Building Meaningful Relationships and Delivering Recurring Impact: Aaron Hill’s Guiding Principles

This week on the Revenue Insights Podcast, we’re joined by Aaron Hill, SVP Growth Strategy at The Arbinger Institute.

In this episode, Aaron discusses his approaches to sales functions at The Arbinger Institute. He discusses the two key principles he has brought to his role: building meaningful relationships and delivering recurring impact to generate recurring revenue. He further delves into the Arbinger Institute’s Influence Pyramid philosophy and the current challenges he is facing across his sales team.

Aaron Hill is an experienced Revenue Leader, Operator, and Consultant. As the Current SVP of Growth Strategy at The Arbinger Institute, he designs and executes all sales and growth strategies. He is further a part-time Advisor for jaxx.ai, where he provides product direction and strategic go-to-market guidance, and Co-Founder of Funnel House, a consultancy specializing in sound fundamentals to hit sales goals. 

Aaron Hill on LinkedIn

Leadership and Self-Deception Book

The Effortless Experience Book

The Arbinger Institute Website

Winning By Design Website

Time Stamps:

• 00:40 – Aaron’s career background
• 06:44 – A look into the sales function at The Arbinger Institute
• 11:32 – Principles for organizing an organization
• 15:52 – Delivering recurring impact to generate recurring revenue
• 23:52 – Multi-threading deals to build better relationships
• 29:43 – Changing the perspective of your sales team
• 32:45 – Matching the hiring profile to the sales team’s goals
• 38:09 – Aaron’s book recommendations

Highlights: 

Building meaningful relationships with clients 

Aaron is a strong proponent for two principles from the Revenue Architecture framework: building meaningful relationships with clients and delivering recurring impact to generate recurring revenue, both of which he has utilized in his role at Arbinger. On relationships, Aaron found that his sales leaders each had their own playbook and contacts. So they re-aligned all leaders behind a single playbook and approach, democratizing the relationships they had and ensuring greater multi-threading. It meant that Arbinger as a company now holds far stronger relationships with their clients, as opposed to just the sales rep holding the relationships.

Deliver recurring impact to generate recurring revenue

The secret to generating recurring revenue is to consistently deliver impact and results for clients. It sounds simple, but providing genuine value through their sessions (and proving the ROI of that to the client), helped demonstrate why Arbinger’s work was having considerable business impact. 

Influence Pyramid

One of The Arbinger Institute’s philosophies is called the Influence Pyramid, which is utilized as a structure for their sales processes. The philosophy is that if you wish to influence someone, you have to first see them fully as a person, not just as their role. You then need to consider the next level up, who already has influence over them, and build relationships with them. For every new thing you ask someone to do or change, there is roughly nine times that amount of effort or time to be allocated to seeing and understanding that person as an individual. That is how you build strong relationships.

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