Doing sales planning? Here's a post from Aaron Ross that challenges a number of traditional sales assumptions. Here's a link to the post. Aaron claims:

• Salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth, they fulfill it.

• Lead generation causes new customer acquisition and sales fulfills it.
• Boards & CEOs exacerbate the problems of poor sales planning
• Sales people tend to retreat to the safe place of what they know rather than taking the risk of trying new things.

According to Aaron, the things that do work are more subtle. He says, "Unfortunately, there aren't any quick fixes to this lead generation problem today. In fact, if you don't have any repeatable leadgen programs yet, you're already behind in getting ready for '08. Despite your investors' demands, it takes 12-18 months to get leadgen cranking."

He then gives his list of what does work. Aaron's Top 5:

1. Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money)

2. Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value leadgen source, but hardest to influence)
3. Cold Calling 2.0 (by far the most predictable source of pipeline, but it takes time and focus)
4. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results)
5. PR (great if you're great at getting it!)

What do you think? Is Aaron on track?