Book · ~250 pages

Predictable Revenue

Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler · predictablerevenue.com Paid Intermediate

This is the book that made outbound prospecting a repeatable discipline instead of a guessing game, built on the Salesforce.com playbook that added $100 million in recurring revenue. It gives you a structured way to define, source, and qualify a target list rather than treating it as a one-off scramble.

  • Separate the work of building and qualifying a list from the work of closing, they need different skills and time
  • A small number of well-qualified target accounts consistently outperforms a large unqualified list
  • Treat your prospect list as a system you refine over time, not a spreadsheet you build once

It answers 4 questions

  1. Is cold outreach even worth it, or is it just spam that hurts my brand?
  2. How do I build a targeted list of the right people to cold email?
  3. What's a good response rate for cold email, and how do I know if mine is broken?
  4. How do I cold email people at big enterprises when I'm a small unknown startup from outside the major hubs?

Read with it

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  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. An Indian founder story where the early demand test was manual, cold emails and direct outreach to find the first customers... Prime Venture Partners Podcast Podcast · ~50 min How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a Global SaaS Leader Prime Venture Partners
  4. A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to win your first 10 B2B customers Lenny Rachitsky
  5. Video · ~20 min How To Talk To Users | Startup School Gustaf Alstromer
  6. Before any of your outreach copy matters, you need the right person's actual email, and Hunter is the most widely used,... Hunter.io Tool Hunter (Email Finder and Verifier) Hunter
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