Aaron Ross
Predictable Revenue author
An AI built from 13 public sources about Aaron Ross's work. It is not Aaron Ross and is not endorsed by them.
Think through how to fill a sales pipeline the way Aaron Ross wrote about it: split sales into specialist roles, prospect by asking for referrals, target a narrow ideal customer, and fix the system before you blame the people.
Big ideas
- Specialise the sales roles: Ross argued that one of the biggest drains on sales is asking the same person to qualify inbound leads, prospect, close and manage accounts .
- Give someone the job of prospecting: In a 2011 post he argued that salespeople don't skip prospecting just because they are lazy .
- Ask for a referral, not a sale: Cold calls fail, the blog argued, because people dislike being interrupted, busy people get too many calls, and callers jump to the pitch with no friendlier way in .
- Nail a niche before you try to grow: The first chapter of his 2019 book argues that lead generation is the main lever on revenue growth, and that many firms are not ready to grow because they have not "nailed a niche" .
- Respect the tiny window of attention: Ross says early adopters, who trust you, are about 15% of the market, and mainstream buyers, who don't, are about 85% .
- Measure results, not dials: Ross told teams to track results such as completed scoping calls per week, and to stop counting dials .
Hire Aaron Ross for
- Finding new customers: Set up one person whose only job is prospecting.
- Splitting sales roles: Decide who qualifies leads, who prospects, who closes and who looks after customers.
- Cold outreach: Turn a pushy pitch into a short, polite ask for the right person.
- Your ideal customer: Narrow it to one sentence and one pain, and test it with paying strangers.
- First-touch messages: Shrink an email or call opener until a busy stranger can take it in at a glance.
- Metrics: Stop counting dials and start counting qualified opportunities.
- A struggling team: Find what in the system is causing it before anyone blames the people.
- Bigger deals: Work out what it would take for a client to spend ten times more.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Why Salespeople Don't Prospect (2011), Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue blog (byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- 5 Reasons Not to Give Inbound Leads to an Outbound Sales Team (2011), Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue blog (byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- Why Do Cold Calls Fail? (2012), Predictable Revenue blog (early post; byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- Do Your Prospecting Calls Pass These 2 Bottlenecks? (2012), Predictable Revenue blog (early post; byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- 5 Ways To Stop Limiting Your Outbound Team's Revenue (2013), Predictable Revenue blog (early post; byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- Grow Your Revenue By 10X (2013), Predictable Revenue blog (early post; byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- ExpertCEO: 3 Fatal CEO Mistakes In Creating Predictable Revenue (2013), Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue blog (byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- Who Couldn't Use An Extra $10 Million In Sales? (2013), Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue blog (byline now shows Collin Stewart)
- Aaron, I Want To Copy What You Did At Salesforce.com: ROI, Revenue and Costs (2012), Veronica Oquendo, Predictable Revenue blog
- About, Predictable Revenue
- From Impossible to Inevitable, 2nd edition (announcement), Jason Lemkin, SaaStr
- From Impossible to Inevitable, chapter 1, "Niche" Doesn't Mean Small (publisher sample, 2019), Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin, Wiley
- An Argument for Specialized Sales Teams (David Skok interview with Aaron Ross; our summary note of it, not the transcript), David Skok, For Entrepreneurs