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

Author: Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler

Rating: ★★★★☆

• 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.
• In high-productivity sales organizations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth, they fulfill 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.
• 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.
• Experienced salespeople are terrible at prospecting. Experienced salespeople hate to prospect. Even if a salesperson does do some prospecting successfully, as soon as they generate some pipeline, they become too busy to prospect. It’s not sustainable.
• Mass emailing C-level Fortune 5000 executives, with specific kinds of emails, can generate 9%+ response rates. Those high response rates (7-9% or more) from high-level executives have held true year after year, even with my current clients in 2011, seven years later.
• 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.
• Buyers are sick of being sold to and become more resistant every year to classic sales and marketing methods, such as pushy cold calls or generic marketing materials. Sales 2.0 technologies, both of CRM systems and Sales 2.0 applications, make it easier than ever to take the guesswork out of implementing, executing and auditing the ROI of a prospecting methodology. More accountability on marketing budgets. There is ever-increasing pressure on lead generation and marketing budgets to show documented proof of revenue results. Every project is scrutinized: “What’s the ROI? How do you know?” Executives want proof of revenue generated. Have you ever done a careful measurement of your cold calling programs? Chances are they are much more productive in terms of the amount of activity than revenue. Executives are taking closer looks at these programs, and not liking what they see.
• use simple emails to generate referrals to the right people, who then expect (and often welcome) your call.
• 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 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 phone, a rep simply learns about the company and whether 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. Be honest and to the point—what are you looking for?
• Email response rates (usually 7-10%) What e-mails are companies responding to, and why Who is responding (title, position of authority) Number of Scoping Calls completed Who became a qualified opportunity, and why Refinements to the Ideal Customer Profile (which was revised many, many times)
• 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 single owner business doing this for yourself), but it becomes more challenging to make it profitable for hired salespeople.
• A rule of thumb is that for every 400 leads per month that require human attention, a company needs one Market Response Representative.
• Incidentally, my rule of thumb is that it takes 2-4 weeks, on average, to qualify a new opportunity from an initial response.
• Send outbound mass emails or mass voicemails to prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML (though you can use HTML templates that look like text). Rather than sending hundreds of mass emails at a time in big bursts, the idea here is to send a regular, smaller number (50-100) of emails per salesperson each day, a few days a week, as a rolling campaign. The main goal of this stage is to generate just 5-10 new responses per day. Reps can’t handle more responses than that per day without dropping balls.
• Send outbound mass emails or mass voicemails to prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML (though you can use HTML templates that look like text). Rather than sending hundreds of mass emails at a time in big bursts, the idea here is to send a regular, smaller number (50-100) of emails per salesperson each day, a few days a week, as a rolling campaign. The main goal of this stage is to generate just 5-10 new responses per day. Reps can’t handle more responses than that per day without dropping balls.
• You don’t need these many criteria as are listed below, even 3-5 key ones will help you. In fact, fewer, better criteria will make it easier to benefit from this exercise….

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