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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!

An Authentic Conversation lets your buyer define valueThe 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.

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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.

Buyers will build the target and bullseye if we just ask the right questions

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…

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Playbook: Mutual Success Plans

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…

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Playbook: Prospecting is hard work

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…

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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.

Revenue Leader Jarin Schmidt

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…

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Ellen Mayes - Burning Glass Technologies

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…

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Jon Hawkins Augmedix

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…

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