B2B Revenue NOW: Lead Your Revenue Operations with the Best Kept Secrets of Account-Based Marketing & Sales.

By Atte Sallamo

This book holds the BLUEPRINT for that methodology I've used to deliver measurable revenue growth for numerous B2B businesses.

This method has yielded Return on Investment ranging from 324%, to 647% in B2B ROI, all the way up to 900% and beyond in pure profit.

What I am describing here is not an alien result, but one your B2B company gets to experience (and should expect) once you get in place this framework that awaits you inside these covers.

The process:
1) Find your ideal high-value clients.
2) UNIFY & ALIGN your revenue operations.
3) EXECUTE! Conquer your B2B profit & REVENUE GOALS.

The proof and power of this process you'll come to experience firsthand on your own company's balance sheet.

How is this possible?

In all simplicity, we focus on what matters. on those SPECIFIC revenue-critical actions that scale (80/20 principle in action). We amplify them to work in your favor! Identifying your high-value audience, aligning marketing & sales, data-driven leadership, and the Account-Based orchestration of it all.

Once you'll come to graduate from this curriculum, your business has a crystal clear understanding on where to place the energy of your enterprise so it yields the kind of growth that others will envy. This we'll do together by hand-picking the correct alignment processes, leadership practices, and measurement models for your business from the basket that this book is.

...For growth happens when the conditions inside your company support it. That's when you'll conquer your quarterly goals, deliver on your OKRs, and provide measurable (and fresh) revenue inflows that land on the balance sheet fueling your entire business.

LEARN ABOUT:
Rev Ops roadmap,
Team structure,
& Leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Feb 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9789528081333

Atte Sallamo

Atte Sallamo is an expert in Account-Based marketing and sales with the emphasis on the internal processes that take place within the walls of your company. In his mind, marketing and sales are but two sides of the same coin which are required to work as a one team in order for any company to grow and live up to its full potential. He has extensive experience (close to 7 years and counting) in the deep end of the B2B sector where he's working for companies that grow by selling to other businesses, governments, and large international bodies with complex decision making processes involved in their procurement. This experience Atte has built by working for world class start ups (e.g. in the space industry), marketing agencies, sales process design consultancy, and by running his own business that seeks to help businesses big and small in their quest for growth and ethical profit generation. Having often experienced the struggles that paralyze growth seeking B2B companies, Atte has built a solid toolkit of "growth tools" for marketing, for sales, and their alignment so that nearly any business may kick-start their growth curve up into the right. In Atte's opinion, no concept or idea is too complex to simplify so that others may understand it... after all, a shared understanding is what fuels the execution that follows. Without understanding there's no action. Thus, even his books are written so that "the public" may take in the message almost through osmosis while reading. Complex topics are opened up with the help of fitting analogies, and the books are structured in a manner where every piece of information has the right time and place where it's easy to take in and digest. Atte is a structured thinker with the passion to bring down the "silo walls" that keep apart B2B revenue operations (of marketing and sales). In his mind, and with his approach, what unifies all stakeholders, business functions and departments is a common focal point of focus. This enables cross-functional collaboration between all revenue-critical parties that are to work, build, and manifest your ambitious revenue goal into a living and breathing reality... After all, growth is fundamentally about teamwork (and alignment). And great teamwork in revenue operations may only emerge when you set the conditions right for your team to thrive! This happens when you lock-in the right communication tools (for internal alignment), set up appropriate KPIs, OKRs, and incentives.

Book preview

LIABILITY

The information contained in this book doesn’t take into account the unique situation and circumstances of the reader, thus the book is for general advice and informational purposes only.

Results mentioned in this book are not typical and may vary from person to person as ultimately the nature of the actions taken will define anyone’s end result. There are no guarantees in life. Any actions taken based on the information provided are at the reader's own discretion and risk.

Before acting on any advice the reader should think through the fittingness of the advice for their unique situation and size their bets vs risks accordingly if they take any action. The author and publisher shall not be held liable for any direct or indirect harm, financial losses, or adverse consequences resulting from the application of the ideas and concepts discussed in this book.

For all those who stood by my side going through this journey… My family, friends old and new, and most of all, to the journey of life itself.

Special thanks to my mother and father who’ve always believed in me, even when I didn’t myself.

WHAT’S THE ‘ACCOUNT-BASED’ METHODOLOGY?

(AS DEFINED IN THIS BOOK)

First of all, it’s the framework that fuels your B2B revenue operations: it aligns marketing and sales.

But often when you ask the questions, what is it?, you come to meet the very ‘broad’ and popular way of defining this key term as someone replies to you: …it’s marketing/sales done to your specific target accounts which are expected to grow your business the most (vs alternatives), so it’s a way of prioritising where your time and energy goes.

The above of course is completely accurate!

