Adapting a US sales playbook to Spain

Start with the good news, because it is bigger than most leaders expect. The core of a mature US playbook is method, and method does not care about geography.

• Stage definitions with exit criteria. A deal moves from discovery to evaluation when a specific, observable thing has happened, not when the rep feels good. That rule works identically in Spain.
• Qualification as a discipline. MEDDICC (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion, Competition) or any similar framework forces the team to know what it does not know about a deal. The questions stay. What changes is where you find the answers, which we cover below.
• Role specialization. Separating prospecting, closing and retention (SDR, AE, CSM) is a sound division of labor. In Spain you may compress it at first, but the logic holds.
• Pipeline hygiene and forecasting. A CRM that reflects reality, weekly pipeline reviews and a forecast category per deal. Spanish buyers do not change the arithmetic of coverage ratios; they change the inputs.
• Customer success as a revenue function. Onboarding, adoption and expansion matter as much in Spain as anywhere. Arguably more, because a referenceable Spanish customer is worth more there than a logo on a slide.

What these share is that they describe how the seller works, not how the buyer behaves. That is the test. Any element of your playbook that is about your own discipline usually transfers. Any element that assumes a buyer behavior, how fast they reply, who they let into the room, how they react to a deadline, needs checking against the Spanish market before it goes into the plan.

This is the table we build with every US team at the start of the work. Copy it, add the elements specific to your motion and fill in the last column with evidence, not opinion.

Notice what the drop column has in common: every item relies on pressure. Pressure through volume, pressure through deadlines, pressure through price. The Spanish B2B buyer is not immune to urgency, but urgency has to come from their business problem, not from your calendar.

This is the single biggest difference, and the one that most US playbooks underestimate. In a US mid-market company, the budget owner is often a VP with delegated authority and a procurement process that runs in parallel. In a Spanish company of similar revenue, authority tends to sit higher and in fewer hands.

A few patterns to map before the first campaign:

• The owner or the managing director signs. In family-owned and founder-led companies, which are common across Spanish industry and services, the director general (managing director) or the owner has the last word on anything that is not routine. A department head can champion you, but rarely closes alone.
• Finance is in the room earlier. The director financiero (CFO or finance director) often acts as a decider rather than a late-stage approver, especially on recurring spend.
• Signing authority is formal. Contracts are signed by people with registered powers of representation, apoderados. Ask early who signs, not only who decides. They are not always the same person.
• Large corporates look more familiar. Spanish listed groups and multinationals' Spanish subsidiaries have procurement departments, supplier approval processes and category managers. The subsidiary may also need sign-off from a European or global headquarters, which adds a layer your US map does not show.

Our decision-maker map captures this by role, not title: who decides, who influences, who blocks and who pays, with real power and current stance for each. For a US team, the most useful exercise is to draw the map for your five best US deals and then for your first five Spanish opportunities, side by side. The differences become the local layer. For a deeper look at the Spanish buyer, read how Spanish companies buy; for the underlying model, the B2B buying center.

A US sequence assumes that a prospect who has not replied after four touches is not interested. In Spain, silence after four emails usually means the channel was wrong, not the prospect.

Cadence of contact

Contact is fewer touches, spaced more widely, and heavier on voice and meetings. A phone call to a direct line or a mobile number obtained through an introduction is normal. So is a follow-up message after a meeting on a messaging app, once the prospect has used that channel with you first. What reads as persistence in a US sequence can read as pushiness in Spain, especially from an unknown foreign vendor.

The calendar matters too. August is largely lost for new decisions in many sectors. The weeks around Easter (Semana Santa) and the period from Christmas to January 6 slow things down. Regional and local holidays differ by autonomous community. Build these into the activation plan instead of discovering them as "slipped deals".

Language and register

Sell in Spanish. English is widely used in multinationals, tech and export-oriented firms, but the decider in a mid-sized company will read your proposal, contract and invoices in Spanish, and so will their finance team. A playbook where discovery happens in English and the contract arrives in Spanish drafted by someone else creates friction at the worst moment.

Register is part of the method. Spanish business writing has become less formal, and tú is common between peers, but a first written approach to a senior executive you have not met reads better with a measured, courteous register. The rule we give reps: mirror the buyer. If they switch to tú, follow.

Spain also has co-official languages. Article 3 of the Spanish Constitution makes Castilian Spanish the official language of the State and recognizes the other Spanish languages as co-official in their autonomous communities under their statutes. In practice, Spanish works for B2B selling across the country, but marketing material and public-sector work in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, Valencia or the Balearic Islands may call for the regional language, and doing so signals respect.

