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Podcast (10k-podcast): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:20 — 21.4MB)
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Learn the basics of creating a predictable revenue with Aaron Ross as he talks about lead generation and building your first sales team.
What drives growth?
What causes growth to stall?
This is Aaron’s main lesson from Salesforce.com which was around $25M revenue and mostly in small companies when he joined; whereas they wanted to go up towards larger companies.
They hired a lot of salespeople but it wasn’t bringing in qualified leads.
So Aaron created a pipeline for this because you have to have a predictable leads creation system.
Product-led growth is an interesting term.
Marketing – one-to-many broadcasts, advertising, etc.
It’s more about the number of leads rather than quality. Whether in e-commerce or B2B.
Outbound selling, – typically a targeted list and reaching out directly to see if it’s a fit.
Eg distribution partner for e-commerce Or brand owners for agency owners
These are harder to find but much more valuable potentially.
Pick one or two things vs. Doing 20 things.
What’s worked best for you?
Most people don’t invest in their strength enough before they plateau. They assume a marketing channel has plateaued much earlier than it has in fact.
Look at your natural interest.
Some people are just more into writing, social media, video or outbound selling.
It could be a book or a webinar. Aaron is a book person.
Any passion or enthusiasm helps because it takes a lot of work and time.
This could take 6-18 months to grow.
A lot of people aren’t comfortable with the word “sales” – but it’s a skill you must have.
It’s just a skill – helping people make decisions.
Salespeople include Mother Theresa, JFK; Elon Musk.
A lot of people won’t be a good fit for a sales team.
It can take months or longer to begin to build a team.
In Silicon Valley, a lot of founders don’t want to be part of selling.
This is a huge mistake. The right ones try to be part of the first 20-30 sales.
Then they get tired and hire a salesperson.
Junior person who is there to take inbound calls or outbound prospecting
So you have a junior person who is prospecting and one senior who closes.
Of course, they will often fail – you’ll normally know within 30-60 days.
Once you’ve got that rep in place, you can promote that person or hire another.
So you now have a junior and two senior people
They are normally best at optimizing what is working.
It’s a different skill set and personality to build from scratch.
Building a sales team can be 2-3 years long!
We hear so much about “overnight successes” but we don’t see the 10 years before that.
We all have resistance.
Some people deal with stress by freezing like a rabbit in the headlights.
Others are like a rabid dog!
Forcing functions create situations that mean you can’t get away with this!
Making public declarations with deadlines help
For example:
Having multiple workshops forced Aaron to get a lot of clarity in his business and in his book.
That’s one of the things that made “Predictable Revenue” a bestseller – because they had honed the message through multiple workshops.
2 free Book chapters
Or on Amazon
https://predictablerevenue.com/
This is really about building B2B outbound sales teams.
Choosing your niche with Aaron Ross