The Startup Sales Resource Bundle

Want everything in one place? The complete bundle is a single ZIP file of about 97 MB with 85 files, organized into three folders: Books, PDFs, and Spreadsheets and Toolkits.

Some resources were written years ago. Older books use the company’s earlier name, Close.io, and several items were created for remote selling in 2020. They are still in the bundle, and we’ve noted the dated ones above.

If you’re building a startup and responsible for revenue, you’re probably either winging sales or copying advice that worked after product-market fit and wondering why it isn’t working for you. This bundle collects the books, templates, scripts, and toolkits Close has published for exactly that situation, most of them written by Steli Efti from lessons earned building Close and coaching founders and reps.

It includes:

• 14 books on sales hiring, demos, follow-up, negotiation, outbound, cold calling, cold email, SaaS and enterprise sales, and scaling customer acquisition
• 4 long-form guides on sales pipelines, sales pitches, remote sales teams, and video sales calls
• Templates and checklists for qualifying, objections, sales strategy, call scripts, demos, call reviews, coaching, hiring, interviews, and onboarding
• Spreadsheets and toolkits, including the Ideal Customer Profile Kit, the Sales Enablement Toolkit, an Excel CRM template, and a meeting cost calculator
• Email templates for cold outreach, follow-up, CRM-ready sales emails, and referrals

Most of it is free to read or download on close.com, one item at a time. The links below go to the best open version of each resource. Anything that isn’t hosted on its own is in the complete bundle download at the end.

Who this bundle is for

• Founders doing sales themselves
• Early sales hires who want to actually perform
• Leaders tired of guessing and hoping

Across the bundle, one idea shows up again and again: sales is learnable, systematic, and measurable. If you hate sales but need to close deals, don’t know what to say on calls, or feel stuck between being nice and being effective, these resources give you language, structure, and confidence.

Three ideas from the books are a good place to start:

• Sales hiring is not about talent. The Sales Hiring Playbook shows you how to interview for evidence, not confidence, and build a repeatable hiring process before a bad hire burns months of runway.
• Your demo is about leading a decision, not showing features. Product Demos That Sell shows you how to anchor every demo to a real buying outcome and create urgency without pressure or tricks.
• Follow-up isn’t annoying. Being vague is. The Follow-Up Formula shows you how to follow up without sounding needy, get clear yes or no answers instead of endless maybes, and build a system so nothing slips through the cracks.

Ten of the books have their own free pages on close.com. The others are free downloads.

The bundle also includes four long-form guides by the Close team, each available as its own free download.

Short, practical documents you can put to work the same day. Several are now full web pages on close.com, and a few are built into the Sales Success Kit page so you can use them without downloading anything.

Bigger working files for defining your market, equipping your team, and tracking your pipeline.

• The Ideal Customer Profile Kit includes a quick start checklist, example profiles, blank templates, and question sets for industries from SaaS and financial services to real estate and ecommerce.
• The Sales Enablement Toolkit includes case study, comparison chart, sales battle card, and sales script templates with fillable fields, sequence strategy examples, cold email templates, and a comparison pricing calculator.

Copy, paste, and personalize. Most of these templates use Close template variables such as {{contact.first_name}}, which you can swap for the fields in your own tool.