From Impossible to Inevitable How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue

Break your revenue records with Silicon Valley’s “growth bible”
“This book makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there”

Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth.

From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records.

• Pinpoint why you aren’t growing faster
• Understand what it takes to get to hypergrowth
• Nail a niche (the #1 missing growth ingredient)
• What every revenue leader needs to know about building a scalable sales team

There’s no time like the present to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster. Find out how now!

Aaron Ross founded PredictableRevenue.com, a consulting company that helps b2b companies triple sales growth & create self-managing sales teams. Aaron is also the founder of PebbleStorm, which is helping 100 million people "make money through enjoyment" by combining happiness and money.

Jason Lemkin is a Managing Director of Storm Ventures. At Storm Ventures, Jason focuses exclusively on early-stage SaaS/enterprise start-ups and helping them scale. He has led and/or sourced Storm’s investments in next-generation SaaS leaders including Talkdesk, Algolia, Pipedrive, Parklet, RainforestQA and Guidespark, as well as his own Storm-backed company, EchoSign (acquired by Adobe). He also serves an Advisory Board Member or investor in other emerging SaaS leaders, including Convertro (acquired by AOL), BetterWorks, AnyPerk, Retention Science, Showpad, FrontApp, Influitive, and Greenhouse.io. Jason is an acknowledged thought leader in SaaS through his creation of theSaaStr community for SaaS executives and founders. 

Preface: Systematizing Success xiii

Lessons from the World’s Fastest-Growing Companies xiii

Part I Nail a Niche

1 “Niche” Doesn’t Mean Small 2

Are You Sure You’re Ready to Grow Faster? 2

How to Know If You’ve Nailed a Niche 4

Achieve World Domination One Niche at a Time 6

The Arc of Attention 7

2 Signs of Slogging 12

Are You a Nice-to-Have? 12

Big Companies Suffer, Too 15

Case Study: Where Aaron Went Wrong 16

Your Current Strength Can Be a Future Weakness 21

3 How to Nail It 23

Where Can You Be a Big Fish in a Small Pond? 23

Work through the Niche Matrix 25

Case Study: How Twilio Nailed a Billion-Dollar Niche by Walking in Its Customers’ Shoes 31

The 20-Interview Rule 36

4 Your Pitch 39

If You Were a Radio Station, Would Anyone Tune In? 39

Elevator Pitches Are Always Frustrating 41

They Don’t Care about “You”: Three Simple Questions 43

Part II Create Predictable Pipeline
Introduction: Lead Generation Absolves Many Sins 46

5 Seeds—Customer Success 50

How to Grow Seeds Predictably 51

Case Study: How Gild Dropped Monthly Churn from 4 to 1 56

Case Study: Customer Service Excellence at Topcon 58

6 Nets—Marketing 61

Three Uncommon Approaches of Hypergrowth CMOs 63

The Forcing Function Your Marketing Leader Needs: A “Sales Qualified Lead Commit” 70

Corporate Marketing versus Demand Generation 71

How Inbound Changed in 10 Years Between Scaling Marketo to $100M+ and Founding Engagio 72

Heroic Marketing: When You Have No Money and Little Time 76

7 Spears—Outbound Prospecting 80

Where Outbound Works Best—and Where It Fails 83

Outbound Lessons Learned Since Predictable Revenue Was Published 85

Case Study: Outbound’s Role in Acquia’s $100 Million Trajectory 87

Case Study: How Sagemount Triples the Value of a Company in Three Years 89

Case Study: How Zuora Drives 60%-Plus of Its Growth by Outbound, Even When Accounts Need Nurturing for Years 97