Because in essence what we – as the practitioners of the Account-Based methodology – are doing is: we are putting our effort, time, energy, marketing budgets, and the limited time of our sales people to where they turn in the most high-value clients possible for our B2B company.

This ‘core spirit’ at the heart of the Account-Based methodology is indeed well captured by our initial broad definition.

But there’s so much more to it…

How so, you ask?

Well, the above definition accomplishes in conveying that yes, indeed the individual target accounts (high-value clients) are at the apex of our focus here, but the definition fails to turn this focus into an applicable framework that TAKES CARE of conquering this beast of a goal of yours.

In essence, the initial definition lacks practicality…

It has no real-life clarity that would guide you on your day job and would tell you in detail HOW you are supposed to land the ambitious growth targets of your B2B company.

Here the book at hand steps in.

In the following pages, I’ll supply you with the frameworks, processes, and the internal communication tools that will ALIGN your revenue operations (of marketing and sales) naturally.

Because great alignment isn’t something you have to ‘manage’ that much, it simply ‘takes place’ when you set up the corporate ecosystem correctly! So that it supports alignment.

To achieve this… we create (or rather, hand over to you) a set of natural and easy-to-use internal communication tools that by design align your revenue operations (marketing & sales) and begin to drive your unified teamwork.

Sounds good?

Great! In that case, keep reading, because this book is all about turning this into a reality.

This can only take place by us diving deep into the practical applications of the Account-Based methodology where marketing and sales start to become one. Two parts come together and turn your revenue operations…

From: marketing + sales = revenue

To: marketing x sales = revenue

→ With alignment achieved, these two business functions begin to AMPLIFY each other (after all, they are two sides of the same coin) as you’ll begin to identify, reach, convert, and win deals with those high-value B2B clients that can revolutionise your revenue inflows.

Thus, in this book we expand the original definition by including all practical frameworks, that drive your success… because only a practical application of a processes will create measurable results.

With that in mind, in this book we define Account-Based marketing/sales as follows:

The original definition: marketing/sales done to your specific target accounts which are expected to grow your business the most.

The frameworks that get all this done:

Your in-house processes and operations.

Your internal communication tools, views, dashboards.

Your data structure, measurement frameworks, and goal setting of KPIs/OKRs.

The grand strategy that ties together marketing and sales operations.

The teamwork model for collaboration and alignment.

The meeting cadences and agendas that drive execution.

The infrastructure that pulls all of this together: Ideal Customer Profile, Target Account List, CRM and MAS set up and processes, nurturing flows, the brand story you are telling, and so on.

Our goal in this book is to be very practical, so that you’ll get to copy-paste the practices outlined in the coming pages.

All this you’ll come to turn into a living and breathing reality… into a network of self-standing processes that run themselves and keep your team aligned no matter if the manager needs a day off once in a while. Simply keep flipping the pages, and by the end of the book your B2B growth engine is up and running.

It’s time to begin your journey.

CONTENTS

PLANTING THE SEED

Your Account-Based Journey Begins

The Backbone of Account-Based Action & Alignment

Building the Team Behind Your Success

TIME FOR ACTION

Construct the Engine for Growth

Define Your Target (Accounts)

Account-Based KPIs and Measuring Your Success

YOUR ULTIMATE TRANSFORMATION

The Compounding Account-Based Growth

Knowledge into Action

GLOSSARY

IMPORTANT!

Please read before you start.

This isn’t a book about marketing or sales ‘techniques’. No.

Not even though we use marketing and sales as THE ultimate medium to channel in the fresh revenue inflow for your B2B company. These methods stored in this book have allowed me to create +900% ROI in the B2B industry, but even still…

This isn’t a book about flashy ‘techniques’ that work for a week and then the results die off. So if that’s what you are looking for (what's trending this week), close this book right now, and put it back on the shelf you picked it up from for a better day, or get rid of it. Your choice.

This is something bigger we are building here…

To put it shortly, you are about to set up your very own UNIFIED revenue operations team which leverages both marketing and sales, but isn’t limited to just one or the other as your B2B growth driver.

As such, this book isn’t just about marketing or sales either. No. You already know what those are, because both remain fundamentally unchanged in Account-Based marketing and sales methodology.

This book is about something bigger.

It’s about how you bring those two functions together (in practice) with the world-famous Account-Based methodology that most B2B companies have left very much under-utilised and pay a mere lip service to…

What this book is about is that Account-Based part of your revenue operation; what’s unique about it and what makes Account-Based marketing and sales TRULY Account-Based in the first place (sneak peek: it has a lot to do with your ideal buyers and alignment processes).

The above is also why I purposefully in this book write "Account-Based" in capital letters, while keeping the "marketing" and "sales" lower case even though a frequently used format for writing them is "Account-Based Marketing and Sales".

