From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue, with Aaron Ross [Episode 87]

In this episode, Aaron Ross, discusses the lessons that sales leaders have learned about building a predictable revenue machine since the publication of his best-selling book, Predictable Revenue. He has captured many these lessons in case studies contained in his new book (written with co-author Jason Lemkin), From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue. In this information-packed episode we discuss his new book and other topics including:

• The steps required to plan for sales success.
• How to increase you chances for success by Nailing a Niche
• Why you can’t prove your sales model by selling to friends of friends.
• How to avoid being trapped in the Trust Gap
• The vital role that Customer Success plays in driving revenue growth
• And much, much more!

Want to learn how to accelerate predictable revenue growth for your company? Don’t miss out on this episode!

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Ross: Hey, happy to be here. Thank you. Thank you.

Andy Paul: Oh, great. so tell us a little bit about yourself.

Aaron Ross: Well, where do I begin?

Andy Paul: Let’s start with the nine kids.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. Nine going on 12.

Andy Paul: Seriously.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. At the time of recording this, we’ve got nine at home and there’s three more we’re adopting. So there’s a couple of 10 year old boys from China who aren’t related, who were, I think we’re picking up in a few months and there’s a newborn baby in Florida. We’re looking at. So for 12 kids and some of their, I think eight will be adopted either through foster or a national domestic or some other version. And four. a couple of my wife’s prior marriage, just a couple together from scratch.

a little bit everything.

Andy Paul: A lot of diversity, so cheaper by the dozen.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. Pretty much not so cheap. So not so cheap. Cheap?

Andy Paul: no. At one point you make a reference to the cost of a lease in Santa Monica. I thought. Holy cow. That’s a number.

Aaron Ross: Oh yeah, no, it’s five figure per month.

Andy Paul: Wow. Okay. So now we know you’re motivated to work.

Aaron Ross: That’s what I’m saying.

Andy Paul: That’s right. You talk about that. And we’ll talk about that in the book. So how’d you get your start in sales?

Aaron Ross: a lot of people, if you’ve heard of me already, they would have heard of the book, Predictable Revenue. In there I go into more detail but I think that book, and that was the precursor to the new one from impossible to inevitable, but it all goes back to, yeah, there’s like natural selling and professional selling. And I think in terms of B2B sales, I got started at salesforce.com back in 2002. And I actually got a job in sales there, and it was the lowest level job they had in sales. Cause this is all they had answering the 800 line and, making very little money and got very little equity at Salesforce. So I started early there maybe with a couple of hundred people, but as I say, not early enough. And I went to there. By the way, you might even be able to hear when the baby’s screaming in the background for lucky. It’s never quiet here.

Andy Paul: No, not with eight or nine kids. It’s never going to be quiet.

Aaron Ross: I’m literally in a closet cause I there’s no office, there’s no place. I have to hide in my own house to do any kind of work, but it’s worth it.

But I went to Salesforce to do sales. I wanted to learn how to sell because before that I started an internet company and it failed one and we’d raised venture capital and so on. But one of the reasons it didn’t work was because I as the CEO, founder didn’t know how to, I’ll call it professionally sell. Like every entrepreneur and anyone who accomplishes anything has to be able to sell. And if you raise money for business, if you sometimes get a promotion or a job, if you raise money for nonprofit, start one, that’s all versions of selling and you always have to sell. But it’s different then to build a company in, have a organized professional selling after that brings in money month after month.

So having a failure, it’s just okay, crap. I got to know this as an owner, how to sell. I went to Salesforce. I learned a lot there by being in the trenches. And it went on to, create called, the outbound prospecting team, Or the sort of cold calling 2.0 sales process that helped add a hundred million to their revenue in a few years, by now it’s probably been more than a billion. and that was what has made me, call internet famous in certain circles. So I never thought I’d want to learn how to sell or sell, but I’ve appreciated now how vital it is, how everybody needs to know it. It’s a life skill and it can make or break your career or your business.

