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thanks Doug and I am happy to be here I'm actually from the Bay Area I grew up in Palo Alto I went to Stanford did banking in San Francisco but a few years ago I moved down to Los Angeles and I don't I love it there and now I'm married with a bunch of kids which you'll see in a second okay this is me so this is the cover of the book how many people here have read the book of parts of it okay maybe half well the book has been at least right now it's the number one two and three spots on the telemarketing list of Amazon because there's Kindle paperback and audio and it's also been the number one out of all sales and marketing books peak there so it's an all through word-of-mouth so it's been fun to just see this happen and to get the feedback and we've had lots of people say hey your book changed my transform my business or my life or or it you know really could use some work well maybe not now the sketch on the cover I caught the hot coal sketch and I think anyone who's been an executive especially CEO VP sales an entrepreneur can empathize with the hot coals in the middle now the idea is the the yellow part is when you start something a lot you get some early customers you shoot through word-of-mouth investors friends family networks you know you get your first beta customers your first few paying customers and you know may or may not be that hard but you get them that way and at some point you change your goals you decide okay we need to grow faster maybe you take investment maybe you get a bigger mortgage whatever it is like okay we need to we need to grow faster we need to double or triple or more and you start spending money on sales people or marketing or sales or who knows what and nothing works and you struggle through these hot coals trying to figure out well how do we actually go out and talk to people who have never heard of us and get them interested so every company almost every company goes through that transition Hawk holes and where you want to get to is the green side where you have some sort of predictability in your growth which is if we hire a salesperson spend X we're gonna get Y over next year or if we invest in marketing in some way we're gonna get a certain amount return you have some sort of predictability and where you go now I call predictable revenue is actually another word term for peace of mind revenue which is not do you ever ever have peace of mind in a start-up or tech company but you're gonna at least have a lot more on the green side than on the red side and I mentioned I was early at Salesforce I actually created the outbound prospecting team there which helped him almost double how fast they're growing and add an extra hundred million in a few years and since this is mid 2000 since then has probably helped them at almost a billion in extra revenue or five hundred million it's a lot and I left Salesforce in 2006 I've done consulting since then and so I've really taken the ideas of what worked at Salesforce and distilled them down I'll share a couple today I also have a lot of kids for today and if within a year we'll have eight the way it happens is through adoption not fertility drugs which nothing wrong in that but my wife is pregnant with one we just found out a couple weeks ago or three weeks ago she's pregnant again and we have three adoptions and on the way we've only told my parents about two of them so don't say anything because every time we either have adopt a child we've done one so far where we start a new one my father calls me are you sure you're gonna be able to handle it yes dad it's gonna work out alright I think that's it yeah Oh another fun fact is I've been pretty good about keeping about a 25 hour workweek for years since leaving Salesforce 3 I find when I work more than that I get more stuff done in the short term but I lose some of the insights with bigger picture things like the shortcuts like to say you know I do more the 20% improvement things but I lose sight of what can get a 200% improvement all right so let me start out by a little bit of a story there's this company called Acquia by the way this is uh if it looks it's not like a it's a Melissa and Doug kids chalkboard so does anyone here have kids all right I've only been married two and a half years so that's one of the story how I have eight kids within three years but a Qui has been a client there's actually the number one fastest growing software company in North America ing to Deloitte just announced and the way that one of the ways now they've done a lot of things right with their company and they were already succeeding before they hired me and started doing we're going to talk about but one of the things that has worked for them and has given them control over how fast they grow is creating a prospecting team an inside sales team of prospectors who just prospect who have a funnel like this and what they've done is they've got this math down where they've got expect these are sort of rough one prospector and again all this person is doing is going to find new accounts for incremental business who sends you know say a thousand emails a month and has about a hundred to come quick conversations twenty it says some twenty more in depth discovery calls or demos or appointments for their closers which generates you know let's say fifteen sales qualified leads per month for a prospector now they have an average deal size of fifty thousand in ARR annual recurring revenue so what happens is if they know ok we've got this one person who does X and we get Y and again this one prospector doing fifteen qualified opportunities a month again pass to a closer times fifty thousand a IRS generating almost a million dollars in qualified pipeline per month per prospector and so if you build a team of 40 prospectors you're looking at adding almost 30 million in revenue per year because unlike sales people were in general today if you double your sales team you're not going to get twice