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

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. Consistent Sales Systems, because without consistency you have no predictability.

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.

What works to generate flows of new leads:

Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Cold Calling 2.0: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in awhile, it generates actual results!

The point here is that when you’re low on resources, by having a clear objective and looking at it as an interesting challenge, you can force yourself (and your employees) to GET CREATIVE. Constraints often lead to more creativity from both yourself and your people. Don’t let so-called “reality” stop you!

The tipping point of the Cold Calling 2.0 process was born: sending mass emails to high level executives to ask for referrals to the best person in their organization for a first conversation.

Cold Calling 2.0 means prospecting into cold accounts without ever making any cold calls. More importantly though, executed systematically in high-volume, an inside Sales Development team devoted exclusively to Cold Calling 2.0 can become the most predictable and sustainable pipeline engine (and thus revenue) for the company.

Three key principles to developing a team successfully include: No cold calling! Prospect into cold accounts with new methods, other than surprising people on the phone or trying to negotiate around gatekeepers. For example, use simple emails to generate referrals to the right people, who then expect (and often welcome) your call. A focus on results, not activities! That means that dials and calls per day, or even appointments set, are much less interesting or even important. Rather, track metrics such as qualification calls per dayor week, and qualified opportunities per

month. Calls per day and dials are usually only tracked during training periods, for coaching purposes whil...

Everything is systematically process-driven! This includes management practices, hiring, training, and of course, the actual prospecting process. By emphasizing repeatability and consistency, the pipeline and revenue ramps generated by a new Sales Development Rep become ve...

Develop respected experts:

Qualify accounts and contacts before calling:

Spend serious time on identifying and clarifying your Ideal Customer Profile. Define what companies are the most similar to your 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.

Research rather than sell: When reps do call into cold accounts, rather than cold calls, make “research calls.” The intention is different, rather than trying to get the decision maker on the pho...

there is even a potential fit or not. Blackberry-sized emails: Avoid sending long sales emails that no one reads. Send emails that are very short (readable on a blackberry) and to the point. ...

Go beyond basic SFA: Leverage your sales force automation (“SFA”) systems in every way possible. For example, you MUST use dashboards. What about applications for de-duplication and data cleansing, contact acquisition, or tools that tell you when prospects that you are in touch with visit your website? There is a wealth of options now to enhance every step of your process — in fact, there are so many options it can be c...

Are your customers worth more than $5,000 to you? (It can work for smaller amounts, but it will be harder for you to make it profitable).

The Cold Calling 2.0 process works for consulting and services companies as well, though it is more challenging. Professional services companies tend to have developed their business based more on relationships and brand than on specific benefits. Services companies have to spend extra time honing in on their Ideal Customer Profiles and their challenges, to make this worthwhile.

The point is to focus your highest value people on the low-volume but high-value activities (building relationships at key accounts), and specialize other roles and sales reps to take over low-value yet high-volume activities (prospecting into untargeted cold accounts).

The closers focused on their live pipeline, closing deals and only prospected to a small number of strategic accounts. Companies must make these kinds of changes in order to create a highly effective outbound sales team.

To begin implementing the Cold Calling 2.0 system, you should have: At least one person 100% dedicated to prospecting (or you intend to have this person). Yes, you can start part-time, but it will be hard to get significant results until you have someone totally committed to it. You have some kind of sales system that lets your sales team share and manage their sales contacts and accounts. Salesforce.com is still the best system (in my humble though admittedly biased opinion) but what's more important is that you have something beyond spreadsheets, whiteboards and email. Your prospects use email. You have a proven product or service that has generated revenue. The “lifetime value of a customer” is more than $10,000 (the more the better). The process will definitely work if your lifetime value is lower (especially if you’re a singleowner business doing this for yourself), but it becomes more challenging to make it profitable through hired salespeople.

Experiment To Make It Work For You Every business is different, and things work differently for each salesperson. The idea here is to give you a set of tools, with some

As a first step, dedicate a role (whether you begin with one person or a whole team) to ONLY doing outbound prospecting activities. Break it off from inbound lead qualification and from closing.

Specialize, Specialize,

Specialize! I...

a Sales Development function to prospect for new clients to ensure a predictable, sustainable supply of qualified leads for the field and/ or telesales teams, and a Market Response function to qualify the leads that come into you...

1. Sales Development Reps prospect into cold or inactive companies who aren’t engaging with you already, to source new, incremental sales opportunities and pass them to quota-carrying salespeople.

One Sales Development Rep typically can support a maximum of 2-5 quota-carrying Account Executives.

However, Account Executive closers shouldn’t spend their time making cold calls. They should focus on higher-potential sources of business: a small list of targeted accounts at which they can build relationships, current clients, or their own past dead opportunities.

2. Market Response Reps qualify incoming leads that reach the

company through the website or phone (usually driven either by internet search, word-of-mouth or marketing programs), and route qualified opportunities to ...

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

By removing unqualified opportunities out of the pipeline early in the sales cycle, Market Response determines which accounts will be followed up by the sales force and thereby paves the way for increased close rates by the field and tele...

Why Sales Development and Market Response Sho...

The roles are very different (inbound reps receive leads to work to qualify, while outbound reps initiate calls and emails), and it’s very challenging for a rep to switch between the two mindsets throughout the day. The Market Response Reps become experts at efficiently qualifying inbound and marketing-generated leads, and the Sales Development team only prospects for incremental business at accounts that need to be pursued, where there is no active or pre-existing interest.

The Source Of Predictability: Cold Calling 2.0 Funnel Here is the source your PREDICTABLE REVENUE comes from: predictable lead generation. For companies selling high-value products or services, the most predictable source of leads (whether or not it’s the largest source) can be outbound sales prospecting. Here is a sample funnel that breaks out the prospecting stages:

As you can see, if you experiment with your process, people and activities to find how to generate a predictable flow of new qualified opportunities, and have a consistent sales closing rate, you can begin to generate highly predictable revenue and proactive growth.

Revenue Predictability = The Funnel + Average ...

Time: Ramping New Reps

Prospecting cycle length: Measure the time between a) when the prospect first responds to a campaign to b) when a quality opportunity is created or qualified (this means the quota-carrying Account Executive has re-qualified and accepted the opportunity

that the prospector passed over).

Incidentally, my rule of thumb is that it tak...

average, to qualify a new opportunity from an i...

Sales cycle length: I like to measure the time from a) when the opportunity was created or qua...

Example: To use realistic numbers, let’s assume: A new prospector takes two months to ramp to full quota. Each rep produces 10 new, qualified opportunities per month. Deal size is $100,000 In this case, after two months an outbound rep will be producing $1 million in new qualified pipeline per month. Now, if: Sales win rates are 20%, and Sales cycles average six months... ...then each new prospecting rep (working with their quota-carrying Account Executives) will be adding an incremental $200,000 in new revenue each month, with the flow really beginning about

eight months after the outbound rep was hired (or six months after they reached full production). Does eight months seem like a long time in our world of quick-fixes? What if you had started this team or this process eight months ago, wouldn’t you love having that revenue right now? Once you get this machine rolling, like a flywheel, this predictable source of new leads will keep producing revenue.

How Cold Calling 2.0 Works, The Process Here is an overview of the Cold Calling 2.0 process, for a Sales Development Rep that is doing it full-time and passing opportunities to a quotacarrying salesperson. If you are a sales rep who can only prospect part-time, adjust the goals accordingly (send half of the volume of outbound e...