Andy Paul: And it almost sounds like from this new book that you almost learned twice, cause you talk about, once you started your own business, that you sort of went through that learning curve again.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. it’s very different to be successful, working for somebody and selling someone else’s stuff. And then when you go out and create your own stuff to sell, it’s a whole new experience for a lot of reasons. Two of which is because, first you don’t appreciate how hard it can be to get something off the ground and not just so sell like a first thing, but to actually turn it into something you make money at. Second of all, when you create your own thing and sell it, there’s so much more emotional involvements in making it perfect that a lot of entrepreneurs, again, who might be very successful selling for someone else’s stuff where it’s like, Oh yeah, if you don’t buy the copier, what’s the big deal. But when they sell themselves, As a consultant or a product they make, or their idea, there’s a lot more anxiety over or people gonna like this. So there’s a lot more resistance to even putting themselves out there, putting their stuff out there because of this, attachment. Cause it’s me, they take it personally

Andy Paul: Well this book seemed to me, it seemed quite personal.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. A lot of parts are a lot of parts.

Andy Paul: It seemed like a story you had to tell.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. And I think Jason and I, because my coauthor, Jason Lemkin, he’s a, Uber, he’s a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and VC and founder of, the SaaSter business, which is like the, I think he calls it now, which is true, the largest community of SaaS founders on the planet.

But we both have been through the ringer, time and time again. Either ourselves personally, with our businesses or seeing people we work with or advise go through it. And it’s the idea of like, how do we, help other people avoid all these painful mistakes we’ve made or see people make time and time again in getting a company, either off the ground or just getting into a growth mode.

So yeah, the new book, isn’t it’s not about how to have an idea, but the idea is if you have some idea or a product or something, it shows you how to turn, how to make money with it and in some sort of sustainable way.

Andy Paul: Yeah. And I think the title, just so people don’t get scared off by the title with the hyper growth and thinking that it’s purely for tech companies. this is a great book for yeah. For SaaS startups, tech startups, but as you said, consultants, small businesses, anybody that wants to grow their sales. You really guys lay out a really detailed prescription for how to go about that from the beginning to the end.

Aaron Ross: Yeah, no, I had a client who said to you, they should make it a high school text. Cause if you really read it as an individual, it’s like the same things that make your company successful and growing can be very similar, with some twists to make you as an individual successful in your career.

Andy Paul: Exactly. Exactly. All right. let’s start at the beginning. And one of the early sections in the book, you talk about nailing a niche, which I think is a great place for us to focus on as it seems to be that the trouble spot for so many companies is they’re trying to preserve their options. and they try to, they don’t want to exclude any opportunity, potential opportunity and as a result, they don’t focus on the one that, is going to be the success for them.

Aaron Ross: It’s the fear of missing out, Which is I want to be able to, what, if we, what if we could do big companies and small or United States and the world and, financial and this and that and everything, we wouldn’t be able to everything, which just makes it very confusing to your prospects. And so they don’t know what you really do so they don’t buy anything at all. It’s the, what was this? The fable about the dog with a bone in his mouth. He sees the other bone in the water and tries to grab and he dropped,

Andy Paul: Oh, it drops it into my season’s reflection right on the water, right?

Aaron Ross: Yeah. It was the same thing.

Andy Paul: So really what you guys talk about is the fact that you can do more by doing less,

Aaron Ross: It’s yeah. It about focus. So we call it nailing a niche or niche. Being a Canadian we say niche. Are you in Canada?

Andy Paul: I don’t why I say niche. No I’m not Canadian, but I’m from Wisconsin originally. Maybe that semi-counts.

Aaron Ross: Our software company, carb, the iOS and Coover.

So I’m always hearing niche up there, but I say niche, I don’t know, they both work, but the point is when you, it’s not about thinking small in terms of niche, it’s about being focused. That doing fewer things better that standing being, standing out in one area, being a big fish in a small pond, in other words, and like I say, in the book, it’s easier to make the pond smaller than the fish bigger.

So in other words, it’s easier to shrink your tea, the sort of, the kinds of markets and customers you want to go after to fewer, more targeted types than it is to make your company or products like bigger and more able to cover more types of markets.

Andy Paul: Yeah, because the downside is if you try to do more, as you become less proficient in each of those.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. And awesome, and just confusing to the market. And I think what people don’t realize, and this is in the same section, is it when you, let’s take a small business or startup, but this is actually also true of even big companies, but let’s say you’re a few hundred thousand dollar or smaller, even that few, couple million, few million. And usually what you’re doing is you’re getting feedback from people who, the customers, a lot of the customers are coming again through word of mouth or relationships, or they heard about you or, and you vastly underestimate what it takes in order to go market and sell to people who’ve never heard of you.

Andy Paul: And you use the term unaffiliated customers, which I think is a good term for people to keep in mind.

