Manuel Hartmann

Founder & CEO@SalesPlaybook | Build & scale B2B sales without trial & error

Transforming B2B SaaS Sales in the DACH Region

With over 5 years of experience, I built SalesPlaybook from CHF0 to 30k MRR in under 18 months and scaled it to a 7-figure annual revenue with fewer than 6 FTEs. I’ve supported 300+ B2B SaaS and Professional Service Entrepreneurs to:
- Achieve EUR 0-10 Mio. ARR in under 3 years profitably
- Accelerate ARR growth by over 5x from 0-1 Mio. in less than 18 months
- Close 10-50x larger deals through Message-Market-Fit & Value Selling
- Implement & optimize HubSpot Sales Hub & Outbound Sales from scratch

Career Highlights:
- 2009: Launched sales career with 3-figure NPO donations
- 2012: Reached 6-figure sales with sportscars@Tesla
- 2014-2016: Led 7-figure CRM transformations@Accenture
- 2017-2019: Managed 5-figure AI SaaS@Onedot
- Present: Driving 5-figure deals@SalesPlaybook

What I Offer:
- Pipeline Generation: Developing and executing strategies to build robust sales pipelines.
- Sales Enablement: Equipping sales teams with the tools and training needed for success.
- HubSpot Services: Comprehensive implementation and optimization of HubSpot CRM

Personal Interests: 
- I’m an avid UFC fan, active (kick)boxer, snowboarder, and musician (piano + e-guitar). 
- I enjoy taking on challenges like writing a book in under 30 days or completing 1,000 push-ups

Education: Master’s Degree in Business Innovation from HSG with MBA Exchange in Canada

Let’s connect if: 
- You're a B2B entrepreneur looking to scale sales quickly, efficiently & without 6-figure mistakes
- You identify as a Top 1% talent on hunger & drive, urgent curiosity, intelligence & integrity

Founder & CEO

Join 220+ customers to build & scale sales with the #1 B2B SaaS Startup Sales Journey Partner in DACH.

All the expert sales help you need to fast forward your B2B SaaS Startup.

👉 Book a 1:1 Sales Assessment Call: https://thesalesplaybook.com/bookacall
👉 Get proven hands-on sales resources: https://thesalesplaybook.com/resources
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Track Record:
❖ 0-2M booked ARR in <15 months by finding message-market-fit in <9 months (boostbar)
❖ 0-7 figure ARR in <12 months by hitting message-market fit, setting up outbound sales engine & more (Kyan Health)
❖ 0-7 figure ARR in <18 months by hitting message-market-fit, building outbound sales & training first sales hires (Archlet)
❖ >10 projects to 50+ subscriptions to exit after building outbound sales from 0 (Airica)
❖ 0-2M+ ARR in <18 months by building a sales team from scratch (rready)
❖ 5x MRR by building scalable sales & hiring first sales rep (Turbit)
❖ Ramp 5 SDRs to quota in less than 3 months (Beekeeper)
❖ 4x annual revenue after closing 700k deal with Fortune 500 company by leveraging value-selling (novoMOF)
❖ 2x MRR in 6 months by niching down on Ideal Customer Profile (Houston & Ko)
❖ 370k+ deal closed through hands-on support, approaching 7-figure revenue (56k.Cloud)
❖ 2x ARR in 9 months by 10x'ing ACV by 10x, winning 100K+ deals & hitting 90% reply rates (Classtime)
❖ 2x MRR in 3 months, from 5-10k deals to EUR 150k contract, hitting 30% booking rates (wowflow)
❖ 2x MRR in 6 months from group coaching sessions & more (Houston & Ko)
❖ 250k ARR deal closed by changing their positioning & negotiation approach (Linimex)
❖ <5% to 80% opening and 30%+ reply rates on scalable outbound sales (TRESIO)
❖ 2x MRR in 6 months by niching down on Ideal Customer Profile (Houston & Ko)

Holistic Go-To-Market & AI for B2B / 12 domains / €2M up to €1B+ / 14 int. known experts.

As a Chief Revenue Officer, I operated 20+ B2B AI, SaaS and traditional companies in more than 15 industries. I've felt firsthand how building modern, leading revenue systems became a very complex given. A bit like building a house. 

🤯 Everything became too complex. Every domain became a universe on its own, with all its subdomains and now even more so with AI.

🚣🏻 You don't have everything in-house. You just do what you can with what you have.

🏃🏾‍♀️ All while you're constantly trying to improve your go-to-market maturity in all these domains, relative to your current and next growth phase.

