Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com Kindle Edition

I definitely enjoyed the book Predictable Revenue and really like the author's style. Ross did an amazing job helping Salesforce.com generate its opportunities, and this book tells his story of building the lead generation function from scratch and gives some great examples of his leadership style.I would have liked it to have been more specific, but it still fully deserves a 5 star rating for being the course on "Bay Area Lead Gen Scaling 101." Having built and managed a 5+ member lead generation team from scratch exactly like the author, here are my thoughts on the book:Ross' Vision:1) Don't let the so-called "reality" stop you. (Love this comment)2) Subteams and miniCEOs, cool idea for teams within companies. (Great vision, his best)3) Design CEOs and VPs of Sales out of the sales process. (Hmm, interesting. Agreed)4) The future of sales is on new user acquisition and important titles like VP of Lead or Demand Gen. (Agreed)5) Design self-managing teams. (Good)The 4 things Ross nails especially well:1) "Prospects should earn proposals." (This is the best line ever, I always say this)2) Always get prospects to talk about their business, not selling the product. Ask "why" 3x or more. (Great!!)3) In 6 months, follow-up on all past opportunities. (Important)4) Ask yourself in order, "what can I:" A. eliminate B. automate C. outsource D. delegateSome facts:1) "Short and sweet" emails get over 9% open rate vs. sales-y at 0%.2) Responsibilities of VP Sales includes: goal setting, involvement in big deals, culture, etc. (See full list)3) Most inbound leads come from small businesses, not enterprises.Things I found interesting:1) "Send messages before 9am or after 5pm and avoid Monday and Fridays." (It would be interesting to see these stats in much more specificity)2) "Did I catch you at a bad time" is best intro line. (Hmm, maybe, need to think about)3) "Return on Salesperson's time." (Very interesting concept and would be interesting to track both to company and as an individual)4) Ross says: don't assume sales people will find deals by Rolodexes and cold calling. (Great!! Yes)Parts of Ross' Process:1) Define what companies are most similar to the top 5-10% of your clients. (Good)2) Voicemail and email combinations are effective. (Ok)3) Create a "success plan" for after product is sold. (Good)4) Always start high 1-2 levels above decision maker. (Maybe. Good rule of thumb, but I don't like the word "always." Finding influential people is key)5) Free trials - help create "what defines success" and make sure there is follow-through. (I like paid trials better)6) Track call conversations with DM's per day for sdr team. (Yes)7) Always set up a next step with qualified dms. (Very important)8) Need a market response rep for every 400 leads. (Ok, maybe)9) Metrics to track at board level: new pipeline generated per month. (Good)Some additional thoughts:1) Scaling is "not about hiring more salespeople." (Agreed. Ideally this process would be systemized and automated)2) Hubspot's suggestion on blogs: Participate with others' blogs, comment, and make it a 2 way conversation. (Very good!)3) The trends in sales & marketing are: more accountability on marketing budgets and lead generation teams on ROI. (Yes)Recommended products to check out:1) Landslide - design your sales process for free.2) InsideView3) Connectandsell.com - ondemand conversations4) How Marketo uses Marketo: a. Lead scoring breakdown. Very cool!! b. An email is sent 11 min after web form..Suggestions for improvement:1) Would have likes to have seen more specific examples of success at Responsys, HyperQuality or other clients rather than vaguely "tripled results."2) How important is predictable revenue? Is there a trade-off between predictable revenue and more revenue? I wonder. Maybe, maybe not. I know that I've seen AEs (ClearSlide is one example) incentivized to sandbag to hit 120% of monthly quota rather than have wild swings of 300% ten 40%. That's terrible.3) Didn't include: process for data management, recommended software for deduping, or how leads and accounts were structured.Connect with me at LinkedIn.com/in/caseydkerr or on Twitter @drcaseykerr

Focused in b2b selling

Great book. I love the coaching style. This is a great guide for sales teams, technologist and managers leading digital automation such as sales force automation in todays turbulent business world. The key to business growth is a foundation built upon predictable and repeatable processes. This in turn leads to self managing teams that drive business value through greater scalability and specialization.

I ve been working with similar approaches for half a decade and when reading the book I realized about many things going on within my organization. A great point to start organizing your workforce specially for software and licencing businesses

I completed reading Predictable Revenue and I have a couple issues with this idea of adding an extra step before contacting your decision maker with a cold email. As optimistic as I would like to be, I cannot totally buy into this idea until I find a worthy explanation. I looked several times for the answers inside the book but could not find clear answers. My questions are: When emailing our initial point of contact, why is it recommended that we target a C-Level executive rather than going straight to the decision making source? How does simply mentioning in an email: "Mr Smith mentioned you were the person I should contact..." increase the odds of receiving positive feedback from our decision maker?Furthermore, I can call the gatekeeper and receive my point of contact's email and phone number almost 100% of the time. This seems like a better idea than hoping the C-Level executive will send me the same information via email. Mr. Ross mentions this feedback is only received 10% of the time. It seems as though this idea calls for an additional and unnecessary step that increases the chance of having our emails deleted which ultimately decreases your chance of contacting your decision maker.In addition, say you actually do receive an email back from the C-Level executive with the point of contact, you then have to cold email the decision maker after all, which puts you in the same position you were before you contacted the C-Level Executive. I did not see a clear purpose behind adding this step, and I am a little skeptical of going all in with this idea. If It were immediately apparent in the book, and this approach was backed up with a thorough explanation and concrete supportive data, then I would rate this book a lot higher.What I really liked about this book is the idea of specializing your people with very specific tasks. The idea of wearing different hats to satisfy your peers and your boss is just nonsense. Having laser focus, and a precise purpose will make each person the work place far more productive than taking on several roles.

Inicia diciendo que para vender más nos solo metiendo mas vendedores y de ahí desarrolla todas sus teorías creo que ha cambiado mis estrategias y visión este libro. Gracias

Tolles Buch. Gut zu lesen und sehr praxisnah. Die Gedanken und Informationen sind ein echter Mehrwert und mach Lust darauf einiges davon auszuprobieren. Ich freue mich darauf.

This book was really insightful. I learnt a lot from this book. The author has put down his practical experiences in managing teams which was a superb value add.

Me ha recordado a los tiempos de la universidad. Podría decirse que el autor nos da una auténtica clase magistral con este libro lleno de buenas lecciones! lo recomiendo!!!

Awesome good - a lot of good tips and pratices to test while selling. Nice cases as well. Still trying to put that content into practice, but already collecting results. Easy reading - recommend to any CEO or Sales representatives.