From Impossible to Inevitable

By Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
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This book is built around what is called The Seven Ingredients of Hypergrowth:

Nail a niche, which is about defining your focus and ensuring you are ready to grow. 

Create predictable pipeline, which about “seeds” (using existing successful customers), “nets” (classical inbound marketing programs), and “spears” (targeted outbound prospecting) campaigns to create the opportunities sales needs to drive growth.

Make sales scalable, which argues convincingly that specialization is the key to scalable sales. Separate these four functions into discrete jobs:  inbound lead handing, outbound prospecting, selling (i.e., closing new business), and post-sales roles (e.g., customer success manager).  In this section they include a nice headcount analysis of a typical 100-person SaaS company.

Double your deal size, which discusses your customer mix and how to build a balanced business built off a run-rate business of average deals topped up with a lumpier enterprise business of larger deals, along with specific tactics for increasing deal sizes.

Do the time, which provides a nice reality check on just how long it takes to create a $100M ARR SaaS company (e.g., in a great case, 8 years, and often longer), along with the wise expectations management that somewhere along the way you’ll encounter a “Year of Hell.”

Embrace employee ownership, which reminds founders and executives that employees are “renting, not owning, their jobs” and how to treat them accordingly so they can act more like owners than renters.

Define your destiny, which concludes the book with thoughts for employees on how to take responsibility for managing their careers and maximizing the opportunities in front of them.

The book is full of practice advice and real-world stories, full of recipes and tactics for how to improve each piece of your go-to-market machine.

Hakan Ozturk

Hakan Ozturk
Founder, theCScafe.com, #1 Weekly Customer Success Newsletter

Hakan Ozturk is a Paris-based Customer Success leader with over 15 years of experience in the computer software industry. Passionate about driving growth and delivering value to strategic customers, Hakan has established himself as a trusted industry expert. As the Founder of The Customer Success Café Newsletter and TopCSjobs.com, Hakan provides valuable industry insights and daily-updated job opportunities worldwide in the field of Customer Success. Connect with Hakan to boost your career in CS and your company’s potential for massive growth.

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