Financial modeling aims to evaluate your plan’s coherence and reasonableness. Models test whether you’ll achieve your goals if your initiatives deliver the productivity you expect. They also make your assumptions explicit, enabling you to judge whether they’re reasonable. This revenue model allows you to analyze multiple sales channels and multiple products. It captures the idea that different channels will…
In Economical Growth, Chris Pham outlines his strategy for creating a top performing sales development team that creates qualified sales leads to pass to account executives to work and close. This digest focuses on Pham’s methods for outbound outreach. He outlines how to to create provocative email campaigns at scale, describes seven different value points…
Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules sets forth a humane and data-driven approach to people operations. Bock (who used to run people operations at Google) argues that companies that offer their employees freedom perform better and attract the best talent. Bock describes Google’s workforce policies and, more importantly, lays out Google’s methods for continuously improving them. Google relentlessly gathers data on happiness and…
A few years ago, I switched from being a lawyer to a technology salesperson. How did that happen? I became a lawyer because I loved the thrill of public speaking. Trying cases seemed like a way to do this for a living. But when I started practicing, I realized that this isn’t what lawyers do….
Andy Grove’s High Output Management is an example of sound engineering thinking applied to management. It’s also the best book on management I’ve read. The most powerful idea in the book is that managers should focus on activities that have high leverage, meaning that they they either affect the productivity of a large number of people…
In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters, Richard Rumelt argues that the essence of strategy is discerning the one or two critical issues in a business problem and concentrating effort on them. Developing a strategy requires making a clear diagnosis of the problem, defining an overall approach to solving it, and creating a set…
Getting to Yes argues that negotiations shouldn’t be a contest of will in which both sides state extreme positions and then dig in their heels to move as little as possible. Instead, the authors advocate principled negotiation: using objective criteria to craft an agreement that meets the needs of both sides. In their view, negotiation is about interests,…
Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman’s The New Strategic Selling is a systematic analysis of how to sell to large organizations. The book focuses on positioning yourself for success prior to a sales call by understanding the interests of both the buying organization and each of the individuals who will influence the sale. Sales success comes from demonstrating both individual…
The Challenger Sale argues that sales is not about building relationships or discovering needs through a set of diagnostic questions. Instead, sales is about teaching the customer something that leads them to be interested in your solution and controlling the conversation by telling the customer what they need rather than asking. Introduction Customer relationship is…
Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s Venture Deals (2nd edition)* is a perfect introduction to the key terms and strategic dynamics of venture financing. Their thesis is that founders should focus on terms relating to the economics of the deal and the control of the company and not be distracted by peripheral matters. Introduction Two elements of…