Predictable Revenue

What Hacker News says

1. chrisvalleybayJan 2025
   Three years ago I started consulting as an interim CTO for a company doing sales and marketing on behalf of other B2B SaaS. I had to onboard myself into this domain and it was quite hard as there are many snake oil sales men selling snake oil.

   The first book I would read is Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. After this, in no particular order you could have a look at:

   - This is Marketing by Seth Godin

   - Positioning by Al Ries

   - The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

   - Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross

   - Traversing The TRaction Gap by Bruce Cleveland

   - From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin

   I would also have a look at the models created by Winning By Design [1]. But be sceptical! These models do however hold some value in terms of visually presenting the sales funnel and gaining understanding of land and expand.

   Best of luck to you!

   [1]: https://winningbydesign.com/resources/blueprints/

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2. callmeedSep 2024
   Predictable Revenue is considered canon for B2B/enterprise sales https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practice...

   But not sure how applicable to agencies it is so YMMV.

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3. JugurthaJul 2024
   >The sort of skills that would eventually allow me to run my own company/team/org.

   These are different things. Running your own company more often than not implies you have started the company, and the skills you need to start and run a company are different in and of themselves, let alone the fact they're different from running a team in an established company/organization where you never think about how the power is still on.

   In smaller companies and startups, the opportunity to learn is yours if you want it and the incentive to do so is survival. The company is small enough that you can, if you're so inclined, be involved in and learn about everything.

   I answered a few questions on some topics you might find relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482961

   There are a few replies there about communication and alignment. More (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25288605)

   A FAANG is so large that the acronym is just five letters, and procuring whiteboard markers to them could be the biggest contract another company ever had.

   What you want is to expand the spectrum of your involvement or "ownership". One way of doing that is to learn to sell into the enterprise.

   Imagine you are a startup and you want to sell your product to [insert your company]. How would you go about it? It teaches you many things: What problem does it solve? For whom is it a problem? Why is it a problem? Why now? Are they aware it is a problem? Have they tried solving that problem? What outcome and why wasn't it solved? What does winning look like (success criteria)? For whom? Who are the owners and stakeholders? Who has the budget? Who is the competition [it could be internal competition]? Will this make or break someone's career if it's a success/failure? Who can torpedo the effort? Who's green-light do you need? Who's non red-light do you need? How does that align with the company's strategy? How do you scope that solution? What features are table stakes? How do you manage the product's roadmap (what not to build and what to build and why)? Does everyone know why they're doing what they're doing and can they make decisions unsupervised? What's important for each one at the table (legal, security, IT, infra, finance, sales, marketing, etc.)? You'll learn how to reason from each one's perspective (even make their own case for them) in order to orchestrate and find ways to drive the effort forward.

   All these will be really useful because, even if you are still at that company, you'll have to learn how to do it to get buy in for whatever project or product or project you're working on or direction of the product you think is right, to get the resources you need, get the people you need (or to prevent adding more people, both are important).

   Do you hang out with people starting start-ups? They surely talk about the problems they're facing and you could learn a lot brainstorming with them? Talking with people starting different startups exposes you to a variety of problems, solutions, and thought processes. You could notice patterns.

   A few books that could come in handy:

   - "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" - Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo's founder).

   - David Skok's "For Entrepreneurs" - https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/ and https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/zero-to-100/

   - "The Lean Product Playbook" - Dan Olsen

   - EnterpriseReady - https://www.enterpriseready.io/#features

   - "Lean B2B" - Étienne Garbugli

   - "High Output Management" - Andrew Grove

   - MEDDIC sales (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify/Implicate the pain, Champion). That's a known sales framework

   - Michael Dearing on Pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20160318134158/https://www.heavy...

   - "Predictable Revenue" - Aaron Ross

   - "Founding Sales" - Peter Kazanjy (I haven't read that one but I've heard good things)

   - "When software and people mix" - Gail Goodman - Business of software 2012 (https://vimeo.com/54076835)

   - "Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business" - Jason Cohen at Microconf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw

   - How to Build a Startup - Steve Blank on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwxTw4SYaPnxzSuovATB...)

   - Marc Andreessen's archive, but start with this: "The only thing that matters". https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

   Whatever you do, you know the whole customer development and product market fit and ensuring there's a market and that you have distribution? Most people know that and still, the temptation to build before is strong. That's why I started my list with Gabriel Weinberg's "Traction".

   All the best. Happy to exchange throughout your quest.

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4. saadgulApr 2023
   Garry Tan recommends reading Predictable Revenue and implementing the Cold Calling 2.0 sales system for recruiting customers. It has been life changing. Which books are worth studying for marketing?
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5. palidanxMar 2023
   I'd read

   https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practice...

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6. eltJul 2022
   It really depends on your customer. In my case, I did cold emailing. I was able to narrow down my customer by their job title/role and knew exactly who to email.

   I don't really buy into gimmicks or tricks to differentiate my emails. You can read a lot of "tricks" out there, but they come across as inauthentic to me and that isn't how I wanted to establish a business relationship.

   The thing I did was send very targeted emails (to people I honestly believed would benefit from my service) and every email was personalized (and I don't mean using a template and swapping out variables). I sent each and every email from scratch, one at a time.

   I did read a few books on sales outreach and prospecting ("Predictable Revenue" and "Predictable Prospecting"). They were helpful and I did pick up a few ideas from them, but I mainly took the knowledge and paved my own prospecting/outreach strategy from it.

   With that being said, I haven't done any outreach in over three years. All of my customers come to me, mainly referred to my service by existing customers. Or customers that leave a company and advocate for my service at their new company.

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