👎🏼 Agencies and freelancers have a core offering and 101 side-offerings, which are average at best.

🧩 Getting external help is also always very fragmented and very transactional in nature.

💲Everything is so solution-first, never that problem-first approach.

Based on these experiences and findings, I created The GTM Syndicate. Where I developed my vision around holistic GTM and AI - and the 3 houses narrative 🏡.

Then I brought together an international team of 20, best-in-class domain experts and their companies, across 21 domains of expertise. And created our complete mirroring offerings and holistic way of working, around GTM and AI.

Via our problem-first approach we’d love to see how we can help you as a long-term, anti-transactional, strategic knowledge and implementation partner. Whether that’s starting holistically, multi domain, or single domain - we can help you to build in-house.

Stephane Maes

What the 5 different go-to-market motions can cost vs. what you are spending on each of them right now.

Everybody's always talking about growth & measuring growth - but what about the cost?

Today I'll cover:

- $ to € normalization (Notion Capital)
- Conversion rate vs. ACV
- CaC & CTS vs GTM motions
- New ARR vs CaC
- LTV(nY) is needed
- CaC & CTS vs LTV(nY)
- Gross Retention Rate (GRR)
- Average GRR
- What a GTM motion should cost

In a world where:

- Everyone talks the same
- Sounds the same
- Talks about the same stuff...

Work with the people who know how to count & how cost is half of a modern revenue system.

How many of these folks do you hear about how it actually works, mathematically? Most people find it "boring". Admit it, you probably find that boring too.

It's where it's all about. If you get your math wrong... forget about it. If you get that math right, it's how you build a company.

Your growth is dependent on proper calculations & measurements. And you're probably calculating and measuring wrong.

Most of all, you're probably heavily overspending on your GTM motions vs. what they should cost. Which means you need to adjust your GTM motion.

I'm available as a fractional CRM and GTM advisor. Aside from us as The GTM Syndicate being happy to take a closer look at your GTM System.

WDYT? Jacco van der Kooij, 🚁Roee Hartuv, Jeremy Spijker, Douwe Wester 🟢 👉, Guillaume Jacquet, Jonathan Moss, Yasmine de Aranda, Charlie Moss, John Williams

Closing your GTM capability gaps with real operators, real context, and end-to-end orchestration / Go-To-Market & AI Partner for B2B / 20 experts / 21 domains

GTM Motion Correction

Sales. You probably think it looks something like this.

- A simple org chart.
- A funnel.
- Some targets.
- A few dashboards.

But when you zoom out, you realise something. Sales isn’t a function, it’s a system. A system made of strategy, operations, infrastructure, enablement, execution, cross-functional interplay.

All influencing each other, all compounding behind the scenes. That’s why most teams feel like they’re “doing the right things” but still missing something.

They’re optimizing pieces, not the whole. This carousel breaks down what a modern sales system actually includes and why the obvious view is rarely the real one.

When you look at your own sales org… do you see a team, or a system?

These are the elements we focus on with your team, when we onboard ourselves to create the context we need - by screening your sales engine.

Sales

The biggest issue in SaaS right now isn’t pipeline, product, or pricing. It’s competence at the top of the go-to-market engine.

Was an absolute pleasure meeting Douglas van Oijen yesterday for a first time. 

We had a high-energy, lovely exchange between 2 people passionate about GTM, about the state of the industry, when it comes to operating SaaS & AI businesses. 

I wanted to share these insights with you, because I think they're just golden & summarize everything that's wrong right now.

After years of easy growth, the market has shifted - and it’s exposing something uncomfortable…

A lot of GTM leaders were promoted during “good weather,” not because they had the operating depth to lead in a storm.

We’re seeing it everywhere:

- inflated titles with thin execution skills

- leaders fluent in playbooks but unable to fix a broken system

- teams that reforecast instead of rebuild

- companies loyal to “nice” but under-qualified managers

- budgets locked not because money isn’t there, but because CxOs, VPs & Heads of were burned before

And while the market keeps tightening, the knowledge gap keeps widening. Modern GTM now spans so many domains, subdomains and now, also AI and no single leader covers it all.

This creates a strange paradox: SaaS companies aren’t short on headcount. They’re short on people who can actually operate (knowledge).

People who’ve lived the hard years and know how to navigate complexity. Who can translate strategy into execution and can rebuild when the system underneath is failing.

2026 won’t be won by the loudest brand or the biggest team. 

