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

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 while reps ramp up their pipelines.

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 very predictable, and the entire team’s results become highly sustainable.

Revenue Predictability = The Funnel + Average Deal Size + Time

Studies conducted have shown that less-educated people tend to click on pay-per-click ads, while more-educated people click on organic search results.

keyword research and search engine rank monitoring.

The Layers Are Mutual — Get To Know The Prospects As They Get To Know You

Shifting from organic growth to proactive growth requires new habits, practices and systems, causing a lot of delays and frustrations

high-productivity sales organizations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth, they fulfill it.

The team no longer had to qualify website leads.
The team didn’t handle sales order paperwork.
The team didn’t close small deals.
The team didn’t help out marketing.
The team wasn’t distracted.

Instead, the team had a single mission: to generate (but not by cold calling; see Chapter 2) new qualified sales opportunities from cold companies (ones at which we had no activity or interest) and passing these qualified opportunities to quota-carrying salespeople to close.

Despite your investors' demands, it can take 2-12+ months to get lead generation cranking and generating predictable revenue.

Here are some further thoughts on what has changed: