FOREWORD

In 2011, Marylou and I published Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com, which was referred to by Inc. magazine¹ and others as “the sales bible of Silicon Valley.” That book revealed how I created the outbound prospecting program at Salesforce.com and introduced several breakthrough ideas for adding qualified opportunities at the front end of the pipeline in a way that ensures rapid and consistent revenue growth.

The first breakthrough idea was that organizations need to have dedicated prospectors to get off the revenue roller coaster. Blowing out quotas some months and bombing during others is a natural consequence of asking salespeople to do everything—prospecting, qualifying, closing, servicing, and managing accounts. Even the greatest of the great, people who excel at both prospecting and closing, will end up on the roller coaster. It is almost impossible for a single salesperson to balance prospecting and closing in a way that delivers consistent results. To get predictability in revenue, you have to have predictability in lead generation. The way to achieve that is by having dedicated prospectors who feed experienced closers.

The second breakthrough idea was that phone- and e-mail-based outbound prospecting is the most predictable way to create qualified appointments. This concept remains particularly heretical with gurus espousing that the road to riches is paved with inbound marketing and social selling. I too would like to make money while I sleep, but I know sales accrue to salespeople who work the hardest and the smartest.

When Predictable Revenue was published, many sales leaders operationalized it by developing phone scripts and e-mail templates as well as measuring the volume of e-mails and dials per day or the number of appointments set. What people miss is the fact that success is not solely about templates and activity. Building a predictable pipeline requires diligent implementation of an end-to-end system. The system starts by finding the right targets and, critically, avoiding the wrong ones. After that, you move the right prospects through an increasingly personalized assembly line toward a final outcome—they buy or they don’t.

Before I created the outbound prospecting system at Salesforce.com, I read countless books on sales prospecting, and almost all of them were a waste of time. Most sales books rehash the same high-level ideas over and over again, albeit with new, trademarked names. What made Predictable Revenue successful was one strategic concept supported by a few simple, highly actionable tactics that most types of companies could employ. And that same formula is what will make Predictable Prospecting indispensable. For starters, Marylou and Jeremey have enhanced the strategic concept. While outbound prospecting remains the big idea, they acknowledge the world has moved from spray and pray to account-based sales development (ABSD). In addition, they have taken the tactical elements of Predictable Revenue and added pressure-tested details to explain precisely how to build and operate a successful outbound prospecting program. Nothing like this book has existed before.

Each year, outbound prospecting gets more complicated; there are more data sources, more apps, and more tasks. All of this complexity has made it exceptionally challenging to build, maintain, and sustain a consistent sales development system. One of my favorite things about this book is that Marylou and Jeremey have decluttered ABSD by coming up with a step-by-step system that anyone can implement. Importantly, their system delivers the nitty-gritty with tips on how to move customers through the buying cycle from unaware to aware to interested to evaluating to purchase. And, while I think it’s important for you to stay focused on their complete system, I have to admit that I love the line-by-line analysis of sample e-mail templates.

The information in this book is critical to senior sales executives looking to establish an outbound prospecting team, sales managers leading existing teams, or individual salespeople seeking to improve performance. Individual reps, in particular, can implement Marylou and Jeremey’s system by scheduling recurring calendar blocks of two or more hours. Without consistent time blocking, nothing else in this book, or any other book, will predictably increase your sales pipeline.

Marylou and Jeremey’s follow-up to Predictable Revenue goes deeper, making Predictable Prospecting a perfect complement. I decided to go higher-level in my latest book, From Impossible to Inevitable, by asking: How do successful sales teams achieve and sustain hypergrowth? Underlying this question are many others, including: Why engage in outbound prospecting in the first place? How does it compare to inbound marketing and word-of-mouth? When does it succeed? When does it fail? In the end, I found what matters most is to “nail a niche” of customers who value your offering as a must-have, not merely as a nice-to-have.

I leave you with this universal truth: prospects don’t care what you do. They care about what you do for them. At its core, prospecting is simply people selling to people. It’s not about templates, scripts, and activities. Prospects need to connect with you and to trust you as a partner who is helping them achieve their goals. If you nail a niche, stay organized with the system outlined in this book, and bring your genuine humanity to prospecting, you will outperform everyone else.

—Aaron Ross, bestselling coauthor of Predictable Revenue and From Impossible to Inevitable and cofounder of Carb.io (Twitter: @motoceo)