It’ll be won by the companies with the fewest blind spots. The ones honest enough to admit where the gaps are and mature enough to fix them.

What do you think?

State of The SaaS & AI Industry & Operating The Business

Over the past six, seven months, I’ve been working on something that didn’t exist yet. It was just a passionate pitch to the domain experts on a new operating model for how revenue expertise should work in SaaS.

A model where domain experts & their companies don’t only operate in isolation but rather next to their business, also stand together as one unified brand.

One narrative, one long-term strategic partner for companies that need deep, cross-domain expertise & not another surface-level fix.

It took months of experimenting, dozens of prospect conversations, feedback loops, and iteration to shape it into what it is today.

And then a conversation with a top ICP stakeholder (CRO) recently only reinforced something I deeply believe - and what our pipeline and most conversations with prospects' stakeholders are also indicating: the time is right for this and the market is asking for it.

Most GTM problems today are strategic, interconnected, multi-domain and trust-based which means the deal cycles are longer. The work is simply so much deeper and the impact is so much bigger. You can’t rush that.

Very soon, companies will recognise these challenges for what they are. And they’ll start looking for real strategic partners who can fix them.

But here’s what has become clear, if we build this together, we can create an engine none of us could ever build alone.

Not through one hero (or ego), one company or through one network.

But through:

- the combined brand-equity of proven experts & their companies
- our combined network
- a shared long-term vision
- product-led content & education
- consistent thought leadership
- and a reputation for being the partner who actually does what they say.

It’s still early, painfully early.

We’re still in the “trust-building” phase with companies and we’re still laying the foundation for a motion that compounds over time.

But the fundamentals are there. The conversations with prospects are alive. The opportunities in our pipeline are maturing. The need in the market has never been clearer (yesterday's post).

This however only works if we pull together with:

- Promotion.
- Content (new podcast will soon launch).
- Our Syndicate's dealflow, next to their own deal flow.
- Shared upside
- A rising tide that lifts all of us

Because no single expert (& their company) - no matter how strong - can solve the GTM problems companies face today.

But together... 

Together we can create a category-defining engine that benefits all of us far more than what any of us could build alone.

That's why we're now working on the GTM Syndicate 2.0, where we take that to the next level. Because if we execute this properly, it's the most powerful growth engine we could ever dream of.

That’s the vision and what I'm building. This is just the beginning.

How to reactivate a deal with 3 stakeholder changes in a just a few months, by consistent follow-up and a cold call.

How much of your pipeline fell apart because a champion left for a new company? With us, this happened for about half of our pipeline deals.

This GTM planning season, so many companies are either replacing key roles. Or key people just leave for a new company.

We have this customer from heaven but a deal flow from hell.

The deal flow:

- Introduced by the founder to the CMO & interim CEO
- Want to start ("sold")
- CMO leaves, warm intro to the interim CMO (resell)
- Deal stuck with interim CMO
- Interim CMO apologized for the delays (very respectable)
- New CEO & CRO hired
- New CMO joined too
- Start from "scratch" (resell x2)

Had been chasing the new CEO and CRO for a while now - but LinkedIn messages, outbound emails - it's what it is these days. Hard to get through.

So I picked up the phone and I called the CRO a couple of times. No luck.

Yesterday I got through and I must say, a good cold call is still better than a 1000 emails, dms or whatever touch points. 

A kind of magic happened there you just can't replicate in any possible way. It's the next best thing to meeting F2F. You have direct feedback & you can have a real interactive conversation, as human beings. 

Enabling you to also briefly, really & truly connect with someone. Was it a cold/cold-call? No, there is of course the history here & context.

Yet I had to start from scratch with explaining what we do, the deal flow so far and why we're different than all others. Since as a new CRO he gets 100 messages a day now with folks asking if he needs help with GTM.

We agreed to reconnect in dec/jan when their strategy and gtm planning was finished so we could start from there.

Best of all there's another window of opportunity, where the interim CEO wasn't interested in our holistic approach and the company wanted to focus on marketing as a starting point.

Now, because of all these changes, it's like starting from a white page - with also a new opportunity to potentially support them beyond just marketing and a domain - but apply our multi-domain or holistic approach there.

The power of consistent follow-up combined with a cold call. A good outbound call is worth it's weight in gold. Yet most of you stop after a couple of tries - and never pick up the phone.

It just works. 

Do you do a lot of cold calls or calls in general to reach out to prospects?

