Short & Sweet reviews of our favorite books for entrepreneurs. This weeks review:
Predictable Revenue: Turn your business into a sales machine with the $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com
by Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler
4 out of 5 NINJA STARS
Entrepreneurs often struggle with stability because revenue is often not predictable. This book gets 4 out of 5 stars because it has good practical advice about how you as a solopreneur can increase stability by making your sales numbers more predictable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aaron Ross is the award-winning author of the bestselling book Predictable Revenue, as well as the co-CEO of the Predictable Revenue sales consulting firm.
KEY ACHIEVEMENTS
- launched a sales process at Salesforce.com that lead to revenues of over $100 million in their first few years.
- bestselling author
- has helped many companies to double and even triple their revenues
BOOK SUMMARY
In Predictable Revenue, Aaron insists that the biggest impact on generating predictable revenues is having an outbound sales team that focuses 100% of prospecting. This book tells you how to build your outbound sales development team.
TEN KEY TAKEAWAYS
- “Predictable Lead Generation is the most important thing for creating predictable revenue.”
- “You need a a Sales Development Team that bridges the chasm between marketing and sales.”
- You need “Consistent Sales Systems, because without consistency you have no predictability.”
- You need an outbound prospecting team with with a single mission to prospect qualified leads from cold companies; they then pass qualified opportunities to the sales team.
- Your sales process is only scalable if the CEO aand executives are NOT involved in the process.
- When sending emails to high level executives, always ask for a referral to the “best person in their organization for a first conversaion.”
- “Get clear on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), including how to describe them, and what their core challenges are.”
- When you have set up a phone call, “the biggest challenge is staying focused on the prospect’s business and not selling yours.”
- “You can’t predictably create revenue without predictable pipeline, and that requires ways to measyre and track how pipeline gets created.”
- “Obess about the decision making process, not the decision maker.”
OUR NINJA OPINION
Although Predictable Revenue focuses on entrepreneurs with the ability to hire people, we think even solopreneurs can benefit and learn from the solid practical advice in this book. For solopreneurs planning to grow their companies down the line, this book should be considered obligatory reading!