the revenue if you double your lead generation of good leads now whether its marketing or prospecting which are forced you actually can double your revenue because lead generation is what drives a new growth not sales people of course we need sales people and they have you know but if you're trying to double your company you don't need twice as many sales people you need twice as many good leads or at least twice as many twice too much pipeline so then aqua has an ability to say hey if we need to add and this is what they're doing they should have twenty prospectors now and within a year or five quarters they went from zero prospectors when we started to twenty because it was working so well and they're doubling again in the next eighteen months so this is how they're going to one of the ways you're gonna make sure they go public because they have some predictability over their sales over their growth I'm imagining most companies here could use an extra thirty million in revenue if you don't need it then you must have had a big exit already so now just one more example is a company called responses and I didn't put their name on the slide because technically I know it's been a few years they don't they've never been a good reference because they didn't like they don't want anyone to know about this but they went from twenty million when we started this is actually five years ago or six years ago and they weren't growing at all to now are two hundred million and they went public a tad like a nine hundred billion dollar valuation basting and I'll show you how this is they're setting up in like why the idea is I'm going to share important and one more example as a company what went well there were under a million in revenue and putting in prospecting team went from 1 million to 20 million in three years 82% of which was driven specifically by prospecting so it's don't have to be a big company you don't have to be a small company you just have to have a product that works where if you had more appointments you will get more sales they they make a huge difference huge do you think about it there's lots of things that help increase revenue great product word of mouth they're all important there's really not that many things that give you control over how fast you double or triple or grow by 10 times so my point is that lead generation is one of them maybe the only one I know to go from that you know sort of scattershot hey what are we gonna do to rocket ship I do this art by the way some people ask hey who does that well it's me I like I fit and I just started fiddling with crayons a few years ago and I had fun and come up with this but all right so I'm gonna share just a couple fatal mistakes that companies do in trying to get predictable scalable sales revenue now the first one is treat is trying to watch jump ahead but first one's treating all leads alike that's his baby Perry who's now 21 months she's got three vehicles you know this first vehicle is there a little scooter in the kitchen she can hop on scoots you know 20 feet bumps into the counter and stops hops off turns it and goes back fine if she just wants to scoot around she's also got a little red car with her big brother MAV who's force our adopted son in China so if he wants to play there's that and there's now she doesn't own this but it's a picture she got with a Ferrari in Vegas at a racing thing that was really fun by the way now the point is all three vehicles are great for their purpose but they're different there's a solo play right play with a friend and just sort of the fancy shot and similarly there's three types of leads seeds nets and Spears they're all important but they're all different and you have to know so like if you're building a house you're going to need a hammer a chisel and a saw but you need to know when to use each tool in what situation by breaking down so seeds really a word of mouth it's where you get started they're the best leads but they're really hard to grow and you can't really grow them predictably Nets are marketing you so broad you know broadcasting whether it's inbound marketing or any kind of to be SEO or whatever and then Spears are targeted sales new business development prospecting you know what I found is most companies start with seeds you know we're two mouths that's where you should start and then it makes the most sense to do prospecting because it can really be the most direct way to get pipeline and over time is you get clear on your messaging and content you build a successful inbound marketing campaign which actually it does take a lot of work in time but again they're all complimentary and I - we're not from my experience the most predictable direct way to double or triple is outbound that's what we do at Salesforce seen done it responses Acquia and other companies so now okay having said that and one more important point about I'm sorry at least types is again they're gonna have different funnels they're gonna have different ideal customer ideal customer profiles they could have different ways that you generate them and and handle them so in the last point is if you have investors if who here is actually on a board either as the founder or investor executive not so many but the point is maybe Jim can if that's what this is in a board meeting when you're doing sales projections and lead generation projections if you're a smaller company and you've had a lot of word-of-mouth and you think you're gonna double revenue by doubling the number of leads next year then you're not and you're just you're gonna totally miss your projections so having this kind of sense of what types it leads you have and what you need and conversion rates you can make much more effective in realistic projections with the board so that you don't look stupid when you totally fluff your numbers flub I guess flub when your numbers next year because you're lead gen I'd expectations were completely wrong all right so second fatal mistake is really not specializing