Book Review:  From Impossible to Inevitable

This post reviews Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s new book, From Impossible to Inevitable, which is being launched at the SaaStr Conference this week.  The book is a sequel of sorts to Ross’s first book, Predictable Revenue, published in 2011, and which was loaded with great ideas about how to build out your sales machine.

From Impossible to Inevitable is built around what they call The Seven Ingredients of Hypergrowth:

1. Nail a niche, which is about defining your focus and ensuring you are ready to grow. (Or, as some say “nail it, then scale it.)  Far too many companies try to scale it without first nailing it, and that typically results in frustration and wasted capital.
2. Create predictable pipeline, which about “seeds” (using existing successful customers), “nets” (classical inbound marketing programs), and “spears” (targeted outbound prospecting) campaigns to create the opportunities sales needs to drive growth.
3. Make sales scalable, which argues convincingly that specialization is the key to scalable sales. Separate these four functions into discrete jobs:  inbound lead handing, outbound prospecting, selling (i.e., closing new business), and post-sales roles (e.g., customer success manager).  In this section they include a nice headcount analysis of a typical 100-person SaaS company.
4. Double your deal size, which discusses your customer mix and how to build a balanced business built off a run-rate business of average deals topped up with a lumpier enterprise business of larger deals, along with specific tactics for increasing deal sizes.
5. Do the time, which provides a nice reality check on just how long it takes to create a $100M ARR SaaS company (e.g., in a great case, 8 years, and often longer), along with the wise expectations management that somewhere along the way you’ll encounter a “Year of Hell.”
6. Embrace employee ownership, which reminds founders and executives that employees are “renting, not owning, their jobs” and how to treat them accordingly so they can act more like owners than renters.
7. Define your destiny, which concludes the book with thoughts for employees on how to take responsibility for managing their careers and maximizing the opportunities in front of them.

The book is chock full of practice advice and real-world stories.  What it’s not is theoretical.  If Crossing the Chasm offered a new way of thinking about product lifecycle strategy that earned it a place on the top shelf of the strategy bookcase, From Impossible to Inevitable is a cookbook that you keep in the middle of the kitchen prep table, with Post-It’s sticking out the pages and oil stains on the cover.  This is not a book that offers one big idea with a handful of chapters on how to apply it.  It’s a book full of recipes and tactics for how to improve each piece of your go-to-market machine.

This book — like Predictable Revenue, The Lean Startup, Zero to One, and SalesHood — belongs on your startup executive’s bookshelf.  Read it!  And keep up with Jason’s and Aaron’s great tweetstreams and the awesome SaaStr blog.