In the US, a cold email from a credible company can open a door on its own. In Spain, the first meeting depends more on who introduced you than on what you wrote. The playbook has to engineer warm entry at scale, which is a different skill from writing sequences.

The main sources of warm entry, in the order we usually test them:

1. Existing customers. A Spanish customer willing to take a call from a prospect is the strongest asset you can have. Build customer references into the CSM role from day one.
2. Partners and integrators. Consultancies, system integrators and distributors that already sell to your ICP. For many US companies this is the fastest route; see distribution channels in Spain for how to choose among them.
3. Industry associations and business confederations. Sector associations and regional employer organizations run events, working groups and directories where decision-makers show up.
4. Trade fairs and sector events. Madrid and Barcelona host the large fairs; many sectors have their own specialized events. The fair is where you meet; the meeting two weeks later is where you sell.
5. Alumni and executive networks. Business school and professional networks carry real weight in introductions among senior leaders.

For each source, the playbook needs the same fields as any other action: owner, cost, KPI and date. That is what our action sheet is for. "Go to events" is not an action. "Two sector events this semester, owner the country lead, goal of eight qualified first meetings from attendee lists pre-booked by introduction" is an action.

Three elements of the US motion fail consistently in Spain. Each fails for a different reason, and it helps to know the reason, because it tells you what to replace them with.

Aggressive outbound

The legal reason comes first. Article 21 of Spain's Information Society Services Act (Ley 34/2002, LSSI) prohibits sending advertising or promotional communications by email or equivalent electronic means that the recipient has not previously requested or expressly authorized, with an exception for existing customers and products similar to what they already bought. The article's text does not exempt business recipients, which is where many US teams assume otherwise. Get Spanish legal advice on your specific outbound design before launch; we design the motion, a Spanish lawyer confirms it.

The commercial reason matters as much. In many Spanish sectors, the number of real buyers is small and they talk to each other. A reputation for spam spreads faster than a reputation for quality. Replace volume with precision: fewer accounts, a named decision-maker map per account and a warm entry per account.

Quarter-end discounting

The end-of-quarter push depends on a buyer who does not know your calendar. Spanish buyers who have dealt with US vendors know it well. Once they learn that the best price appears in the last week of March, June, September and December, they wait for it. You end up with a lumpy pipeline and a structurally lower price.

Replace it with value levers that are not headline price: phased rollout, a pilot with conversion terms agreed in advance, payment terms, additional services. And if you want a deadline, anchor it to the buyer's own calendar: their budget cycle, a regulatory date, a season. Our B2B pricing strategy guide covers discount governance in more detail.

Email-only sequences

The US SDR playbook often runs almost entirely on email and LinkedIn. In Spain, a sequence without a call and without a meeting request that makes sense to the buyer tends to die in silence. Email is the record, not the engine. The sequence that works starts with an introduction or a shared context, moves to a call, and uses email to confirm what was agreed.

MEDDICC holds in Spain, and we recommend keeping it, or whatever framework your team already uses. Changing the framework at the same time as changing market destroys comparability. What changes is the evidence that satisfies each criterion. This table is the version we use as a starting point.

The most useful discipline change is the champion test. In the US, a motivated VP can carry a deal. In a Spanish mid-sized company, a champion who cannot get you a meeting with the director general within a reasonable time is telling you something about their real power. Qualify on that.

US finance teams often model Spanish revenue with US collection assumptions. That produces an optimistic cash forecast and, sometimes, a comp plan that pays reps long before the company is paid.

Spain regulates B2B payment terms. Law 3/2004 on combating late payment in commercial transactions sets a default of thirty days from receipt of goods or services when the contract says nothing, and caps agreed payment terms at sixty calendar days. In practice, what you sign and what you collect can differ, so model your cash on your own collection data, not on the contract alone, and review the specific terms with a Spanish lawyer or tax adviser.

What the local layer should cover in procurement:

• Supplier approval. Large Spanish companies run formal supplier onboarding: company documents, tax identification, insurance, sometimes compliance questionnaires. Build it into the decision process stage, not after signature.
• Payment instruments. Bank transfer and direct debit are standard. Some large buyers pay through confirming, a supplier-finance arrangement run by their bank, or promissory notes (pagarés). Finance should know what to expect before sales promises anything.
• Invoicing. Spanish invoices have mandatory content and tax treatment that your tax adviser will specify. Getting it wrong delays payment for reasons that have nothing to do with the buyer's satisfaction.
• Public sector. Selling to Spanish public bodies follows public procurement law and tender processes. It is a separate motion, not a variant of enterprise sales.