Aaron Ross: And so so you get, let’s say you get 10 or 2050 customers and they’ve all come through some sort of connection. So they’re affiliated in some way, it could have been a referral, it could even mean that you have a buddy on the New York Times, and you’re able to get an article that way, but there’s some sort of slack you’re given. It’s not the same as if you’re truly cold calling somebody and they’ve never heard of you or your business, and you’re trying to get them interested.

So it’s a great way of course, to get off the ground. And usually you can get to like between one and $10 million, if you’re a company on the sort of organic or a relationship based or network based growth, but to be able to go past that, create predictable revenue, that’s under your control. A lot of this is learning what does it take to find and reach out to, and get interested and sell successfully to people who’ve never heard of you or your brand. And it’s a much bigger challenge than people realize.

Andy Paul: And you used, you referred to the term, the trust gap at that point. So when you’re making that reference to Jeffrey Moore and crossing the chasm and so on, but you have that trust gap once you explain that.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. So I started, I noticed this idea and there’s this there’s art in the book. There’s a sketch of the arc of attention-

Andy Paul: lots of Venn diagrams in the book. Good, good device.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. So there’s this arc of attention. And if you can imagine, just say on the right side of this arc, Caught there’s the trust side where others, if you there’s people who already know you in some way, and they’re going to give you extra time, it could be your mom or a friend.

So if you go to them and say, Hey friend, would you sit with me for an hour to listen to them, to this pitch? And how many practice they probably say yes, on the other side, the left side, there’s this no trust area. This is the people who don’t know you. There’s no connection. And if you went to them and said, Hey, would you give me 30 seconds? You say you’re in front of whole foods market, and you’re trying to get someone to talk to you. They don’t know you give me 30 seconds and they were using to say, no. I don’t know you. And in the middle, there’s this trust gap. Jeffrey Moore called it the chasm and across the chasm in this book, I actually explain, or Jason, and we explain why there’s a chasm in the first place.

why is there this gap in the first place. And how to get across it, but involves, there’s there’s a matrix and there’s these five aspects of nailing a niche, but you’re really involves how do you pick the right kind of target? Who needs you the most, Where you’re not a nice to have, but they really have a need for what you do and then how to find them. And what is that need and explain yourself in a way that they, it clicks with them quickly. Because you might only have a few seconds or fractions of a second to engage them. there’s people who don’t know you and, or your company. So in other words, it’s not going from these customers who know you in some way to customers who don’t know you at all in being able to market and sell to them, isn’t moving from San Francisco to San Diego.

It’s like moving from San Francisco to China or maybe sometimes to the moon. People, I said, vastly, maybe it’s dramatically, but there’s just a huge under expectation around how hard it will be for companies to get across this gap.

Andy Paul: Yeah and there’s five characteristics. You alluded to them before that you talked about in the book that I think are really important for people to understand as they try to nail their in their niche or their niche. Maybe we should just go through those and the first year talking about, popular pain, meaning it’s something that’s pain somebody has to have.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. It’s something that people, someone has to have a pain and it’s common enough where you have a chance of actually finding someone who had it.

Andy Paul: Cause sometimes, ironically sometimes companies get almost too focused in terms of what they think their solution is and the pain they’re solving.

Aaron Ross: And it’s specific, they can’t find anyone with that pain.

Andy Paul: Or not enough to build a company.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. Yeah. Again, pain, there’s a whole section on, are you a nice to have versus need to have.  You’re a need to have somebody. And so it may not be, people tend to spend too much time trying to sell the people who don’t really need them. So again pain, like where do people need you the most focus on them? So this idea of popular pain.

And then tangible results, which is you need to have some sort of concrete way to show them what you deliver. Beause they don’t really understand, they’re like, how much money can you make me? Let’s just cut to the chase. This is why it’s hard for a lot of consulting services. Or if you do like sell culture stuff, no, we make your employees happier.  But what I really, what do I really get out of that? So you have to have proof, case studies or proof. Tangible results of if we do this happiness workshop, not only what are your people sing kumbaya, but you’ll actually lower your employee turnover and save this much money. Like people don’t realize  what do I get. What do they get? And really laying it out in a concrete way. So that’s hard.

Another one is identifiable targets. If you can’t create a list of people you would go after, either directly or if it’s like channel partners or media partners. If there’s no way to target that list, then you can’t nail it really. You just gotta sit back and wait for people to call. So consulting, there’s a lot of specialty consultants probably found this place where if all you did was serve CEO’s with kids with bipolar who are under 10. Like how are you going to find them?

