Anthropic's official Sales plugin ships 36 skills. Five of the jobs that matter most in founder-led sales still don't have one.

Founder-Led Sales Skills is a pack of five Claude Skills built to work alongside that plugin. It exists because a founder selling without an SDR team needs a system, not just better emails.

It covers the jobs that decide whether outreach works at all: who to target, when to reach out, and what happens after the deal closes. Below is the full breakdown: what Claude already does for you, what's missing, and how to run the whole system in your first week.

Inside you'll find:

Most founders assume their outreach fails because of the copy. Usually it doesn't.

Before the first sales hire, the founder is the SDR, the account executive and the onboarding team at the same time. What breaks first is not the writing.

It's the system around it. The failure modes are familiar:

• Emailing companies that were never going to buy, because the ideal customer lives in the founder's head instead of in the data.

• Reaching out with no reason to act now, so a good account ignores a message that simply arrived at the wrong moment.

• Forgetting what was promised during the sale, and discovering it three weeks into onboarding.

→ AI made writing cheap. It didn't make targeting, timing or follow-through cheap. That is the lens for everything below. A better email only helps once you have picked the right account and the right moment, and once you can keep the promises that email leads to.

Anthropic publishes an open-source Sales plugin for Claude with 36 skills. It installs from the plugin directory in Claude Cowork, or with two commands in Claude Code.

It is broad. Grouped by the job they do, the skills cover research and prospecting, outreach and meetings, deal management, pipeline and CRM work, existing customers, and the daily routine of a seller.

• Research and prospecting: account research, lead triage, account tiering, stakeholder maps, competitive intelligence.

• Outreach and meetings: outreach emails and sequences, call prep, call summaries, objection handling, one-pagers.

• Deals and pipeline: deal reviews, close plans, win/loss reviews, pipeline reviews, forecasts, CRM hygiene.

• Customers: account plans, customer health, renewals, expansion opportunities. The most telling detail is who some of these skills are written for. Several assume a sales team already exists: rolling up pipeline by rep, preparing a manager's 1:1 with a rep, routing leads between owners. Useful once you hire. Not the founder's problem yet. The second detail matters more. The skills that prioritise accounts score them against your ICP, but the plugin treats that ICP as a fact you already know. The first skill that needs it asks you one question and moves on.

→ Don't rebuild what already exists. Install the official plugin first, then add only what's missing.

Founder-Led Sales Skills adds five skills, each aimed at a job the official plugin doesn't handle directly. They are designed to run in order, and each one feeds the next. icp-builder: who to sell to.

It turns your closed-won and lost deals into a written Ideal Customer Profile and a 0–100 scoring rubric. An ICP written from memory reflects who you want to sell to.

One built from closed-won data reflects who actually buys, stays and expands. The official win/loss review explains why deals are won or lost; icp-builder turns that evidence into who to target next.

The rubric is tested before you use it: past winners should score 75 or above, lost deals below 50. If they don't, the weights change.

With fewer than five customers, the result is labelled a hypothesis to validate after the next ten deals. lookalike-accounts: more companies like your best customers. From two to five seed customers, it finds companies with the same niche, size, business model and stage.

Every company must be verified with a live source in the session. If only 12 of 25 pass, you get 12, not 25 with padding. buying-signal-watch: who to contact this week.

A weekly scan of your target list for dated, sourced signals: a new executive in the buying function, a first hire for the role your product supports, a funding round, a move away from a competing tool. Each signal carries points, so the shortlist is ranked, not guessed. linkedin-outreach-cadence: the channel email can't cover.

It drafts connection requests and DMs and plans a 10-day cadence across LinkedIn, email and phone. It writes; you send. customer-handoff: what you promised.

It turns call transcripts, emails and the proposal into an onboarding brief: every commitment with its source, flagged when it was only verbal or depends on the roadmap, plus stakeholders, risks and expansion signals.

→ Targeting, timing and follow-through, the three jobs AI didn't make cheap, now each have a skill.

The pack comes with a one-week plan. Each day produces the input for the next one.

• Day 1, define who you sell to. Upload closed-won and lost deals and ask Claude to build your ICP. Paste the summary block it returns into your Claude project instructions, so every skill, official or not, works from the same definition.

• Day 2, build the list. Ask for 25 companies like your two best customers.

• Day 3, find the timing. Run a signal scan on that list with a 30-day lookback. From then on, repeat it every Monday with a 7-day window.

• Day 4, reach out. Use the official outreach skill for email and the cadence skill for LinkedIn and timing.

• When a deal closes, prepare the handoff before the kickoff call, not after. The cadence is where the pieces meet, and it earns attention before asking for it: a genuine comment on a recent post on day 1, a connection request on day 2, the first email on day 3. The most telling detail is the spacing. After the first two LinkedIn touches, the channels alternate, so the prospect never gets the same kind of message twice in a row. The last touch closes the loop politely instead of pushing, and the whole sequence stops the moment the prospect replies.

→ One week of setup replaces the question every founder asks on Monday morning: who should I talk to today?

The biggest risk of AI in sales isn't bad copy. It's confident mistakes: a company that doesn't exist, a funding round that never happened, a mutual connection that was made up.

Every skill in the pack follows the same rules:

• No invented data. Companies, signals, people and numbers come from your data or from a source found in the session. A signal without a date or a source is dropped.

• Nothing is sent without you. Skills draft and recommend; anything that sends a message or changes a CRM record is shown to you first.

• Outside content is data, not instructions. Web pages, emails and transcripts can't tell Claude what to do.

• Compliance stays on. Cold outreach and prospect data are regulated, for example by GDPR in Europe and CAN-SPAM in the US, and LinkedIn restricts automated activity. The LinkedIn skill also writes to the platform's real limits. Connection notes default to 200 characters, the cap on free accounts (Premium allows 300), and it reminds you that free accounts only get a few personalised notes per month, so they should go to prospects with a real signal.

→ One invented fact in a cold message costs more than a slow week of prospecting. What this means for a founder: the output is slower than a spray-and-pray tool, and that is deliberate. Your name is on every message, and in early-stage sales your reputation is the pipeline.

Founder-Led Sales Skills is built for founders who sell before they hire a sales team. Inside the pack:

• Five skills, ready to upload: icp-builder, lookalike-accounts, buying-signal-watch, linkedin-outreach-cadence and customer-handoff.

• Templates for the ICP and for the sales-to-onboarding handoff.

• A README with the install steps, the first-week plan and the full map of 25 founder-led sales jobs, showing which skill covers each one.

Setup takes three steps. Install Anthropic's official Sales plugin, turn on code execution and file creation in Claude's settings, and upload each skill ZIP from Customize > Skills. In Claude Code, copy the skill folders into your skills directory instead.

Every skill is plain text, so you can edit it with your product's language, your real sales stages and your own examples. The better it knows your business, the more consistent the output.