Most companies treat revenue as something chaotic that happens to them, when it can instead be engineered like a manufacturing line, with predictable sources of leads flowing through known conversion rates toward a goal. Getting there means resisting the temptation to be everything to everyone, designing a sales team where people do fewer things better rather than every rep prospecting, selling and supporting at once.
Drawing on the outbound system he built at Salesforce, Aaron Ross walks through the fundamentals of predictable revenue: specializing sales roles, nailing a niche so your message cuts through shrinking windows of attention, and building the three types of lead generation, seeds, nets and spears. He closes on what he sees as the new precious resource after the pandemic, executive energy, arguing that founders who protect and follow their own energy set the tone for everything below them.
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Wow. I get to speak in my home my new hometown. Right? Moved here from Los Angeles earlier last year, last January, just in time to get settled barely before the lockdown, but better better to be here than in Los Angeles, honestly. We still have four of the older kids who are in Los Angeles since our six youngest are here in town.
I could walk here twenty minutes away, which is something I love about the city. Can walk everywhere. So speaking of which, and I'll get to that because that's one thing that I get energy from, which is one of the most important things to talk about nowadays, not global energy, but personal energy.
But before we get to that part, which will kinda be towards the end, yes, I've written a couple books. Probably best known for creating the outbound system and outbound sales system at salesforce dot com. And when it was a small company, and that helped power their growth, almost doubled their, enterprise sales growth.
The last book I did called From Impossible to Inevitable is really the one I recommend if you're a founder, a c level executive. It's all about how to create engineered growth. And, yeah, fun fact, ten kids. So, yeah, that original picture, that's probably not so much from, working, but as much as parenting.
Because that's pretty much how I look like every day. So there are really five things I'll touch on today. And then for some you, how many people here have read one of the books? It's okay. Yeah. Okay. We got one. Great. So it's all new information.
Now there's some principles that I find myself repeating year after year after year because they're so fundamental, the basics. It's my version of eat vegetables. So I'll go over some of those and some new stuff. But one, like, ultimately, and this is primarily for b to b companies, but a lot of principles apply to whatever you do.
Again, my specialty would be whether salespeople involved. So again, like a Salesforce, or I work with, you know, salespeople, but revenue engineering is really thinking, okay, if we're going to make money, and we think about it more like a manufacturing approach. Right? It's not some chaotic thing.
Like, there could be assembly lines. Now again, for any kind of company, but let's say business to business, this would be kind of ideally, you've got at the top, here are some different sources of lead generation and leads. It's kinda early pipeline. And we generally wanna know what where is that coming from?
In this case, it could be from account expansion, marketing, outbound prospecting, and maybe partners. Now how much of our goal how much do we want from each of those categories? And then what are would be our conversion rates, win rates, and so on, so we kinda know, alright, if we want to achieve a certain revenue goal next year, how much of what do we need?
Right? That's the goal. You generally have to be probably at least several million in size before you start to get a glimmer of this. But it's a goal. Like, to think it is more like LEGO blocks with a structure, you know, fit together.
And as you start to get past, like, one or two million of revenue, and you have enough data because you kinda you just have to hack and hustle your way to that one or two million revenue. You start to kinda analyze, alright, when we get certain leads, how many of what type turn into revenue?
When we if we look at our revenue, where did that come from? You're just kinda analyzing it back and forth to get that sense of how does our map fit together. So that's kinda how you think about it. But the really, the foundation for this is sales team design.
And for some of you that are earlier stage, just understanding, depending on the stage you're at, might affect the type of person you want to lead your sales team. If you're really early stage, you don't want a really senior person necessarily. I mean, there's always exceptions to every rule, but you're thinking, okay, where we are, the type of person just because they worked at a big company, like a Salesforce dot com, Oracle, or Zendesk, or whatever, that doesn't mean they're a great fit for where we are.
And think baby steps. Like, you're really early stage is anyone here actually currently building their first sales team? Okay. A few hands. Think step by step. So usually, the CEO should be selling first. You've got that hands on experience for what it's like, for what works and what doesn't.
And again, this is a generalization, but you can think more smaller steps. And then you would get, like, a junior person to help you do what you're already doing. Right? And then you would usually promote them or hire a salesperson. So SDR means like a junior salesperson, like appointment setting, AE account executive.
So you kinda end up with a c e you know, a founder selling, get a junior person, senior person, and then you get a couple of each. And then you've got something working, you tend to look for a leader. So it's not exactly these steps.
This is more of a a pretty common scenario. It's really thinking more smaller steps. And this is an old idea for now, which is salespeople really shouldn't prospect much. Like, this is it's still around this idea, especially in Europe, even in the States.