But here, we’ll drill down to the Account-Based part of it all.

We’ll of course dive into this journey of discovery through the topics of marketing and sales which are the core business functions in any company that will benefit from the Account-Based approach, since it finds and facilitates business growth by aligning their actions seamlessly together.

This is our point of focus: The collaborative intersection – in your company – where marketing meets sales and where their collaboration is turned into revenue.

That we’ll achieve with the help of carefully crafted blueprints that set up the appropriate collaboration models, teamwork incentives, and business processes which align your revenue-critical business functions behind a common goal: to serve, understand, and grow those very best clients that your business can only dream of today.

Thus, from this book you are not going to find a single sales technique, marketing psychology hack, or a flashy new ‘conversion gimmick’ that’s hot today and forgotten tomorrow.

What we are about to focus on is something evergreen.

Your company’s alignment to serve its ideal clients who are that apex of our focus in this book. These two are what propel long lasting business growth.

Thus, the meat and bones of this book is 100% about creating and facilitating the collaboration between your different stakeholders and cross-functional teams who act central roles in building your pipeline, influencing the buying decisions of your ideal B2B customers, and serving them in a manner that maximises their lifetime value for your business.

This brings us to my last notice: This isn’t a book about any individual business function such as marketing or sales alone, even though they are the spearhead of your revenue operations that fuel up your business. No. Because no single business function can propel longterm growth alone, since if you can’t retain the clients that your marketing and sales teams bring in, there’s no long-lasting business effect in what you do.

That’s why, even though we mostly focus on marketing and sales, I want the readers to know that everything in this book applies to your other business functions as well. Starting from the product/service team, and extending all the way to your customer service/success unit who are the key players in delivering your ideal customers with the value your company can deliver.

You see, without the ‘value’ your company’s value proposition is a mere ‘proposition’ that’s hollow.

Thus, we are to align all of your revenue-critical business operations to also serve the ideal clients that bring your company the best possible profit margins out there. That’s where the 10x growth curve comes from. From a total customer centric alignment.

But this change doesn’t happen by itself and it certainly won’t happen overnight. It takes action from you, patience, and a reasonable time horizon to make manifest your revenue aspirations into reality.

By the end of this road, if you implement all that we cover, you’ve come to transform your business into a living and breathing Account-Based organization.

So… Now that we are aligned, you and I, does this sound like a journey you are ready for?

If so, then keep reading. This book is for you.

Keep Growing.

-Atte Sallamo

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ATTE SALLAMO

THIS WAS MY JOURNEY…

IN BRIEF

Certified Account-Based Strategist x2, by

Demandbase.

+6 Years in Account-Based Marketing (and growing).

Both in-house & agency.

Performance Marketing Expert with proven ROI of +900% revenue result.

MY FULL STORY:

(AND HOW THIS BLUEPRINT CAME TO BE)

Who the heck is this guy? Yes, you may not have heard of me before, but I am dead certain that you’ve come across with the B2B passions of mine that I’ve spent my entire career with until this date. That is, all the alignment work in Account-Based marketing, sales, service/product design, and well… everything, that you are about to step into just by holding this book in your hands.

For my entire professional career (of well above +10,000 h) I’ve been in the trenches with B2B sales teams, marketing leaders, product owners, and function directors. We’ve come up with collaboration models for aligning our actions in a smooth manner, so that you end up better serving, reaching and influencing those business-critical eyeballs and brains that make the decision on whether to buy your B2B product or not.

And the bottom line?

Well, what we’ve found is that more often than not, a better alignment of critical-to-revenue actions tends to turn in bigger profits, faster sales cycle, and improved customer satisfaction as the needs of the buyer are now better met. No big surprise there, so let me save you from rambling on about it.

The backbone of improving these revenue operations is to understand who your ideal buyer is.

This is at the heart of all things Account-Based, no matter if it’s sales, marketing, product development or even customer service we are talking about. And when saying thorough, I seriously mean every single letter of the word. Because those ideal buyers are the people and businesses that decide if yours can exist at all.

See, your ideal clients are those approximately top 20% of your high-value clients who bring in the precious ~80% of your revenue inflows. Now knowing this, just think of what would happen if this stream of income was to be cut in half… or never identified in the first place? Exactly.

This is what often makes or breaks a B2B company, as not knowing ‘who to sell to’ sets a hard cap on your growth, or losing those critical clients will lead into a downfall of even the toughest giants when the blood of the business (revenue) is drained from its veins.

The interesting part is, that for many B2B companies this pool of top ~20% buyers can mean just a few individual clients (out of the total customer base you currently have), so loosing just one of them will show a significant drop off in your revenue inflows, but simultaneously acquiring even just one more of them can have a tremendous uplift in your company’s profitability!

Let me repeat this, one new high-value client can make the difference in between hitting your growth target, revenue goal, OKRs, and KPIs.

