Context
In the early 2000s Salesforce was growing fast, and most customers came from inbound inquiries. Aaron Ross, who joined the company in those years, was given the task of building outbound sales: finding companies that had not reached out on their own.
Symptom
Salespeople who both look for customers and close deals almost always choose the second: closing is closer to the bonus. Prospecting gets postponed, and the flow of deals becomes uneven.
Cause
One role combined tasks with a different rhythm and different skills. Prospecting needs daily routine and patience; closing needs negotiation and time with a specific customer.
The fork
Hire more all-round salespeople, or split the work into specialized roles with separate metrics.
Decision
Ross split sales into four roles: handling inbound inquiries, finding new customers, taking the deal to signature, and working with existing customers. Each role got its own metrics and its own procedure for handing the customer to the next.
Execution
The prospecting team wrote short emails to company executives asking who was responsible for the relevant area. Such an email got a reply more often than a cold call. The contact they found was passed to the salesperson who ran the deal.
Outcome
According to the authors of *Predictable Revenue* (2011), this system helped Salesforce generate more than $100 million in additional recurring revenue. Splitting the roles has since become common practice in B2B sales.
What it means for you
Predictable sales come from the structure, not from the talent of individuals. When each role has its own task and its own metric, you can see at which step customers are lost.
- Who in your company is responsible for finding new customers if the salespeople are busy with deals?
- Can you say at which stage of the funnel you lose the most customers?
- What happens to sales if your best salesperson leaves?
We would start by laying out the customer's path in stages and calculating the conversion of each step. That calculation alone usually shows where customers are lost.
Key dates
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| early 2000s | Aaron Ross builds an outbound sales team at Salesforce |
| 2011 | *Predictable Revenue* is published (Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler) |
Sources
- Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler. *Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com*. PebbleStorm, 2011: Source
The $100 million figure is the authors' own claim; there is no independent confirmation in Salesforce's filings.
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