Recommended reading: Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling by Frank V. Cespedes — : 75-76
Success in SaaS depends on having a carefully designed customer centric sales organization that balances skills, processes, and tools. For this we need to evolve sales. — : 109-111
It is all too common to see sales teams in which directors are doing high volume prospecting for low value customers. Believe us - while this sounds stupid and you are probably telling yourself that you would never make that mistake, in practice it happens all the time to perfectly smart people. To counteract this default behavior, you must go through a deliberate exercise in which you segment your customers by how much revenue they can produce, how many potential customers exist in each segment, and what it costs to service those customers. You can then implement the following common sense strategy: “use low cost, online sales teams to process high volume, low value segments.” — : 176-181
While the specific numbers in your business will vary, we have found that once you take into account both the cost and revenue side of the equation, almost all SaaS businesses have 3 tiers. Even if you offer a $100,000 monthly recurring service, your clients are likely to first check-out your self-serve tier, and there will always be a distinction between a 2nd and 3rd tier - because the 2nd tier sells to single decision makers, whereas the 3rd tier sells to multiple stakeholders in the company. — : 181-185
We commonly see that the companies who are successful in SaaS are successful in the SMB space, and it is these companies that also obtain high valuation. We have seen first hand how companies who achieve success early-on with large Enterprise deals, find themselves circling the drain a few years later. The success with enterprise deals, required these companies to focus on integration instead of innovation. On the other hand clients that enter the market from a freemium/prosumer model are able to adopt quickly. Although many are prematurely stamped “successfull” by industry pundits, experienced VCs will tell you that they only warrant the valuation once success is achieved in the SMB space. — : 208-213
When your service is continuously increasing value, it is in your best interest to avoid multi-year contracts in order to extract more profits via price increases. — : 377-378
DO NOT BLEND TIERS TO CALCULATE PROFITABILITY You must calculate the time to profitability - and this is important - separately per each tier of your business, and sometimes even per vertical. For example it may take a lot longer to make a profit selling into a medical vertical based on the compliance that is needed. — : 408-411
We put a rocket on the cover of our book for a reason, and that reason is that a rocket represents the culmination of what is possible when you carefully design a system of trial and error to improve incrementally. We know, sales is not rocket science. As sales professionals we have heard that way too often in fact. But we believe deeply that sales is not an art. It is a science, and it is becoming more of a science each day. And just like astronauts are no longer balls-to-the-wall test pilots but instead trained engineers, the men and women who practice sales today are highly trained, data driven professionals who rely on process to gain incremental improvements. So what is it that sets apart your rocket science sales organization? Process. Documented process that results in controlled experimentation and deliberate learning which leads to success at scale. So when we hear about sales organizations that lack the ability to forecast accurately how the month will end, or when only 60% of sales professionals hit quota, we ask is that a problem of bad performers? Bad sales leadership? A bad service? The wrong clients? We say no ... we say you simply lack the process to learn and improve on. Or to nicely close out our analogy - you are trying to launch a rocket to Mars without having built a process that results in a Mars landing as the inevitable culmination of a process. — : 741-753
The new model requires staffing multiple customer-facing roles, into a single team, also called a POD. What all PODs have in common is that they have a focus on a specific market with a group goal they are evaluated against. Most importantly, they share the same physical space. — : 1075-1078
The fact is that this generation wants to see immediate progress. And THAT is the key. It is not that they want to run the office. It is that they want to have measurable results from measurable actions. — : 1164-1166
What we have found is that laying out a very clear progression path marked by 3 month intervals is absolutely crucial to keeping entry level sales personnel motivated, possibly even more important than their commission structure. So our blueprint lays out a series of steps that can be made clear to entry level salespeople. The message on the first day of training needs to be that if they succeed as an MDR, in a matter of months they will be able to graduate to a different role, building skills as they go. And as they rapidly move through the progression above, they acquire skills that are valuable across the entire organization, giving you a perfect talent development pool with inbuilt high turnover and the ability to move stars elsewhere in your organization. — : 1168-1174
A second distinctly Millennial characteristic is the need for a mission, a bigger picture that drives personal fulfillment as much as, or more than, just a salary. — : 1177-1178
Last, Millennials are often called impatient. Or distracted. “A-D-D!” screams your VP of Sales when describing your incoming class and their short attention spans. The truth is rather more uncomfortable and hard to face: these young people have no patience for YOU. For your lecturing, for how long it takes you to get to the point, for your bullshit. They will listen for as long as you are conveying something useful, and no longer. What this means is you have get very efficient at conveying information and get rid of hierarchy. In practice that means moving to standing meetings with a maximum length of 15 minutes in which everyone is given equal time. What it also means is that you have to structure learning so that your teams are teaching each other, rather than getting lectured at by a trainer or an executive. You may feel like this will take an inordinate amount of work. Of course it will! Changing the way you do things always takes work. But you adapt to changes in your customers, so you should adapt equally well to changes in your workforce. — : 1183-1190
The key thing to realize is that the speed of change, rather than the magnitude of change, is what motivates today’s young sales professionals. — : 1214-1216