From 2005 to 2008, I worked for Amos at Business.com, leading sales teams that sold online advertising. I started with the company in 2001 as an individual contributor when there were just three salespeople and in 2002 was promoted to director and took over the Inside Sales team. My boss gave me quite a bit of latitude, but this was my first real sales management role. I used my best judgment to lead sales, but I didn't really know what a “sales strategy” was (and I didn't know that I didn't know). Still, I brought much-needed metrics—orientation, organization, and process—to the team and scaled it out to over 30 sales reps

That said, it could have been better. We really didn't have a good lead generation strategy because we really didn't know who our high probability targets were or even what our Ideal Customer Profile was. We didn't have a good understanding of how we made money and where we should be selling ads on our site for the most incremental revenue.

Prior to Amos taking over sales and client services, the salespeople could just call on anybody they “felt” would be a good fit for our online advertising products (cost-per-click advertisers, or CPC). For example, it was very easy for a salesperson to go to Overture (formerly goto.com and acquired by Yahoo!) and type in high-value keywords like “web conferencing” or “web hosting” and call on advertisers buying those keywords. It felt like shooting fish in a barrel. But looking at the big picture, we learned that by selling to the upteenth web-hosting advertiser on our site we were merely shifting clicks around, generating very little incremental revenue for our company. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, except it's the same fish you keep hitting over and over.

I remember a great quote by Tiger Woods's former golf coach, Butch Harmon: “If you don't set a target, you'll hit it every time.” Yep, we had no target. No specifically articulated idea of who we should be selling to and how we should be generating our target lead lists. So some salespeople would call down lists in local business journals, some would call down Dun & Bradstreet lists, some would call on competitors' customers—calling anybody the salesperson thought would buy and generate revenue for them to hit their quota. We weren't considering if our ads would actually drive new business to our customers, if they could become recurring revenue customers, if their ads would add value to our own site. If they were a reachable business, they became a target. This was incredibly painful. Salespeople would regularly tell me that they'd spend about two hours per day merely doing research to find new advertisers to call that they thought could generate revenue for themselves. Two hours of research each day—this means more than a full day every week not selling! That's a tremendous waste of a sales asset.

That's no strategy.

But still, by 2005, our company had grown from $225,000 annual revenue to $6 million. I was proud of my team contributions and loved the fact that my boss gave me the leeway to make decisions and be held accountable. Then I heard that my boss was going to take over a different team and that our CEO was bringing in one of his mountain biking buddies…a guy named Amos from HotJobs.

Who was this new guy? What kind of name was “Amos”? Was my freedom and scope going to end? What was he going to change? As you can imagine, I was nervous about getting a new boss. Sure, things weren't perfect, but the charts were going up and to the right (by hook or by crook) so what was this new guy going to do that I wasn't?

And then I watched him take over the sales team and run his W3 playbook. It's really simple…you can't sell and grow your revenues effectively if you don't know who you're selling to, what they'll buy, and why they'll buy. The simplicity of that framework made it easy for me to follow and makes it easy for any sales leader or entrepreneur to follow to success. I was learning what a real sales strategy was. He was teaching me something new…something that I knew I would be able to use again and again in my future roles. It worked! And it worked fast. In a matter of months, the team was moving in a concerted direction because we were operating under a real sales strategy for the first time.

From 2005 to 2007, our revenues grew from $6 million to over $60 million annually, and we were acquired by RH Donnelly in 2007 for $345 million. While I had limited sales leadership experience, being a part of implementing this strategy at our company gave me a whole new perspective and helped to shape my future sales leadership opportunities.

And here's the thing: I've since learned that there are a lot of people who preach convoluted, aggressive systems as “sales strategies,” but almost all of them fail growing companies and leading teams. However, Amos's system worked.

I like to think of this time as before W3 and after W3, because the impact was so clear. Before, sales targeting was a free-for-all. “Call anybody you like,” we said. “If you think they'll buy what we're sellin', go for it,” we said. So our intrepid sales folks bunkered down in the trenches, pleading with accounts to find something—anything—to sell them, even if it was clear they saw no value in our ad space. There was no time for follow-up or customer development, let alone a funnel that could actually help direct efforts.

Fools!

After, sales targeting became a fine-tuned machine that put precision and accuracy at the top of the pyramid. We had a funnel. We had a process. We actually thought about who we needed to talk to and why they would want to talk to us. Now we get to tell our valiant sales folks what every smart team wants to hear: “We're giving you the list of high-probability prospects who already buy cost-per-click advertising and who will fit into categories on our site that will generate the most incremental revenue for us. It will generate this cash because we have a relationship with these customers that's as valuable to us as it is to them: this targeted list of customers buy from us because we can give them a better ROI for their online advertising dollar by delivering higher quality clicks from our niche search engine.”

This was transformative because now we had the ability to orchestrate the creation of organized lists for the salespeople based on the strategy that was best for the business, which fueled our segmentation and lead prioritization strategies for the whole sales team; and everyone made more money.

By following this simple approach, we went from throwing pasta at a wall to orchestrating a lavish dinner party so desirable that R.H. Donnelly wanted to pay $345 million for a seat at the table. Those who were part of the leadership team went on to start their own companies, lead $500 million sales teams at Viacom/MTV, and take other Los Angeles startups from nothing to millions. But for me, the most important lesson learned was what a real sales strategy consisted of. I took his approach to my opportunities and repeated the playbook with success. I've used the W3 approach when I started my own business in Sales Strategy and Recruiting and while at ZipRecruiter, where I grew the sales team from two salespeople to over 400 in less than six years.

What this strategy did for us at Business.com and what it continues to do for anyone who uses it is simple, but important: it personalizes the sales process. As a CEO, founder, sales leader, or up-and-coming sales rep just trying to gain a foothold, it's easy to focus so much on the numbers and the selling that you can grow blinders to the most critical person in the process: the customer. They don't have to buy what you are selling, so you have to know why they will benefit from it. You have to know where they exist and what they're worried about. And having that simple—but solid—formula to ask who, what, and why helps center the sales and growth process so that companies and customers can thrive.