But they're not good at it, they don't like to do it. It's not a high value use of an experienced person. So really, the foundational idea of a sales team is think about a sports team. There's no sports team where the coach says, everybody go out and attack and defend and play goalie.
Alright? That's the same thing here, which is in a sales team, even when you're one person, start thinking about we have attacker, you know, you have different jobs. So outbound prospecting is I'm sorry. Lead responding inbound leads, if you've got them, is one type of job.
Another one is outbound prospecting, signing new customers, and supporting current customers, which could look like customer success or renewal. You know, there's a bunch of jobs there. And it's not that these are the right jobs exactly. The idea is you get people doing fewer things better.
Right? Kinda Lego blocks that you're sticking together. Right? And when you do do this, this creates a lot more the foundations for growth. Insights for which you need to understand what's working and what's not. The predictability, the ability to make it easier to hire, train, or ramp people.
And you can also create a farm team of junior people that you can grow up through the ranks. Right? But this is that's the foundation for making the team successful. If you don't do that, if you have a team of a bunch of salespeople all doing everything, it makes everything harder.
And a couple of rules of thumb. When you're creating a new team, it takes months, not weeks, to get it up and running and working. And if you can do it with two people in a new job, it's better because they can support each other, especially when everyone's remote.
And it's just lonely doing that something by yourself. Can't always do two, but it's nice when you can. There's all kinds of ratios out there. This is a more well understood of type of selling, and winning by design does a lot of there's a lot of people who pub and Baldurton has a great playbook.
There's lots of great material. These are just a couple common questions in terms of thinking, alright, if I have a few hundred leads a month, probably need like one person just for those leads. So just to respond to them and pass the good ones to sales.
And if I do have a prospector, they could support, you know, up to maybe four salespeople, but not more than that because, again, they get scattered and diffused. People so more jobs, so people can do fewer things better. That is the the principle and the lesson.
You might do the way you do your jobs could be different. It's like another team, like development. You don't have developers. I mean, are some full stack developers, but generally, you get front end, back end, QA, database. Same idea here. It's just it's not historically how it was done with sales.
Now, nailing a niche. Again, we have a crazy busy world. There's like, is anyone here not overwhelmed? If the answer is no, that's a correct answer. But same thing for prospects and for your salespeople or marketing people, it's really hard in this overwhelming world, Like, where do you focus?
What's out there? And so we're looking for ways to systematize kind of a market message fit, and especially if you are used or dependent on relationships to grow. And this could be big companies too. Like, Red Hat is completely dependent on their brand and relationships.
So it's not just small companies. They're in fact, a lot of the biggest companies, Cisco, which is Red Hat, like, are dependent a lot on brand. How do you kinda get off that dependency? And by the way, relationships, amazing, but they create a a ceiling.
And how can you create a way to create paid growth, whether it's through outbound marketing or prospecting or or other manners? And again, this is not just for it's for small companies, kinda nailing a niche, but also for big. If I'm a salesperson at Oracle, or I'm a buyer, I'm trying to buy something from Oracle, like, what this it's so confusing.
So the idea is there's all this stuff out there, and there's only more stuff. How can you take all the things that you can do and boil it down to your prospects and make it really obvious how that you can help them? And it's hard to do.
Because all this like, too much stuff on your website, in your emails, it just confuses people. There's this temptation which is, oh, if I just put in that one more feature, then someone else might want that. I don't wanna miss something. But at some point, there's too much stuff, and people aren't going to invest their mental energy to figure it out.
Like, simplicity is really key and challenging. And when they're confused, they they're not gonna say they're confused. They'll say things like, oops. There you go. A little fast on the button there. Later, I don't know, they'll bounce from your website. They just won't engage because it's take it takes too much mental energy for them to kinda process what you're doing.
Like, people's, like, mental, kinda like, windows of attention are getting smaller every year. And so your message has to be that much sharper to fit into that little, you know, window sill. Is that right? It's not really correct. The little window opening of their attention.
Now I learned a lot about this through doing outbound prospecting for years. Right? How to start conversations with people who've never heard of me or some company I was helping. And so it's really like this whole psychological exercise. And think about this this this is from the impossible to inevitable book, this arc of attention.
So if you think about it, this, this green area, when people know you or your brand, they're willing to give you a lot more attention, a lot of mental energy to figure out, okay, who are you? Sure. I'll sit down for a coffee for half an hour.