Now even though this 80/20 principle is for the post part a widely recognized rule of thumb in the business world, it actually holds water fairly accurately most of the time! Often when I’ve seen B2B companies run an analysis on who their high-value clients are …or, when I’ve done these myself, most of the time the results mirror the 80/20 principle with an astonishing accuracy.

Now of course the ratio is not always exactly 80/20, but you get the point. This well illustrates the importance of not just putting your customer’s first in your business, but putting your ideal customers even before the rest.

Which brings us to the good news for you. It’s that these I’d kill to have as my clients type of buyers, they do exist in every single market there is. You just need to identify them.

Then what follows if you don’t?

What follows is that when you don’t have a true and explicit, well-crafted definition about your ideal buyers (written down) ...you have them covered in a veil of unclarity which hinders your company’s growth together with your marketing efficiency and sales results. That’s when you can’t find those ideal buyers either in the real world, or sell to them, and there’s no way to describe how they look to your other business departments which are supposed to solve the problems of your ideal buyers.

Unclarity causes a clear disconnect!

A disconnect that multiplies in its effects and runs through your entire organization from top down and back up again leading into tremendous waste; from the C-suite, to the VPs, Directors, Managers, all the way to the operational people in the trenches doing their best to drive your revenue every day.

When their target (audience) is misplaced, then an equal share of your employees' time and effort will go down the drain into utter waste. This leads into conversations and meetings that shouldn’t happen, actions that are better left undone (with no real business impact), and time put into projects that should never be started in the first place.

An endless sea of waste: in time, money, and effort will follow a misplaced audience that doesn’t resemble your true ideal buyers. At best, here your marketing and sales efforts are placed behind reaching buyers who are at least inferior to what you could have sitting in your order books right now.

This is why it’s crucial to get this one piece right: Know your audience and understand it (we will discuss this later).

Now, one would say that I’m exaggerating, but I am sad to say that I am not. It really does make a world of difference if your revenue-critical players set their focus on a wrong target persona, or they simply don’t know what is that ‘thing’ which resonates amongst your ideal buyers… causing your marketing and sales not to turn in revenue.

Now how does all this relate to me?

Well, recognizing the above is why in my career, I’ve made it my mission to truly understand the ideal customers and target accounts that I’ve had to reach, encounter and influence, since that’s literally the only way to align the revenue operations, marketing, and sales of any business. That’s what creates real-life business impact.

And I mean that literally: not just ‘understand’ them in Excel as rows of data, but what their lives are actually like day-to-day… To relate with them, with their needs, wants, desires, and the psychological hierarchy of all this, so that it’s possible to not only find these buyers, but also craft the message that finds the maximal resonance amongst the B2B audience in question.

While we are on this topic of psychology and human behaviour, let me open that thread from my own past, since interest in psychology was one of the original drives that brought me into the realm of marketing and Account-Based everything.

See, what got me into building Account-Based collaboration models wasn’t my heart burning desire to do so at first, but the need to have those in place. This is because once we (me and my colleagues) started to see that most other levers had already been pulled, put to use, and utilised into their extreme in B2B marketing and sales, we were practically forced to look into other ways of influencing revenue creation.

This is where the Account-Based frameworks and models started to come into the picture. But originally, as said, I was pulled into the Account-Based realm by my interest in social psychology, communication, and marketing which at first opened me the door into the world of ‘normal’ B2B marketing. Those topics were the main focus of my interest back in my days studying at the University of Helsinki, from where I took off and made my way into modern B2B digital marketing.

That walk wasn’t easy, I’ll admit. It included a number of stumbling stones that gave me a lesson after lesson both on the fields of the ‘normal’ B2B marketing and the Account-Based methodology.

Especially in the beginning I was fascinated by a number of digital marketing tools that I imagined would fix all my issues like a silver bullet, but they didn’t. Because even though as powerful as an individual marketing/sales tool can be, it’s rarely enough to fix pressing issues alone if the ideal customer profile is ‘off’.

Let me elaborate.

Like, think that you are in a situation where you see your marketing and sales actions yielding no revenue, absolutely none, while your marketing campaigns are bringing in a nice number of leads who are even proving to be of good quality, and all this is accompanied by the fact that your online campaigns have a nice level of engagement. All that with an affordable cost, but still… no revenue in sight.

What could be the problem?

Now, the numbers don’t lie. Your marketing is doing a kickass job amongst the audience that you are reaching. You do know that you have the killer ad, and the follow-up emails are getting sky high engagement, but still… No revenue, no sales deals, no SQLs, no real results.

Now knowing what I know, I wouldn’t go searching for a silver bullet to fix all this in an instant, but where I would now turn my attention is if the ideal customer profile is actually solid in the first place!

I became sensitive to see insights like this when I realised that