Andy Paul: Right.

Aaron Ross: And then there’s believable solution. So there’s two aspects to this, which is why should they believe your claims? Everyone now has the claim, Hey, we can double your revenue or we can generate leads, or we can make your employees happier. We can help you recruiting. It’s easy to make claims. Why should they believe you? That’s one. Plus if you do have a solution, they also have to believe why should they believe that they can do it? Everyone’s busy. They’re like, okay, I think you can help, but they may not have the confidence that they can actually implement it and get the results you promise

Andy Paul: or the confidence that you can help them become successful.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. So it’s basically, it’s the confidence in you and themselves together.

Andy Paul: And then the last point is, but you’d call it the unique genius. So how are you differentiated?

Aaron Ross: Yeah, it’s a bit of an X factor because it’s a bit of a catch all because there’s all kinds of things that really can give you an unfair advantage, anywhere from a certain kind of- Like there’s a company and their founder had 20 years of experience in the support call center industry.

So that alone can be part of their unique genius? But yet ultimately it’s what differentiates you? How do you stand out from the crowd? And it can be, like one of a lot of people for me personally, for my work, one reason I stand out is, my art. Or it can be anything it gives you an unfair advantage  is an X factor.

Andy Paul: Question, I ask all my guests on the show and I’ll take your answer and come back after the break is, so scenario is, imagine you’re been hired as a new sales leader at a company whose sales have stalled out. And there’s a high degree of urgency around changing the ship of state. What two things would you do on your first week on the job that could have the biggest impact?

Aaron Ross: Yeah, so there’s usually two things I do. One is a short survey, either sort of digital or in person. And the second is starting to figure out how to specialize the sales team to restructure the roles. Cause most teams still aren’t specialized, but specialized in sales teams. You’ve got the prospectors who prospect, closers who close, separate account management team. And so the sales people, aren’t doing everything- one person isn’t doing their own prospecting and closing and account management and responding to inbound leads. Those are the two things that tend to first, the survey exposes all kinds of issues you wouldn’t know otherwise. And this restructuring or the specialization is the, that’s the number one thing that will make everything work better. If it has not already been done.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I think it’s worth exploring that again for people in the audience that maybe again, maybe hadn’t read predictable revenue hadn’t excuse me, haven’t really been paying close attention to what’s happening in the SaaS world and other industries where the’yre really adopting the specialized sales model. Maybe break that down a little bit for them so they understand. If they’ve got people are doing full life cycle sales, now what the specialization does and how it helps them.

Aaron Ross: Sure. again, so predictable revenue was the book I wrote and there’s probably three main ideas in it. The first is that if you want predictable revenue, you have to have predictable lead generation. And along with that, there’s three types of leads. It’s seeds, nets, and spears. Seeds are word of mouth generated, nets are marketing generated leads and spears are outbound prospecting. And each are great, but they’ve got different funnels and expectations and ways you generate them. Now, another big idea was specialization.

The idea that a sales people shouldn’t prospect because they’re not very good at it. They don’t do it very well and they just can’t be consistent at it. And it’s very rare once in a while you have it, but it’s pretty rare to have a sales person that can juggle consistently both prospecting and closing.

Much more effective. Again, this is the number one. I always tell people if you’re not doing it, this is the number one thing to do. How can you create specialized roles as prospectors who prospect closers, who close, account managers, managing customers. And if you have inbound leads like an inbound lead response team, and the roles can vary a bit, the idea is you have more types of jobs, so people can do fewer things better.

And for example, it’s going to go back to the lead generation. Again, outbound prospecting has been my specialty for years, begins at Salesforce. And that it’s just having an outbound prospecting program can generate an amazing, a tremendous amount of predictable pipeline and predictable revenue growth.

And we had a company, an early client went from 20 million, this is a company called Responsis, went from 20 million revenue to 200 million in revenue in five years. And sold themselves to Oracle for one and a half billion, almost totally on outbound prospecting, but it doesn’t work and won’t work consistently or predictably, unless you’ve got people dedicated to it.

Going back to the specialization. So to grow with predictability. You need principal Legion. That’s not going to happen at least with prospecting, unless you’ve got dedicated junior people who were dedicated to prospecting and in partnership with the closers. Now I review in summary, these ideas in the new book, the form from impossible book.