You can talk about what you do. I'll talk about what I need. We'll find a fit. Sure. But as you start to expand and target audiences outside your relationships, what you know, it could be through paid it could Google Ads, outbound prospecting. I mean, there's infinite ways that you can do that to grow outside your pond.
Their attention starts to go, you know, through this you gotta cross this trust gap. And when there's people who don't trust you, how do you actually get them interested? They're not gonna give you a half hour. They're gonna give you half a second or three seconds.
Right? How do you get them interested at least for the next step? That's kind of this idea of nailing a niche. How do you engage with people who don't know you yet so they're willing to at least listen to you? And when I use the word niche, by the way, in the States, call it niche, but, you know, in Europe and Canada, niche, and it's not about thinking small.
Because I know if anyone has been from Silicon Valley or infected with that thinking, it's like, oh, I need to have, like, world conquering dreams. Gotta think big. We have to, like, change the world, which is not true. It's just but in this case, really being focused, not thinking small.
You're trying to do everything or be everything to everyone. It kinda mean nothing to anyone. So how can you it's a lot easier to make the the pond smaller than the fish bigger when you're trying to be the biggest fish in a small pond.
Right? So it's easier to be more specific with your targeting and your messaging. Like, who is our customer? What do they care about? That's easy to change. It's hard to change your product. It's hard to change your business model, which you can do, and a lot of companies did do last year.
But start with who are we targeting and why should they care? So I think the easiest idea to take away from this part is to think about, okay, if we are gonna differentiate or discern between the kinds of customers who need us versus to whom we are nice to have, what are the differences?
Especially entrepreneurs, oh yeah, everyone could use this, everyone should use this. That's dangerous thinking. So you go back, you get your first ten or hundred customers, whatever you have, and you go back, okay, some people did great, Some people failed completely. And there's a bunch that are like, okay.
For the ones that did great, who paid the most money, got the best result, you know, needed us the most, how are they different from the ones where they didn't really need us, but they were a friend, or they were just too tired to look around, or they kinda stumbled on us.
So I went through this myself, and I've seen this. And this is, ten to, you know, twelve years ago. I left Salesforce dot com. I did some VC stuff, and I was like, okay. What do I wanna do? I know I did I I knew I didn't wanna raise money and start a company.
I was like, alright. Well, I wanna make as much money as I want doing what I love, but I don't know what that means. So I created this thing called You Need Genius, helping people make money through enjoyment. I created this thing, my first book called CEO Flow, Turn Your Employees into Meanie CEOs.
But then I got married in twenty eleven and went from zero to nine kids in seven years. And there's a tenth just this year. Half adopted, right, a little bit of everything, modern family, two for my wife's first marriage, three bio kids together, five adopted, little bit of this, little bit of that, some older kids, couple teens, couple, you know, baby.
It's the you know, it's not potpourri, it's like a buffet of children. Right? Everyone remember that picture from the beginning? Yeah. That's that's but it's it's tiring but awesome. I had to make more money. Right? So when it came down to making money, like, again, whether it's a business or a person, it's really the same thing.
Who needs you the most for the most money? Because it's sort of like who gets the most value from what you do wants you the most, and focus on that type. And for me, that was really sales. I'd left Salesforce thinking, I don't wanna do sales, I'm so tired of that, like, what?
But I redid it and found ways to enjoy it more, again, and grew my income by eleven times in three or four years, from seventy thousand US to eight hundred thousand US, following a lot of the same principles as a person. So I've seen the benefits for myself and others, and when you do focus on fewer customers that are a better fit, who need you more.
Because I know it's a big world, it's so tempting with everything out there, but you gotta resist that temptation. And as you think about the kinds of customers you're you're gonna talk to, you remember that they don't care what you do. Software, server, they don't care. What can you do for them?
What's the result you're you're getting you that you can promise for them? So if you're a consultant, and there's just someone who said, well, we do growth consulting. Okay, what does that mean? Oh, well, we help companies put together boards of directors. Got it. That's really clear.
Right? This is my daughter, Aurora, and she'd say, dad, can you take me to doughnuts? And say, no. And at some point, she changed her message. She said, hey, dad, know, when we've gone for doughnuts, those are some of my happiest memories. I'm gonna treasure these memories.
And I'm I'll probably never get tired of telling a story, but you wanna speak the customer's language. Not who's in charge of receivables at a US hospital, who's in who handles patient cash. Not who's in charge of supply chain optimization, because like, what is that even?
Who handles second tier supply chain resiliency, or whatever the lingo of that team is? So it takes practice. Now this is kind of one of the fundamental ideas that people really appreciate in the books. If you are gonna grow, lead generation is your lever for growth, your primary lever.
