You will see later
The publication is a member of a household of books that came out last year and earlier this year and that describes the best practices for various revenue production activities at a time where there's a desperate need for improving the productivity of each dollar we invest in marketing and sales.
All of the books have a practical approach to what we used to predict direct advertising, but that over the years has been renamed to outbound lead generation and earnings through the phone (although the approach also applies to scenarios where the final mile of the sales process necessitates meeting face to face with the potential clients ).
These novels are:
- The Sales Acceleration Formula: Utilizing Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million, by Mark Roberge.
- Predictable Revenue (Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With $100 Million Best Practices of salesforce.com) by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler.
- From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Businesses Create Predictable Revenue, by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
The race for market direction
Aside from The Revenue Acceleration Formula from Mark Roberge, that is based upon the inbound"religion" preached by his own firm Hubspot (and not without some merit), the additional publications deal with business models which need knocking on the door of possible clients and building relationships which will lead to earnings and earnings. Blind chickens also can locate corn, so the two big questions all these books discuss are:
- How do we design our small business growth, marketing, sales development, sales, account management and other revenue generation activities so they provide predictable outcomes?
- How do we ensure that we can scale these actions, maintain predictability and attain steadily decreasing client acquisition price per revenue dollar?
Although none of the books explicitly refers to why scalability is so vital that I dare conclude that they agree that the objective of any data technology business must be reaching the market leadership position before the competitors. Crossing the chasm, passing the tipping point and achieving market leadership changes the marketplace dynamics in your favor, you may enjoy higher profitability than your opponents and you will be hard to conquer any insurgent.
Filling the pipeline
Most tech firms really do a good sales occupation when they first have their foot in the door and sit at the table with a potential customer. The challenge for many is that they sit there far too seldom and consequently Predictable Prospecting from Marylou Tyler and Jeremy Donovan comes as a godsend. The publication efficiently punctures the myth that lead generation is some sort of magic or wizardry and the book provides you with a step by step approach for designing an approach that may work.
She who hopes to find a quick formula for combining some specific words which will open all doors will probably be disappointed. Part one of the book is about crafting an aggressive value proposition and carefully, very carefully identifying the target section, the ideal potential (account profile) and the various personas that we should expect to engage with. 30 percent of the book is devoted to planning and profiling, but it pays off to hold out and read these pages carefully.
If you, as many others (like myself), have a strong propensity for actions then it's worthwhile recalling that"preparation is cheap and execution is costly". While"just do it" may sound more macho than"believe" it frequently pays off to think a little bit before you jump head first in an unknown swimming pool.
What I really enjoyed when studying part two of the book was the logical approach and the practical examples. Marylou and Jeremy provide templates that you can use as the starting point for creating your own outbound lead generation system. I had a dialogue with Marylou a few months back and we agreed that the examples provided in the book will work in North America and Northern Europe, while they'll need some tweaking before they will work in other civilizations.
The approach recommended by Marylou and Jeremy relies on two assumptions:
- We have to assume that the leads on our list do not have an active need for what we offer. We, therefore, must participate with providing something of value that is not only pushing our products and our firm.
- We do not know if the prospects on our record are a good fit because of our value proposition, therefore the first objectives when obtaining contact is to clarify this (AWAF: Are we a match?).
The book provides guidelines, recommendations and templates for email campaigns as well as the follow-up telephone calls, and recognizing that telephone calls are extremely expensive and that we consequently must have a very large probability that we are calling on the best potential prospects.
A building, managing and growing the organization
The next and final part of the book is devoted to all the challenges and issues associated with monitoring performance and together with building, managing and growing an organization that may produce a steadily increasing stream of qualified prospects for our enterprise. As soon as I started reading this portion of the book I had the expectation that this might be filler material to deliver the publication beyond 200 pages (which often is true for non-fiction books), but I was no way. There's genuine value in these pages too.
What good does it do if you've got the recipe for creating strong messages and can design effective call flows if you do not understand how to develop and grow an organization that may execute your wonderful blueprints?
All pages in this book are well worth reading twice. For many companies and individuals engaged with business growth, marketing, sales development, sales, account management and other revenue generation activities this book could well be their bible in regards to ensuring predictable lead generation.
