Why Sales People shouldn’t Prospect – An interview with Aaron Ross

David Skok - In this article I interview Aaron Ross, co-author of a new book, Predictable Revenue. Aaron discusses his experience at Salesforce.com starting a new group that used an innovative outbound prospecting approach (involving no cold calls) to create new leads. Aaron’s group came up with several important breakthroughs which enabled them add over $100m in incremental recurring revenues over a few short years. This article reviews some of those best practices which provide a recipe for others to make outbound prospecting a repeatable and predictable revenue generator.

As most of my readers know I am a huge fan of using marketing to develop the lead flow for sales people so they don’t have to do cold calling. The main reason for this is the high cost of salespeople, and as a result, the high cost per lead that is created using this technique. However in certain situations, it does make sense to augment marketing with outbound cold calling.

The right situation is likely to have the following characteristics:

• Marketing is not producing the right kinds of leads, or enough leads.
• You have a clear set of target customers that are likely to be the biggest, or best suited, customers for your particular product
• Reasonably high lifetime value of customer that will justify the higher cost per lead. (If you can make $10k in the first year from a customer, this can be very profitable.)

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Understanding the Customer Buying Cycle & Triggers

David Skok - This article looks at why customers expect different interactions with you depending on where they are in the buying cycle. It also examines how specific events trigger them into a buying mode. It then explains how you can use this information to make your marketing more effective.

The Customer Buying Cycle
A simple way to look at the buying cycle is to break into three stages:

• Awareness – when a customer first becomes aware of your product. Or could also refer to the point where a customer first becomes aware of a need that they want to fulfill.
• Consideration – when a customer starts evaluating solutions to their need
• Purchase

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