Our Book
About The Revenue Acceleration Playbook
The most powerful driver of revenue acceleration is not your product, your sales execution, or your marketing positioning. It is how well you help buyers and customers define value for themselves.
Anchoring on buyer-defined value accelerates revenue performance at every single step of the buyer or customer journey. Adopting this simple rule of thumb is your path to top performance.
Buyers and customers are hungry for authenticity!
The buyer journey has fundamentally changed. Today’s buyers have almost unlimited information about vendors, products and competitors from websites, peer reviews, and social media. So much so that it’s often overwhelming.
What buyers want more than anything in this environment is an authentic, personalized buyer journey that cuts through information overload to help them focus on their key goals and priorities.
Yet, most companies continue to pitch their product or their company story in ways that increase information overload, decrease authenticity and lead to buyer disengagement.
This book introduces a simple, go-to-market framework in which authentic conversations anchor every single sales, marketing, and customer success interaction, by putting your buyer goals first, your product second to create engagement, personalization, and momentum.
Grounded in practical application, the book draws on more than twenty successful company examples to show how an authentic buyer journey can improve all your revenue outcomes. It leads to more new opportunities, more won opportunities, higher account values and deeper segment growth.
Endorsements
“In the hundreds of business books I’ve read, I’ve never seen a concept as simple and powerful as the playbook approach to revenue growth.”
David Meerman Scott
Business growth strategist, entrepreneur, and author of twelve books, including the Wall Street Journal bestseller Fanocracy
“Sales is way more than simply talking up your products. The Revenue Acceleration Playbook shows you how to lead from a customer-value perspective instead, so you can scale your business.”
Verne Harnish
Founder Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) and best-selling author of Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)
The ideas in The Revenue Acceleration Playbook will change the mentality of your go-to-market team. Rather than ‘getting the product demo,’ the focus will be on making your buyers and customers more successful. That shift will unlock your team’s full growth potential.
Gary Fortier
CEO, Ready Education
“The Revenue Acceleration Playbook is filled with practical strategies to have intelligent, authentic conversations with buyers. The result? Unprecedented sales growth.”
Jill Konrath
author of SNAP Selling & More Sales Less Time
“Top producers need strong situational awareness. Playbooks break down each buyer interaction into digestible “plays” that can be trained and reinforced. It is a powerful approach to sales acceleration.”
Russ Jackson
VP of Growth Sales, NECI
“Anchor on buyer value early and often. That single lesson from The Revenue Acceleration Playbook will fundamentally change how you approach buyer conversations and pricing conversations. It can help optimize profitability and drive higher buyer satisfaction during final negotiations.”
Deric Peterson
VP of Commercial Sales, Verisk
Sales can feel harder today than going to Mars. The Revenue Acceleration Playbook guides you through transforming your go-to-market team around a trusted advisor model and helps build breakout growth.”
Mark Guthrie
Chief Growth Officer, Mutualink
Digital transformation for an energy, transportation or manufacturing company is hard. This book dramatically increases a vendor’s chances of success. Align the shop floor to the executive suite on a shared idea of value and measure, measure, measure to prove tangible results.”
Raj Atluru
Founder & Managing Director, Activate Capital
About the Author
When I started my career as a revenue leader, after 10 years as an academic at Stanford and the RAND Corporation, I turned to my friends in business for help. I needed to find resources on go-to-market strategy, market positioning, and sales execution.
The resources they shared were all about the product – positioning, pricing, promoting and selling a product or service. I remember thinking – “This product-oriented selling really does not work for me. What about the customer and what they care most about?”
So, I went back to how I as an academic led qualitative interviews with business leaders – always start with what is in it for them, always recap and speak to their areas of value, always confirm next steps.
In applying these simple principle to revenue leadership, I invented the authentic buyer journey and a created a better approach to growth.
Supplementary Resources
Learn here how to implement each play in The Revenue Acceleration Playbook with summary overview, video explanation, and then a step-by-step guide.
How Good is Your Buyer Discovery?
The heart of an authentic buyer journey lies in guided buyer discovery. The reality, however, is that good buyer discovery is a broken skill. Sales conversations should be about conducting GREAT buyer discovery. Ask the right questions, in the right order and you will…
Account Expansion Starts in the Close?
Uncommon Opinion: your account expansion really starts in the initial closed sale. Too many go-to-market teams view closing an initial deal with a new buyer as a separate activity from expanding account value after a buyer has turned into a customer. Sales does the…
Land with Your Endgame in Mind?
To do prospecting right, you must build a prospecting narrative that connects landing the first deal to account expansion. “Land with your endgame in mind” is how Ro Saccone, Chief Marketing Officer at Planet, put it in a recent call I had with her. “We try to build…
Revenue Leader Stories
You can read here examples of some of the more than 20 revenue leader stories in the book that show how an authentic buyer journey leads to faster growth.
A ‘Problem Finding’ Approach Connects Buyers with Genuine Value and Unlocks Growth.
Good discovery takes the guesswork out of sales and customer success work. It lets a new buyer tell us exactly why they are talking to us and what might motivate a purchase. It lets an existing customer tell us what could lead to an account expansion. The best…
Land and Expand Faster with a Mutual Success Plan
A good mutual success plan shifts the buyer-seller relationship from “closing a deal” as an isolated transaction to relationship building that connects each buyer-seller conversation around the opportunity to “continually expand value.” Broad goal exploration…
Growing into the White Space
Too often, go-to-market teams focus account expansion efforts on “selling into the white space” of the product capabilities that their customer has not yet purchased. In other words, they view the area of open opportunity in terms of their own product. White space…