For comp design, the practical choice is between paying commission on signature, on first invoice or on collection, or splitting it. There is no universal answer. What matters is that the rule is decided before the first Spanish deal, not negotiated after it.

A US team tends to plan Spain as a single territory with a single rep. That works for the first months. It stops working as soon as the pipeline grows, because Spain's economic geography is regional and so are its business networks.

This table is qualitative on purpose. Before choosing regions, score them with your own ICP and data. Many Spanish companies also organize their own sales by regional branches, delegaciones, and your decision-maker map should show whether the branch or the headquarters decides. The local layer is where these differences are written down once, so that every rep does not rediscover them.

The US role split is a scale design. At entry, you do not have scale. A common and sensible sequence is to start with one senior seller who can prospect through their network, run discovery and close, supported remotely by your existing SDR and CSM teams for research and onboarding. Split the roles when the volume justifies it, not before.

Three decisions deserve explicit thought:

• Hire for credibility, manage by method. The first Spanish seller needs standing with the buyer. The mistake is to hire that credibility and then exempt it from the playbook. Their deals go into the same CRM, with the same stages and the same qualification, from week one.
• Local employment is a specialist topic. Contracts, notice periods and variable pay rules in Spain differ from US at-will norms. An employment lawyer in Spain sets that framework; the playbook works inside it.
• Product-led growth needs a local layer too. PLG transfers when a single user can adopt the product without anyone's permission. It stalls when the first real purchase needs finance, IT or the managing director. Localize the product and billing (Spanish language, euro pricing, local payment methods, invoices that meet Spanish requirements) and design the hand-off from product signal to a sales conversation in Spanish.

This is the sequence we run with a US team entering Spain. Each step ends in a document leadership signs off, because a local layer that lives in one person's head leaves when that person does.

1. Inventory the US playbook. List every element: stages, qualification, cadences, roles, pricing authority, comp, procurement handling. Deliverable: the keep, adapt or drop table above, filled with your elements.
2. Map decision-makers in Spain. Interviews with the first Spanish customers and prospects, plus analysis of any lost deals. Deliverable: a decision-maker map by segment.
3. Write the local layer. Vocabulary, register, contact cadence, calendar, warm-entry sources, procurement and payment norms, regional priorities. Deliverable: the local layer document, one per segment if they differ.
4. Adapt qualification. Keep the framework and rewrite the evidence column. Deliverable: the adapted qualification table, loaded into the CRM as required fields.
5. Turn it into actions. Every activity with owner, cost, KPI and date. Deliverable: the action sheets for the first period.
6. Measure the starting point. Pipeline, stage conversion, cycle length, win rate and collection time for Spain, even if the numbers are small. Deliverable: a signed baseline. Every result afterward is read against it, not against US benchmarks.
7. Review by period. A period committee decides what continues, what changes and what stops.

A hypothetical scenario

Say a US company sells workforce scheduling software to mid-sized manufacturers and has three Spanish customers that found it on their own. The US playbook would call for an SDR team running email sequences to plant managers. The local layer would likely show that the plant manager is a user and influencer, while the managing director and the finance director decide; that warm entry comes from the three existing customers and a sector association; and that the contract, the invoice and the payment term need Spanish-language handling. The motion that follows is smaller and slower at the start, with a qualification rule that no deal moves past discovery without a path to the managing director. Whether it works is decided by the baseline and the committee, not by anyone's intuition, ours included.

1. Take your current playbook and fill the keep, adapt or drop table with every element. Mark each "adapt" with the evidence you would need to decide how.
2. Pull every Spanish opportunity from the CRM, won or lost, and write down who actually signed or would have signed. Compare that with the economic buyer your reps recorded.
3. Ask your team to pause any high-volume email sequence to Spanish prospects until a Spanish lawyer has reviewed it against the LSSI.
4. Ask finance to model Spanish revenue with the payment terms you actually sign, and check whether your comp plan pays before you collect.
5. List the three warm-entry sources you could activate this quarter, with an owner for each.

If you want a second opinion on the result, that is the kind of work we do. Alocallao is a strategic marketing and commercial planning consultancy that leads companies' entry into Spain, the Dominican Republic and the United States. We work remotely, with an agreed cadence. See how we approach the US to Spain corridor.