Systematizing Sales Success (1/100)

I’m posting the entire “From Impossible To Inevitable” book over the course of 2023, with an observation at the end of each piece around whether or what has changed since its release…

There’s never been an easier time to grow a business. Ironically, though, while everyone else around you seems to be crushing their goals, does it feel like a struggle for you?

If you needed to triple your revenue in the next year or three, would you know exactly how you would do it?

Tripling isn’t magic. It’s not about the school you went to, luck, or working harder. There’s a template that the world’s fastest-growing companies follow to achieve and sustain hypergrowth.

Whether you want to add $1 million or $100 million, the fundamentals are the same. You can grow your business 2 to 10 times faster in honorable ways that feel good to you, your employees, and your customers. (In fact, the truth is the best form of sales and marketing.)

This book (From Impossible To Inevitable) shows you how to break growth plateaus and get off the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster, showing you how to answer:

1. “Why aren’t you growing faster?”
2. “What does it take to get to hyper-growth?”
3. “How do you sustain it?”

LESSONS FROM THE WORLD’S FASTEST-GROWING COMPANIES

The Internet’s filled with advice on how to grow your company — some great, some harmful, mostly outdated, or just nice to have. How do you sort through the clutter to figure out the few, big things that will change and sustain your growth rate?

Whatever your business is, rather than a 2% or 20% increase in sales, we want you to find ways to get a 200–1,000% increase in growth by learning from companies like:

• Salesforce.com, the multibillion-dollar, fastest-growing big software company
• EchoSign (now Adobe Document Services), growing from $0 to $144 million in seven years
• . . . and other time-tested hypergrowth companies such as Acquia (a #1 fastest-growing private software company), HubSpot, Marketo, Twilio and more who’ve broken (well) past $100 million revenue and billion-dollar valuation marks in record times.

Now if you’re like us, you want to know how the heck did they do that?
It wasn’t from posting a video that went viral or anything else that would make you say, “oh, they got lucky.”

Instead, there are repeatable lessons any company can learn from.

Success can be a system, not random. Revenue and growth can be (mostly) predictable. And they have to be, to take impossible goals and turn them into inevitable success, success far bigger than you can imagine from where you’re sitting today.

The Seven Ingredients of Hypergrowth

1. You’re not ready to grow. . . until you Nail A Niche.
2. Overnight success is a fairy tale. You’re not going to be magically discovered, so you need sustainable systems that Create Predictable Pipeline.
3. Speeding up growth creates more problems than it solves. Growth exposes your weaknesses. Things will actually get worse until you Make Sales Scalable.
4. It’s hard to build a big business out of small deals. . . so figure out how to Double Your Deal Size.
5. It’ll take years longer than you want. . . don’t quit too soon or let a Year of Hell discourage you. Be prepared to Do the Time.
6. Your employees are renting, not owning, their jobs. Embrace Employee Ownership to develop a culture of taking initiative beyond a job description.
7. If you’re an employee, you’re letting frustrations stop, rather than motivate, you. Stop waiting for someone else to fix it; flip your frustrations to your advantage and Define Your Destiny.

Follow the Impossible recipe to kick off your biggest growth spurt yet and make success Inevitable.

Observations: This preface section is 100% on point. I would like to add newer case studies to the body of work, since the ‘hot’ companies list and some details change even if the principles don’t.

Two areas Jason and I left out or didn’t go deep in:

1. product design and launching. We focused this book on comapnies that had “something” (even a little revenue) to sell already, and wanted to grow it. Peter Thiel wrote “0 to 1”, and this book was about exponential growth of “1 to N”.
2. people and team building. there is so much great content already on leadership, recruiting and people, that we focused on adding fewer, less obvious ideas throughout (like around hiring a VP Sales in the ‘Make Sales Scalable’ section).

What do you think? I’d love to hear your experience in reading or using the book in the comments.

-Aaron “Air” Ross