Build an Outbound Program Right the First Time 104

Have You Been Too Successful at Inbound? 110

8 What Executives Miss 114

Pipeline Creation Rate: Your #1 Leading Metric 114

The 15/85 Rule: Early Adopters and Mainstream Buyers 116

Why You’re Underestimating Customer Lifetime Value 119

Part III Make Sales Scalable

9 Learn from Our Mistakes 123

Growth Creates More Problems Than It Solves—But They Are Better Problems 123

Top 12 Mistakes in Building Sales Teams 124

Advice from the VP Sales behind LinkedIn and EchoSign 126

10 Specialization: Your #1 Sales Multiplier 129

Why Salespeople Shouldn’t Prospect 129

Case Study: How Clio Restructured Sales in Three Months 132

Can You Be Too Small, or Too Big, to Specialize? 134

Specialization: Two Common Objections 136

Specialization Snapshot at Acquia 137

11 Sales Leaders 139

The #1 Mis-Hire Is the VP/Head of Sales 139

The Right VP Sales for Your Stage 140

Ten Favorite Interview Questions 143

12 Hiring Best Practices for Sales 146

If You’re a Startup: Four Phases of Hiring Your First Sales Team 146

Simple Hiring Tricks 149

When Doing Something New, Start with Two 150

The $100 Million HubSpot Sales Machine: Recruiting and Coaching Essentials 152

Case Study: How to Cut Down on Wasted Interviewing 154

13 Scaling the Sales Team 157

If You’re Churning More Than 10% of Your Salespeople, They Aren’t the Problem 157

Three Ways to Cut Churn and Increase Sales Motivation While You Scale 160

Advice to CEOs: Put Nonsales Leaders on Variable Comp Plans, Too 164

Are Your Enterprise Deals Taking Forever? 166

Five Key Sales Metrics (with a Twist) 168

14 For Startups Only 171

Every Tech Company Should Offer Services 171

What Jason Invests In, and Do You Need to Raise Money to Scale? 173

What the Headcount of a 100-Person SaaS Company Looks Like 176

Part IV Double Your Deal Size

15 Deal Size Math 182

You Need 50 Million Users to Make Freemium Work 182

Small Deals Get You Started, Big Deals Drive Growth 184

16 Not Too Big, Not Too Small 188

When You Can’t Turn Small Deals into Big Ones 188

If You Have Customers of All Sizes 189

17 Going Upmarket 194

If You Don’t Want Salespeople . . . 194

Add Another Top Pricing Tier 196

Pricing Is Always a Pain 199

Going Fortune 1000 202

Part V Do the Time

18 Embrace Frustration 209

Are You Sure You’re Ready for This? 209

Everyone Has a Year of Hell 215

Comfort Is the Enemy of Growth 217

Motivation: How Aaron Reached Escape Velocity 219

19 Success Isn’t a Straight Line 220

The Anxiety Economy and Entrepreneur Depression 220

Mark Suster’s Question: “Should a Person Learn or Earn?” 224

When a Straight Line Isn’t the Shortest Path to Success 228

Change Your World, Not the World 230

Part VI Embrace Employee Ownership

20 A Reality Check 234

Dear Executives (From an Employee) 234

Dear Employee (From the Executives) 235

P.S.: “Dear Senior Executives, Don’t Get Left Behind” (From the CEO and Board) 237

Are Your People Renting or Owning? 238

21 For Executives: Create Functional Ownership 243

A Simple Survey 243

“No Surprises” 245

Functional Ownership 248

Case Study: How a Struggling Team Turned into a Self-Managing Success 255

To Turn Things Around 256

22 Taking Ownership to the Next Level 259

Financial Ownership 259

Move People Around 260

The Four Types of Employees 262

Part VII Define Your Destiny

23 Are You Abdicating Your Opportunity? 268

Your Opportunity Is Bigger Than You Realize 268

How to Expand Your Opportunity at Work 270

You Need Some Humdrum Passions 272

Your Company Isn’t Your Mommy or Daddy 276

Forcing Functions: How to Motivate Yourself to Do Things You Don’t Feel Like Doing 277

Sales Is a Life Skill 282

Sales Is a Multistep Process 285

24 Combining Money and Meaning 289

Meaning Gone Wrong 289

What’s Your Unique Genius? 291

Ignoring Real Life Doesn’t Make It Go Away 295

Aaron, How the Hell Do You Juggle 10 Kids and Work? 297

A Thank You . . . 303

About the Authors 304

Index 305

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