There are others, but this one really is what can help you create predictable revenue if you can create predictable lead generation. Now there's three types of leads, and like at home, there's three kinds of princesses, and each have their pros and cons. A lot of pros to the classic political princess, a few more cons to the grandpa princess, and then there's the big brother princess.
Again, each have their pros and cons, just like the three kinds of leads in, I would say, business to business, but really, this works in any kind of business that I've seen. Seeds would be through word-of-mouth, customer referrals, relationships, your network. They're amazing, hard to get, hard to grow. Oops.
I gotta I gotta slow my finger down. Nets would be marketing. Right? Casting a wide net. You tend to get a lot of leads, but fewer of it that are a good fit. And spears would be outbound prospecting or outbound business development. You usually have a human with a targeted list, and you're trying to get meetings at specific sets of companies.
They're all great. They're just different. So when you are thinking about lead generation, the key thing is we get so obsessed with, like, what's the email template? What's the landing page? What's the call to action? What's the offer? And those are all important.
But fundamentally, what you're really looking for is the dashboard. What are the metrics that I can sort of say, what's coming in at the top, moving through which stage, conversion rates, what's happening here? Because if you don't have that, like this was our car in Los Angeles.
And if my speedometer was wrong, if my gas gauge was wrong, my maps were wrong, I didn't know where I was going, I'm not gonna get there. Same thing with your dashboards. Especially in lead generation. I mean, it's true anywhere in the business with sales and that lead generation is usually your lifeblood when you're trying to grow.
So just, at a high level for these three types, in every business, you want all three, just not all at the same time because they take effort to invest and build and grow. But the best way to grow word-of-mouth is really customer success.
Having a dedicated focused customer success team, which is an investment. It's not about customer satisfaction. It's about revenue growth. And my co author Jason Lemkin says, true like customer success is five times more important than sales. If you don't have that, you'll get you got nothing. Right?
And a lot of Silicon Valley companies will have in their first well, they have ten people. One of them will be dedicated to customer success. With marketing, right, again, the funnel is different. So seeds, nets, and spears have different funnel metrics. They're all kinda different.
They're all lead generation, different steps, but they're different. Different sales cycles. So I think the thing that most companies miss with inbound marketing are is they don't really drill down to all these different kinds of campaigns and channels, because a lead is not a lead is not a lead.
You get a thousand webinar leads, and they're only worth the equivalent of, like, twenty paid targeted Google Adword leads. Or that might be extreme, you know, one word-of-mouth lead is worth, like, five hundred webinar leads. So again, even within marketing, all your campaigns, you wanna really be very specific with, like, what kinds of campaigns and what are the conversion rates or results per campaign as much as you can.
The outbound funnel, again, pretty classic. How many emails, LinkedIn calls are we doing at the top? We're getting meetings, leads to opportunities, and revenue. I think the key thing is really, if you're doing outbound, you're focused on the number of qualified opportunities. Right?
Not meetings, not email, know, that's really the key metric. What's going into the pipeline? And Zohra, you know, everyone's a bit different. This is an example of a company that is probably a couple hundred million revenue, and sixty percent of their new business is driven by outbound.
And that might have changed after after the pandemic. A lot of companies might do more now because everyone's like, oh, we gotta generate leads in through outbound. So your met your numbers will be different. Some of the steps will be similar, but they have a goal for how many account plans they can they target bigger companies.
But the activity goals, meeting goals, revenue goals again, the whole idea of revenue engineering is we're trying to have a set of steps that lead from one to the next, and some sense of ideas of goals around activities and conversion rates, we kinda know, are we on track or not?
Now it sounds simple. That can take eighteen, you know, eighteen months from scratch to get to the point where you're measuring revenue in a predictable way. You know, it's usually if you're gonna start a new kinda lead generation program, it's probably six months just to go from zero to something that's working day to day that you're not watching.
This is not thirty day things. So I mentioned, you want all three. If you're a services company, you tend to focus first. Well, you always start with customer success, right, word-of-mouth. And if you're a services company or in a really complex environment, you probably need content marketing first or marketing first.
If it's hard if you find it's hard to explain what you do, start there. If you're a product or it's like a simpler, hey, this is what we do, outbound is usually the next thing you do. But eventually, you need all of them.
Now this last part is really kind of the it's a new so everything I've done is like the basics. Right? I'm talking about them then. I'll evolve them, but this is stuff that people need to be doing, and and it's, like, the it's too there's still a small percentage of the world's companies that are specializing their salespeople, that are really measuring their funnels in the right ways.