But, again, those were the two or three big ideas from Predictable Revenue that I think made it. People would call it the Sales Bible of Silicon Valley now.

Andy Paul: Yeah, and with good reason. So the fourth thing you bring up in this book and you get into is another revenue center, which is your customer success and how that needs to be looked at as basically a revenue driving function, not just a cost center.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. This is one of these, again, it’s been four years or so since Predictable Revenue came out and I’ve learned a lot since then around what does it take to grow a company or what blocks growth. It’s all new, but it’s learned from, when people try to grow and didn’t work, like why.

So one thing that’s I updated and I mentioned this idea of called seeds or word of mouth leads in the original, but now look at the best way to systematize word of mouth. So again there’s seeds, nets and spears, three types of leads. The seeds are word of mouth, which are the best kinds of leads, highest close rates, fastest, but it’s really hard to grow them.

I n marketing you can run more webinars or you prospect and you can hire more people, word of mouth is tough. So the best way to systematize word of mouth is through a customer success program of some kind. Usually that means you’ve got dedicated customer success managers you might have- and in the way you do it can vary. And then in the book, there’s a case study on how you can actually run this kind of team, but it means you’re really taking a mindset at the company level two, which is we’re here to make our customer successful. So the kinds of products we build and the kinds of people we target, the way that we sell them and the way we deliver it are all aligned to have customers, the right customers sign up, get on board and be successful. Because when we do that, we have lower attrition. We have more loyal customers, better case studies, better testimonials. There’s a lot like Jason, my coauthor says customer success is worth five times or 500% more valuable than the sales. It’s really your foundation of the company. So it’s just this section of the book. How do you systemize size that function?

Andy Paul: Yeah. And also I thought the part that was really interesting is that people intuitively don’t really understand is that from a churn perspective, especially as more companies have service components that they’re, their whole product is based on or it’s part of their business is that your churn rate really has to be a negative number.

Aaron Ross: Yeah. So there’s a couple of things. One, I should want to repeat something you said, which is really important. Is the idea that customer success, whatever you call it, you’re investing in making your customers successful. That’s not a cost center. It’s an investment. Customer. Success is about driving revenue growth, not even customer satisfaction, right?

So you can have a lot of very measurable ways to say how customer success contributes to revenue or profit. And so on. And support and there’s these two sides customer success. I think generally I think of as like a proactive function or mindset, which is how do we prevent problems from happening in the first place, like the wrong customers or upsetting them.

And it’s compliment to customer support, which I think again, is reacting once there’s a problem, how do we fix it? So that’s, the goal is if you have this customer base of customers and you have low, first of all, none or very few are leaving. You want fewer than 15% of your customers per year to leave.

You’re always gonna have some leave. But the ones that stay they’re expanding and they’re expanding more than 15, not only to catch up and cover all the revenue that the ones that left you’re losing from, but they’re ups, they’re buying more expanding. And so you get, end up with negative or net negative revenue churn or net negative and on a revenue basis is to be the customers who stay spend more. So that’s where that negative churn comes from.

I think the best run companies are basically getting like an extra 20% per year in revenue growth from negative churn is where a lot of the best SaaS companies being run get.

Andy Paul: Yeah. And the people that are running those groups are their account managers in those groups have quotas oftentimes, right?

Aaron Ross: Yeah. They can, there could be different ways to measure them, the customer success team can be run like a sales team. And depending on whether you’re serving, one or more segments like enterprise versus midmarket versus small business. It affects, not only do they have quotas of some kind, what kinds of metrics? How do I serve it? I’ll give you, there’s a case study in the book on a company called Guild and their customer success team has three levels. There’s like an enterprise version. Where they look like basically quota carrying salespeople, but just working with current customers. And they have a sort of middle tier for mid market companies where they don’t have a sales quota, but they’ve got an attrition measurement or turn measurement to manage to. And there’s a low sort of like a lowest level tier group, which is more like a customer support function. So it’s a higher volume, but for lots of small customers, they’ve got.

Andy Paul: Excellent, good information. So where can people find out more about the book and about you?

Aaron Ross: So for the new book, the best place is fromimpossible.com. A lot of my current work. So for years, most of my work and we do in the consulting and the prospecting software, that’s all predictablerevenue.com.

Andy Paul: Great. Okay. So we’re gonna move into the last segment of show. I’ve got some rapid fire questions for you. You can give me one word answers or you can elaborate as much as you wish.