Why do we do what we do? And how do we do it? This is the core or every narrative, at every company. It's what makes you unique and it enables you to articulate it to clients.

In a world where everything sounds the same, looks the same, acts the same & folks use the same copy/paste frameworks, how to differentiate?

I upgraded our website this weekend. Simpler. 

Gave the Homepage and How We Work a huge makeover.

- Recorded a video for the top of the homepage
- Updated the house narrative to the latest version
- Removed strips on the home page (more clarity)
- Updated some strips here and there
- Rolled out the GTM & AI Hotline as main CTA.
- Removed the "book a meeting" strips"
- From 9 ways to start to just 3

Tomorrow I'll share the video on the hero (top) of the homepage, explaining why we do what we do - and how we do it. Simple.

What do you think? Is it clear to you what we do - and how we do it?

We're here to support you during GTM planning season. All of us.

Why do we (and I) do what we do and and how do we do it precisely? A question that haunts founders, makes or breaks teams & what customers are oblivious and indifferent about - until you can make them see and care.

That's why I recorded this 15 minute video for the top-fold our website's homepage. For our website? I made this 15 minute video for you.

What more do you need at 8.30am on a Thursday during week 2 of GTM planning season (the 13th of November of all days, at least it isn't Friday) than a 15 min video explaining how we can support you? My thoughts exactly. 

We've build such a powerhouse, to help you build your house, across any part of a modern revenue system. Now it's just a matter of you experiencing it and giving it a try.

Imagine a partner like that, who really knows you, supporting you and the team. Where you can count on 20 known domain experts & their companies, each setting the tone in their domain of expertise , across 21 domains.

The right expertise for you and your team, whenever you need it. Aligned with everything we ever do for you and everything we know of you.

That's it. That's what we've build for you and why, what and how we do it.

Now you may not realize it, but that's the future of GTM advisory.

So keep this in mind during GTM planning season.  

- You know you need to upgrade your GTM maturity 
- You don't have all that knowledge in house
- The way you get help today is broken (siloed, fragmented, transactional)

GTM planning season is in full swing. What better time to talk to us and see how we can help?

Want to jump to specific parts? You can, here's how:

00:00 Introduction to GTM Syndicate
00:48 What Our Customer Experience
01:25 Challenges with Current Solutions
03:39 13 Breaking Points of GTM
03:54 We Cover All 5 GTM Motions
04:35 The House Narrative
06:15 The Holistic Approach
06:51 The Multi Or Single Approach
07:25 AI Integration in Revenue Systems
08:51 The Team
09:07 Why We're Different
10:38 How We Work
13:12 The LEGO Approach
13:37 3 Ways to Get Started
13:57 The GTM Hotline

Holistic GTM & Revenue systems, you probably think it looks something like this. While in reality, it look something like this...

I've been working on visualizing the domains we cover to show you what we look at, when we look at your revenue system.

And what to us is important in that domain of a modern revenue system.

This is what we look at if we take the Holistic GTM approach, starting with our onboarding audit.

I'm also available as a fractional CRO to take full ownership & responsibility over your revenue engine - or to help you as your sparring partner & GTM advisor.

Holistic GTM

You don’t need more leads. You need outbound systems. Most teams still think outbound is “SDRs + tools + messaging.” It’s not...

Outbound touches 13 different GTM domains, whether you like it or not.

- Finance → cost structure
- RevOps → revenue math
- ICP & Messaging → who & why
- Product → usage signals
- ABM → account selection
- GTM Architecture → motion design
- Marketing → channels
- Sales → conversion paths
- CRM → data integrity
- AI → automation layer
- N8N & Clay → workflow engine
- People → skills & capacity

… and everything in between.

Outbound isn’t a tactic, it’s a system with inputs, throughput, and outputs.

And for every GTM motion, the system changes:

PLG → low-touch, cheap acquisition, automated sequencing

Mid-market SDR/AE → hybrid workflows, semi-personalized, layered follow-up

Enterprise → multi-threaded, deep research, exec-level orchestration

Completely different:

- costs
- workflows
- economics

So the question isn’t:

“How do we get more leads?” It’s: “Which outbound system matches the economics of our GTM motion?”

If you know the answer, scaling is easy. If you don’t, outbound feels random, expensive, and slow.

We help you design, build, or rebuild any of these systems - in-house or DFY - so they actually produce pipeline, not noise.

Which outbound motion are you running today and does it (still) your system match it?

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The Battle

Manuel Hartmann

Stephane Maes

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The Battle

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