The new stuff now after the especially after the pandemic is really about, like, we don't have it's not even a a COVID pandemic. It's like an emotional pandemic, an energy pandemic. Alright? The executives I talked to, everyone's, like, tired. I'm guessing most of you as here are tired, whether you have kids or not.
There's just something that has changed in the world, and there's a lot more people today that are like, you know what? **** it. I'm not work doing the same work I did before, or I'm gonna change. I have to change what I'm doing.
Like, I can't do this anymore. I don't wanna do it anymore. We've got this blank slate. You know, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to rewrite what you do or how you do it. Everything's going towards spectrums. Right? You have it used to be binary, male, female.
Now not so much. It used to be binary, work from home, work in the office, not so much. It's very confusing. It takes a lot of mental energy. You know, the whole uncertainty of the pandemic is still eating away our energy, like the kind of the the the background noise.
Right? They're, like, just adds extra tiredness, this uncertainty, the anxiety, like, we gonna be able to have touring fast or not? Is something gonna happen to cancel it? Like, that happens all the time. So this is a I don't know. I'll call it pandemic. Why not?
And it's the thing I think the most about because it's the thing that really affects the companies the most. Right? Executive energy. The old precious resource was time and money. The new precious resource is executive energy. And I use the word executive because they set the tone for the company.
It's it's important for everyone in a company. But generally, the founders and executives, like, whatever they do will kinda set the example for the rest of the company. So if you start at the top and you can affect change there, it'll help trickle down.
And if I'm an executive and I'm tired, I'm gonna be a lot snappier, frustrated, anxious, and more difficult to deal with. Again, that's gonna trickle down as as a parent too. How many people here are parents? Oh, a lot. Okay. Yeah. You know, we've all had our good days.
We've all had our not so fresh days. Right? If you're a parent and you have not yelled at your child, don't raise your hand because that you're not gonna be here. Or at least in your mind. Maybe you've done it out loud. Maybe it was inside voice. So going back to executive energy.
Right? It's really important. That is the new precious resource. The old hard work was let's, put more hours into something. The new hard work is really emotional. It's dealing with fear, uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, loneliness. And, you know, that's the new kind of hard work.
I started seeing this in my teens before, but now with the pandemic, everyone's feeling it. So for me, I actually don't really believe I don't believe with the start with why stuff. I I don't. I think more important than that, at least for me, and I have my why, it's the family, but, you know, it's really like, who am I working with or who am I working for?
You know, what am I doing and how am I doing it? Like, the day to day, if if I'm doing something day to day that feels good or fits my style versus am I doing something day to day that's just like a grind on my soul?
And I had a grind on my soul the last couple years. Let's see here. For me, one of the best things I was able to do was separate from my business partner, the person who ran predictable revenue of the company, old company. We were energy vampires to each other.
So for me, and I'll just some examples kinda like how I'm thinking about this as I've been going through this the last couple years, it started even before the pandemic. What works? What drains my energy? Right? So energy vampires. Right? I had a business with one.
I'm out of there. Great. I feel so much better. Hallelujah. So who I was working with made a big difference. The type of work. You know, I was kinda trapped in very tactical, like, editing, like, cold emails, and, like, it just was soul crushing.
I'm out of that now. I get to work a little bit higher level, you know, like, c levels and more advisory, like, more interesting things. Sitting down to write. Right? Written some books, but, like, sitting to write has just been a grind for a couple years now.
You know, my family can be draining, task overload. But on the flip side so here's the things that aren't working. Here's some things that are working. And I'll mention my core I get energy from my family too. Right? Can get both. I I'm working with people now, some of clients, like, you know, one of these guys at Cisco.
We just laugh. He doesn't have anything to prove. We just have a good time, and we're helping or I'm helping them. For writing, like, I go out walking. I'll record some little audios. I have someone who kinda drafts it up, then they finish it.
Right? That system works much better than sitting down to write, which these days, just for whatever reason, feels like like drilling my brain. And I like really honing out what I like to do. So this c level executive needs advisory work, kind of new new new I I can speak.
A new newsletter I'm doing, really more about the internal path I'm going through, and SaaS consolidation. But the newsletter's got intimate moments as I go through this recreation of who I am and what I'm doing. And I don't know. It just feels good to do it.
So in summary, right, in fact, I'll go to the last page because that's my, the best book to start with, my email address if you wanna say hi or anything. It's, been a pleasure to the first time in almost two years to talk to people, and I hope you have a great time at Turing Fest.
And thanks, Brian, if you're around for putting this on. I mean, that guy, I talk about must be tired. Putting on an event must be so much, so props to him and the team. And, yeah, thank you very much. Hope you have a great day today.
