Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross

• Building a Sales Machine that creates ongoing, predictable revenue takes: Predictable Lead Generation, the most important thing for creating predictable revenue. A Sales Development Team that bridges the chasm between marketing and sales.

• In high – productivity sales organizations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth they fulfill it.

• Most salespeople already work enough hours, and trying to get them to work harder is like trying to solve a problem by going faster in the wrong direction. It’s bailing water out of the boat faster rather than fixing the leak. In other words, “working harder” translated usually means: “What we are doing isn’t working, so do more of it!”

• It’s true that you need great salespeople to close customers, but the better your lead generation is, the less dependent you are on the quality of your salespeople and sales process. Better lead generation = more margin for sales error.

• Do your executive team and board know how much new (qualified) pipeline the company needs to generate per month? (This is the second most important metric to track, right after closed business.)

• What are your biggest or most recent failures? What is it about them that you can be grateful for? Can you anticipate how you will benefit by getting through your current challenges? “Failure” is just your judgment of an experience, because there are no failures – just learning opportunities.

• Making the field salespeople do cold calls means having your highest-cost (per hour) sales resource perform the lowest-value (per hour) activity.

• Spend serious time on identifying and clarifying your Ideal Customer Profile. Define what companies are the most similar to the top 5-10% of your customers, defined as the ones likeliest to purchase for the most revenue, and develop focused target lists based on these tight criteria.

• A rule of thumb is that for every 400 leads per month that require human attention, a company needs one Market Response Representative.

• CEOs, remember: people follow your example. The more you live in your system, the more your people will use it.

• The goal of every mass email should be to establish and close a prospect on a next step. That next step should be either one of two things—but NOT both: Who is the best point of contact for …?” (to get a referral); Or... When is the best day/time for a quick discussion around…?” (to set up a conversation with the prospect).

• Remember, “No” doesn’t matter until you hear it from the CEO or your ideal decision-maker.

• The Top Six Prospecting Mistakes Reps Make

  • Expecting instant results

  • Writing long emails

  • Going wide, not deep

  • Giving up too quickly at ideal targets

  • Not giving up quickly enough at non-ideal targets

  • Depending on activity metrics rather than a proven process

• When anyone gets paid to do something, and has managers breathing down their neck, it distorts behavior. Empathy with prospects is lost in the push to “Just close the deal!” Trusting, capable managers can help protect their salespeople from these distorting effects by focusing on doing the right thing; fear-driving managers exacerbate the problem.

• Hold the hands of your first 50 customers; give them lots of love.

• What do the billion-dollar companies — Salesforce.com, Facebook, Zappos, and Google — all share? Customer trust. Customer success. Customer happiness. Customer delight.

• Sales in the “Attraction” world we live in now isn’t about being passive. You can still be as aggressive as ever – except the tone has changed. Rather than being pushy, all about money, and often coming off as fake, it’s about being respectful, purposeful, and adding real value to prospects, even before they become customers. Salespeople should be “pleasantly persistent.”

• A no-nonsense management model:

  • Choose people carefully

  • Set expectations and vision

  • Remove obstacles

  • Inspire your people

  • Work for your people

  • Improve it next time

• Marc Benioff came up with a plan to set the company’s vision and align all of its people and teams in the execution of the vision. V2MOM stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Metrics.

• As you work through your list of responsibilities and tasks, this is a perfect opportunity to use the 80/20 rule to clear out non-essential tasks. Rather than distributing 100% of the work of the manager, divide the work into two parts:

  • the 20% that is the most important to keep within the team or company, and

  • the 80% that can be eliminated, automated, or outsourced.