While SaaS giants such as Salesforce, Workday and NetSuite have found lasting B2B sales success, a majority of SaaS startups still face the challenge of getting customers to pay for their solutions on a repeated and long-term basis without seeing growth stall out.
As part of the startup process, many companies struggle to get off the ground due to major missteps in the sales process, such as focusing on features instead of customer success and failing to measure and track all customer communication to the sales team. Here’s a few SaaS sales best practice that can help companies streamline and improve the sales process.
Sales teams must carefully utilize CRM and marketing automation tools so to manage employee time accordingly. A company culture must be employed that documents customer communications so to make best practices repeatable across sales, marketing, customer success and business development.
While product is B2B, effective sales teams remember that the process is still P2P, with executives making decisions for a wide range of reasons based on factors far outside product features and the depth of IP. As a result, a large competitive advantage can be gained from building rapport at many levels of the customer organization, helping drive successful triangulation and backchanneling, eventually leading to more deals closed.
Building on this notion, sales presentations should be focused on customer success. Hone in on how the product can help prospective customers, not on the features of the product itself. By sharing success stories form customers who have achieved goals similar to a prospect’s goals, SaaS sales team should see conversion rates improve.
Additionally, while many sales teams keep a close measure of the amount of leads in the pipeline, SaaS providers may find more success by shifting focus to revenue per lead and the rate in which deals are closing. Making this step should work to more properly reward sales teams for the value of their work and avoid producing vanity metrics.
Alongside maintaining a committed and hard working sales force, SaaS providers should be open to continuous investment in growth, development and the adoption of new technology and best practices.
