first draft week + new table of contents

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

I owe a lot of people a lot of replies. If you replied to last week’s email and I haven’t gotten back to you, my apologies. I’ve taken this week off to finish writing the first draft. It’s been an experience, it’s my first attempt at back to back writing days and it’s going better than I thought it would have.

Thanks for your patience as I finish things up, I promise I’ll do my best to back to everyone after Friday.

One thing I heard last time I shared the Table of Contents was that they weren’t clear enough, they didn’t sell you on why you needed to pick up and invest the time reading the book. As I’ve progressed this week, I’ve updated the chapters and added learning points under each one.

I’d love your feedback on the revised TOC, so here it is:

Feedback I’m looking for this week, which chapter absolutely needs to stay and which one would you cut?

Section 1: Strengthen Your Product Market Fit 

Chapter 1: Why Product Market Fit Comes First 

• Product Market Fit is a Multiplier of Go to Market Efforts

• Being Responsible for Growth is Terrifying 

• The ‘Fire the VP’ Fallacy

• Product Market Fit is Not Binary

• The Cost of Weak Product Market Fit

• The Growth Formula 

Chapter 2: Early Product Market Fit 

• How to Choose a Space

• Can You Create a Category? 

• How to Find Unmet Needs

• Why Referrals Are the Ultimate Measure

• How to Find People to Interview

• Early Signs of Product Market Fit

Chapter 3: Measuring Product Market Fit Strength 

• Your First Funnel 

• Collecting the Data 

• Doing the Math 

Section 2: Find Your First Customers

Chapter 4: Find your first customers 

• It’s all about unmet needs 

• DIY first 

• Your first sales hire

• Hiring your first AE 

• Your first scalable customer acquisition channel 

• MarketFit 

Chapter 5: Why Founders Make the Best Sales Reps 

• It’ll be ok 

• Stop treating prospects as something to close 

• Think about the end result (for the customer) 

• Problem space experience > sales experience 

• A template for great sales conversations

• Founder sales philosophy 

Chapter 6: How to Sell, Even if You’re an Engineer

• The Strategy of a Sale

• The Selling V

• Situation, Diagnosis, Recommendation, Implementation 

• How to create urgency 

Chapter 7: Habits of Highly Effective Salespeople

• Next Actions / Next Action Dates

• Customer verifiable outcomes for stage definitions 

• Take good notes (record your calls) 

• Stop Sending Follow Up Emails

• Stop answering the question, “so tell me what you can do for me” 

• Send a post-call summary 

• Pay attention to your camera positioning, lighting, and background 

Section 3: Build a Scalable Customer Acquisition Engine 

Chapter 8: The Four Funnels 

• Sales is a Chain Link System 

• Specialize Your Sales Funnels

• The Nurture Funnel 

• The Meet Funnel 

• The Disco Funnel 

• The Manage Funnel 

Chapter 9: How to Manage Salespeople 

• One on Ones

• Pipeline Review 

• Call Review (feedback) 

• Call Scoring 

• Preparing a Sales Forecast 

• Quarterly Development Plans 

Chapter 10: How to Hire Salespeople 

• Why You Need a Scorecard

• Our Process for Hiring Salespeople 

• How to Source Candidates 

• Why You Might Want to Use a Recruiter

Chapter 11: How to Find More Customers

• The Sales Math 

• How to Budget Time and Resources

• The Four Stages of Ramping a New Channel 

• Growth Curves 

• Four Paths to New Customers

Thanks for everything and catch you next week.

Collin Stewart