your sales people enough like to say that there's a popular article called why paper why sales people shouldn't prospect that the guy named David skok wrote about my book it's a great article so here I'm not sure how many people think sales people should prospect and do their own prospecting I think Silicon Valley is now a little more progressive but still sales people shouldn't prospect and there's three reasons make they're not any good at it really they don't like to do it and it's not repeatable as soon as the salesperson is even if they're any good at it if they generate a pipeline for themselves then they get so busy working the pipeline they can't prospect and they get into this rollercoaster up and down up and down it's not predictable so it's like teaching pigs to sitting which is hate trying to get salespeople to generate their own pipeline to prospect effectively is frustrating for them and irritating to you I know I'm angling that phrase a little bit but you get the idea and I said it's sort of like my son eight-year-old son Valentin X he's nine he's had a birthday whoo yeah I could try to get him to sit still but it's just I get totally frustrated and it doesn't work from him either so helping him run round is what makes us both happier now here's these four core sales rules and this really is probably the most important idea today if you take away is you have to specialize your salespeople even if you only have one person and I'll get to how you do that so there's these four roles top left is is outbound prospecting all right so this is prospectors who prospect they don't handle inbound leads they don't do telemarketing to fill event seats they don't do paperwork for account executives they prospect the second role bottom-left number two inbound reps or become market market response reps or lead qual reps they basically are handling any kind of inbound leads you're getting you know now if you're not getting you probably need at least one hundred a month or a couple hundred a month or something before it makes sense to have someone doing that but the idea that function is all they do is respond to inbound leads now both those roles sort of qualify and prequalify opportunities or leads to generate and pass to the salespeople who are closer is number three and then they do close new business and once you have customers there's different kinds of post sales support account management customer success renewals on the far right now okay I mentioned this if you don't if you have your salespeople doing everything you will not be able to scale I can say that for a fact I think most companies also wait too long to specialize they wait you wait till maybe you've got four or five or six people where you can start where you've got one or two for example if you have two hires one should probably be a prospector and one should probably be a closer or you don't specialize enough where you have closers say if you know a few closers and you've got a couple junior salespeople who do a mix of the inbound lead qualification and prospecting it won't work long term you're not gonna you're not gonna be able to create predictable revenue you're not gonna be able to scale now there's good reasons for this because when you actually break apart specialize your sales people you get a lot more sites until what's working what's not if you have ten salespeople doing everything and some people aren't making their number you can't tell if it's they're not getting enough leads if the leads aren't any good if they can't qualify them if they can't close them who knows because they're doing everything but when you have people prospecting in Mount Olive quaffing closing so much easy to see it's gonna break apart like what's working what's not so that helps you not only getting insights into how do you how do you make each function work well but because you have a farm team system and you have these you know different groups working together it's much more scalable I mean this is one of the keys of how Salesforce is being able to grow from when I was there's maybe 150 people at Salesforce when I started and maybe I don't know 30 people in sales I'm 50 with the most I don't remember exactly and they have 3,000 salespeople today they can do that and it's work to you after year because they have so many different kinds of specialties and roles and they have a great prospecting team they have like 200 people around the world who prospect today so this is why you know again if there's only one idea you take away today it's how can you start to specialize if you're not today this is an example if you have prospectors and closures at one point at what point you pass the lead over I think prospectors are helping build lists making first contact having initial conversations with prospects making sure there's some kind of fit before they actually bring in an Account Executive that they're working as a team and here's an example prospecting funnel so similar to the Acquia one at the beginning you know thousand emails out against a number of responses hunt you know with our templates it's sort of shortened suite referral template should get a seven to nine percent response rate least of conversations leads to demos or appointments leads to qualified opportunities of which take 20% you close which leads to a certain specific amount of revenue which so predictable lead generation can give you predictable revenue so last point here and then we'll have a lot of time for Q&A because I know this idea specialization brings up a lot of questions especially if you have a smaller sales team or if you have a larger sales team but they're not specialized to be but this last point is dad called dabbling and outbound you know I think for me I'm a little biased because obviously I mean creating the outbound team at Salesforce and with other companies I've just seen how it can work I've seen the dramatic difference it can make in changing a company I mean 20 million to 200 million because of this