If you’re in sales development, then odds are, you’ve read the first book by Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue, as a part of your SDR initiation.
Having served as the incumbent instruction manual for building a sales development machine, Predictable Revenue has been dubbed by many: the “sales bible.”
And with everything from tips to generating qualified leads, a list of “7 Fatal Sales Mistakes CEOs and Sales VPs Make,” and strategies for forging predictable revenue pipelines, you can bet that Ross’s concept of specialization in sales organizations made it to your manager’s one-page strategic plan a time or two.
But what Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin hit the shelves with this week has us betting Predictable Revenue’s seat in the house isn’t quite so safe anymore.
Impossible to Inevitable is the newly minted playbook for all things hypergrowth.
What You’ll Learn
Detailing how to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster, the sequel answers three key questions about growing revenue by 10x:
- Why aren’t you growing faster?
- What does it take to get to hypergrowth?
- How do you sustain growth?
And following in its predecessor’s holy-number footsteps, this manual covers the “7 Ingredients of Hypergrowth” in a sales organization.
These steps teach us that hypergrowth comes from focusing on where you have the best chances of winning customers, making them successful, and building a reputation of tangible results in an environment designed for revenue growth.
And the most important lever that drives revenue growth? Lead generation.
Spending your efforts on lead generation campaigns forces you to dive in headfirst with your customers to keep iterating who you’re going after, what they’re interested in, and why they should care about you.
But it’s not the leads here that are important. It’s lead generation knowledge. And the faster you learn how to generate leads, the faster you can prepare to grow.
With the help of co-author Jason Lemkin, Ross pushes sales development and lead generation out of their comfort zones by diving deeper into these key elements of sales development growth:
- The Leading Revenue Growth Metric: Pipeline Creation Rate. Too many companies obsess over a single form of lead generation and ignore the others. But the best metric for tracking growth in qualified leads and pipeline in real-time is the PCR.
- Nets & Spears: Inbound Marketing and Outbound Prospecting. Diving deeper into the driving forces behind inbound “lead commitment” and lessons in outbound sales that we’ve learned since Predictable Revenue, the focus here is on reps who are business people who can sell, rather than simply salespeople.
- Specialization as the Number One Sales Multiplier. In just about every sport there is, there are specialized rolls. Goalies. Forwards. Point guards. Catchers… Proving that in sales organizations today, SDR specialization is key.
- Doubling the Size of Your Deals. It may be the small deals that get you started, but it’s the big deals that drive growth. Bigger deals lead to better customer results. With bigger deals, you can focus on better customer service for fewer customers — ensuring the most value from your product.
Pro-tip: Many sales development organizations looking to double deal size are turning to Account Based Sales Development — and here’s why.
Why It’s Important
But why is it so important for you to read Impossible to Inevitable before your CEO does?
Because it’s modern.
Predictable Revenue was great — don’t get us wrong. We still enforce many of its ideals and practices.
But it’s old.
If we’ve learned anything during this rise of the sales development cloud, it’s that staying modern in your sales organization is the most important aspect to staying relevant, and consequently, growing. A modern sales organization is one that keeps up with the times, moving past antiquated behaviors of the past, and implementing new and improved processes.
Your CEO is going to read this new book with the same fervor that he did with the first (probably more so, after the hype), and it’s going to overthrow your entire sales development team’s dynamic.
So you need to read it first.
Growth isn’t just about cold calling, prospecting, and outlining your sales development goals anymore. It’s about going deep with the why behind each and every thing you and your team do on an everyday basis. By defining the driving forces by the leads that come in and the leads you go find, closing more business, and landing bigger deals — you’ll push further out of your comfort zone than ever before.
Comfort is the enemy of growth. And the irony is, what’s already worked best for you in the past. Dependency, complacency, or just plain business can turn lingering in the comfort zone into the enemy of hypergrowth.
If you’re not failing, frustrated, or disappointed almost every day about something — you’re too comfortable.
Your biggest competition here as a Sales Development Rep is inertia. But the best reps learn to become coaches, ensuring that prospects and customers receive what they need, resources are rallied within the company, stumbling blocks are uncovered and avoided, and surprises are illuminated.
And with these newer, fresher, more modern takes on everything Predictable Revenue preached, Impossible to Inevitable is going to be the next mandatory read for your sales development team to develop into champion sales coaches.
If you want to stay ahead of the curve, like a true business person who can sell, break free of your comfort zone and read it before anyone else in your organization does — especially your CEO.