If you haven't read Predictable Revenue or it's been awhile, here's a short summary of select key ideas.
What Drives Rapid Growth?
Thinking that adding salespeople and working them harder is what drives sales growth remains a common fatal mistake with executives & investors.
Lead generation drives growth; salespeople fulfill it.
If you have predictable, scalable lead generation, you can create predictable, scalable revenue.
Salesforce.com added an extra $100 million in revenue in its early years (and by now $1+ billion), almost doubling growth, by creating a dedicated prospecting team following a "Cold Calling 2.0" process.
Why Salespeople Shouldn't Prospect
Experienced salespeople hate to prospect.
Experienced salespeople aren't any good at prospecting.
Even if a rare salesperson prospects successfully, they become busy closing, and stop prospecting consistently. It's not sustainable.
Specialization Is Your Multiplier
Prospectors should prospect, closers should close.
Specializing your sales roles is the single most important thing you can do to improve everything.
The Four Core Sales Roles:
On Scalable Growth
"Work harder" and "make more calls" doesn't scale. Don't blindly do more of what's not working - fix the systems first, then put more energy nto them after they're working correctly.
Great lead generation fixes a lot of sales problems.
Of course you only want to hire only great people, but the better your lead generation is, the less dependent you are on the quality of your salespeople and sales process.
You can have the most perfect sales process in the world, but if your lead generation lags, you will struggle.
Conversely, you can have a terrible sales process, but still do very well if you have great lead generation.
By promoting from within using a farm team system to develop talent, you reduce your "hiring risk" of new people because your talent already knows your products and customers, your culture, your systems and they've already proven themselves - or at least you already know the truth about their strengths and weaknesses.
On Outbound Prospecting / Cold Calling 2.0
The outbound prospecting role is often treated within a sales organization as a low-level, cheap job. If you treat it that way, you'll get low-level, cheap results.
A dedicated prospecting team with a successful process (which isn't "make 100 dials a day") is a very predictable way to create leads.
And if you can create predictable leads, you can create predictable revenue.
Traditional cold calls were ineffective at Salesforce. But an email-based approach, using simple text-based emails asking for referrals, generated 7-10% initial response rates & was wildly successful.
Hire hungry, coachable people (not too much sales experience), train them on your products and customers, and give them a systematized process and they can often generate all the appointments you need.
Sales Management
A sales team can only grow to the extent that top leaders (CEO, VP Sales) aren't needed to bring in or close deals.
Give your sales team the option to help create team goals & systems - even helping design their own comp plans - and you can get better results & more buy-in.