So what’s the most powerful sales weapon in your arsenal?

Aaron Ross: That’s a great question. How about my book?

Andy Paul: Okay. Which obviously is fueled by your knowledge of what you’re doing. what tool do you use for managing your own sales that you can’t live without?

Aaron Ross: Yeah, that’s a good question. My team.

Andy Paul: And you mean, I should ask them that question?

Oh no. They’re my tool. We were switchingAaron Ross: from pipe drive to Salesforce internally. Okay. And we use Google doc. I don’t know this stuff, but it’s basically, they, he, I know my team is my tool.

Andy Paul: They’re doing that. Who’s your sales role model?

Aaron Ross: That’s a good question. Do I have a sales role model? I feel like I do, my general role model was Winston Churchill. He in fact, as I mentioned, the idea of sales is a life skill. He sort of failed to sell England on the value of getting ahead of the German problem, but then he successfully sold England on standing up to Germany and sticking through to the end of World War II. So I guess you gotta think is any kind of, there’s a new book. There’s a section called Do The Time about the journey. And there’s ups  and downs and when you read about what he had to go through and England had to go through, especially, just, it’s amazing, very impressive. The kind of grit and just determination and even know things like he had depression and what he was able to accomplish,

Andy Paul: Okay. Winston Churchill. Good answer. So besides your own books, what’s one book every sales person should read?

Aaron Ross: There was three books. I’ll pick one, sorry, the three most influential books on me, my sales career aren’t sales books actually. The simplest one, the one I would recommend first, everyone is called Wooden. It’s about the UCLA basketball coach, John wooden. It’s like a little blue book on Amazon. And the other two I’ll just mention one is called The Toyota Way. It’s about lean manufacturing, which is to me very inspirational in terms of the sales systems that I did at Salesforce and later. And the last one is The Four Agreements.

Andy Paul: Tough question is, you know what, when you want to go and get away from it all, what’s the, what’s your favorite music to listen to?

Aaron Ross: Yeah, cause frankly I can get away from it all it’s possible, but, no, right now, actually the whole family almost none, not the whole family, but we hold out the Christmas Carols. There’s a station here in Los Angeles called Coast 103.5. And it’s always fun. And especially so we will play in, but the then my daughter, my daughter Aurora, who’s now about to be 13.

We’ll do a freestyle Christmas Carol. I wouldn’t call it rapping, but we’ll just make up new words as the song is playing and it’s fun. So it’s probably the most fun, Music that we play, at least for me.

Andy Paul: Alright. So last question. What’s the one question you get asked most frequently by salespeople?

Aaron Ross: It’s usually stuff like, how do I sell more? I think that’s just not a helpful question. It’s going up to someone, Hey, how do I live my life better? You got to come up with a more, I think the more specific, the more, yourself in the kinds of problems you’re dealing with and what you want to do, the easier it is to come up with a better question or a question that is not only easier to answer, but it’s more useful to

Andy Paul: Yeah. Good skill for selling,

Aaron Ross: Yeah, no it’s and for life is sales is a life skill.

Andy Paul: That is that’s in the last section of your book. And I think it’s a great,

Aaron Ross: You can’t accomplish anything in life without being able to sell yourself. You’ve got your ideas or some kind of product.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I think, in Dan Pink’s book to sell is human, I think, but fully three quarters of us workers identify themselves as having to sell an idea or something as part of their job.

Aaron Ross: Yep. So actually, if I was getting my soap box for the last few seconds, I think a lot of people resist, oh, I don’t want to have to sell, I don’t have to manipulate people. I don’t want to have act, why can’t I just have people come to me? And I empathize with that cause I’ve been there. I felt the same things. And I think if you just get over it and say, look, if you learn how to sell, you can sell in an honest and in ways that help others and yourself at the same time. Again, you’re not going to be able to do anything. You’re not gonna build the grow without learning how to sell and sell. so don’t hate the word sell is not a four letter word, learn to embrace it rather than resistant.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I say in my books that selling is a service.

It can be,

Yeah. customers, customers are looking for help to make the right decision about a specific product or service. You’re providing a service to help them do that. All right. good. I want to thank you for joining me, my guest again today. Aaron Ross, author of the number one best seller, Predictable Revenue, and a new book From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hypergrowth Companies Create Predictable Revenue. Aaron, thanks for being on the show.

Aaron Ross: Andy. Hey, thank you very much. Really had a good time today.