Your rep only knows what you give it.
You are about to build an AI sales rep for your product. It will answer customers day and night — but only from the material you collect here. This page is the contract: what the rep can do, what it can't, and the one rule every file has to pass.
§1What your rep is — and isn't
Think of the rep as a brand-new hire who has read everything in one folder and nothing else. It has no memory of your business beyond what you supply, and — this is the part people forget — it cannot browse the web. It can't look up your latest blog post, can't check a competitor, can't find the answer it's missing. If a fact isn't in the folder, the rep does not have it.
So the folder decides everything. When a customer asks something the folder answers, the rep answers well. When they ask something it doesn't cover, you get one of two outcomes:
- The good outcome: the rep says "I'll get a person for that" and hands off. A miss, but a safe one — the customer is routed, not misled.
- The bad outcome: the rep guesses, and a confident wrong answer goes out under your name. That is the failure this guide exists to prevent.
The difference between those two outcomes is almost entirely coverage — how much of what customers actually ask is sitting in the folder, and how clearly the rep has been told where its edges are. Both are things you control here.
A gap in the folder is a gap in the rep. You are not writing the rep's personality — you are handing it its knowledge and its limits. Collect the way you'd brief a sharp new hire on their first day: the real material, current, and an honest map of what they're not allowed to answer.
§2One rule for everything you supply: public or publishable
Whatever a customer could hear from the rep, the rep might say. So the test for every single file you add is simple: would you be comfortable if this appeared, word for word, on your public website? If yes, it belongs in the folder. If it makes you hesitate, it stays out.
- Public — already out in the world: your site, your docs, your published pricing, your help center, your marketing.
- Publishable — not published yet, but you'd be fine if it were: an internal FAQ you could post tomorrow, a demo script, a founder interview recorded for this purpose.
Keep internal-only material out entirely: unreleased roadmaps, real customer data, contracts, internal cost or margin figures, credentials, anything under NDA. The rep can't keep a secret it's been handed — if it's in the folder, treat it as something a customer might repeat back to you. This first version of your rep is public knowledge only.
§3The collection, at a glance
Three steps, in order. Each has its own page — start at the top and work down.
1 · What to collect
The full list of document kinds — product docs, FAQs, pricing, support material, security statement — with what each one teaches your rep and how to prepare it. Open the checklist →
2 · Recording sessions
Three scripted sessions with ready-to-read prompt lists: the founder pitch, the product walkthrough, and an objection-handling drill. Open the scripts →
3 · Quality & boundaries
The four levers that make the rep trustworthy, a coverage self-test, and the boundary declarations that become its refusal training. Open the checklist →
Gather the whole folder before you switch the rep on. A rep launched on half a folder learns half a business — and every gap is a customer question waiting to go wrong.