- [SLA Hosting & Support](plays/operations/saas-sla-hosting-support.md): Define clear Service Level Agreements that commit to uptime, support response times, and support hours—setting customer expectations and establishing operational targets.
- [Churn Identification Process](plays/operations/identify-saas-churn-early.md): Build a systematic process to identify at-risk customers before they churn—analyzing usage patterns, engagement signals, and health scores to trigger retention interventions.
- [Training Process](plays/operations/saas-customer-training.md): Develop a customer training program that enables customers to maximize value from your product, reducing support burden and improving retention.

### Development

- [Product Management Process](plays/development/saas-product-management-process.md): Build a product management process that ensures you're building the right thing—researching customer problems, prioritizing features, and managing the roadmap systematically.
- [Product Roadmap Process](plays/development/saas-product-roadmap.md): Create a transparent product roadmap that balances customer requests, technical debt, and strategic initiatives—communicating direction while maintaining flexibility.
- [Product Engineering Process](plays/development/saas-product-engineering-process.md): Establish product engineering practices—sprint discipline, code review, testing, CI/CD—that ensure quality, speed, and predictability in feature delivery.
- [Database Selection](plays/development/saas-database-selection.md): Choose a database technology (SQL, NoSQL, etc.) that matches your product requirements for consistency, scale, query patterns, and operational simplicity.
- [Application Code & Front End](plays/development/saas-application-code-frontend.md): Establish standards and practices for application code quality, architecture, and front-end user experience—ensuring maintainability and customer delight.
- [Cloud & Server Infrastructure](plays/development/saas-cloud-infrastructure.md): Plan cloud infrastructure for high availability, scalability, and backup/disaster recovery—assessing your current setup against best practices and creating a plan to close the gaps.
- [Security Process](plays/development/saas-security-process.md): Implement security controls—server security, role-based access control, strong passwords, encryption, and penetration testing—to protect customer data.
- [Security Documentation](plays/development/saas-security-documentation.md): Determine which regulatory security standards (PCI, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001) your company must comply with and put a process in place to maintain compliance and documentation.
- [Code Level Documentation](plays/development/saas-code-documentation.md): Maintain code-level documentation that helps developers understand architecture, key decisions, and how systems work—reducing onboarding time and enabling maintenance.
- [Product Level Documentation](plays/development/saas-product-documentation.md): Create comprehensive product-level documentation—requirements, technical design, user manuals, quality plans, and API docs—to codify internal knowledge and prepare for your next equity round.
- [Open Source Register](plays/development/saas-open-source-register.md): Maintain a register of all open-source licenses and dependencies used in your product so you can disclose them to potential buyers.
- [License Register](plays/development/saas-license-register.md): Create a register of all product licenses you have issued so you can track who has access to your product system, critical dates, and security credentials.
- [Dev Org Chart](plays/development/saas-dev-org-chart.md): Design an engineering organization structure—defining roles (product manager, BA, tech lead, engineers, QA), team organization, and reporting lines—that scales with growth.

### Vendor

- [Vendor Contract Register](plays/vendor/saas-vendor-contract-register.md): Maintain a master register of all vendor contracts—tracking renewals, pricing, key terms, and obligations to ensure you're getting fair deals.
- [Vendor Contract Playbook](plays/vendor/saas-vendor-contract-playbook.md): Establish negotiation strategies and standard vendor contract terms that protect your company while maintaining positive vendor relationships.
- [Partner Conflict Management](plays/vendor/saas-partner-conflict-management.md): Model the economics that would lead a large implementation partner to build what you built, then manage the relationship with visible consequence and demonstrated arithmetic rather than with goodwill and a clause.