Jacco van der Kooij and Winning by Design
What metrics should be reported to each of your stakeholder audiences when you have a sales team in place with roles across the sales cycle? Use this as a guideline. Table 8.1 Metrics that should be reported for each of your stakeholder types (Location 56362)
Table 8.2 Key metrics that you should be tracking and reporting on by stage (cumulative) (Location 56799)
THREE KEY PHASES OF SCALING A BUSINESS Table 1.1 Key phases of scaling a business START UP | <$1M ARR GROW UP | $1M - $3M SCALE UP | $3M - $10M ARR The company is finding product market fit with 10-20+ customers and up to $2M in ARR in its original market/region. The founder(s) is still closing most deals, leading sales and marketing, has recently closed a seed round, and is working toward an A round. The company is ready for its first sales hire to start driving deals right away, to expand 2-3x in the next 12 months. This means moving from more anecdotal founder sales to building a professional sales team. The company has grown to $2M in ARR, and needs to bring in some best practices to scale sales efforts and start thinking about customer success to continue its growth. It has closed or is in the process of pitching a Series A of funding. The company must scale rapidly across different vertical markets. It is hiring its first one or two sales reps, and potentially looking to hire a VP of Sales to institute formalized process, systems and strategy for better productivity and predictability in the pipeline. The company is now better established with revenues of at least $5M ARR (50+ customers) and with a view to be at $10M within two to three years. The company should be looking to hire specialized roles on the sales team, perhaps two SDRs and three to four AEs. Also needed are detailed processes and metrics, and implementation of best practices into commercial teams to maintain competitive advantage and focus on customer retention and expansion. It also may need to address new markets and open new regions to expand sales. (Location 4370)
How to Create Your Own Sales Process & Sales Playbook No matter what stage your company is in, you must have a clearly defined sales process and playbook. Success in SaaS sales requires measurement, and measurement requires that you be methodical. So creating your documented sales method allows you to: 1) provide consistent guidance to your sales reps on how to progress through their deals, 2) conform your activities to a process that you can easily measure, and 3) understand what’s working and what needs adjusting. STEP 1. DETERMINE WHICH SALES PROCESS Determine the sales process best suited for your business from Table 3.1 (make modifications as needed) STEP 2. MAP OUT THE STAGES Map out the stages of your Sales Playbook. See Table 3.2 STEP 3. DEFINE THE STAGES For each stage, you should define the following: ● Goal: Description of what needs to happen at that stage ● Actions: A few simple actions per stage that the sales rep should take in order to get clear insight into the customer situation ● Enable: Enablement tools available to assist the process (documents, references, team members to bring in) ● Outcome: The single outcome that should result from the actions taken (often a confirmed meeting) Now let’s see what you should keep in mind depending on which of the three phases your business currently falls under. 45 (Location 20098)
Your interest in helping a customer resolve their problem must be authentic. It cannot be manufactured, and you should not use authenticity as a “trick” to close a deal. More and more marketing organizations are making authenticity a concept: they recommend the use of certain words, record videos on your LinkedIn, etc. We do not believe this is sustainable. If you master the five principles below, you will be genuinely authentic - not because it helps you close a deal, but because during the process of executing these principles, you have become someone who cares. Principle 1. Understand their pain Do your research and only reach out to those who have a pain or whom you think you can help avoid it. Do not reach out to people who are “just a fit!” Principle 2. First emotional, then rational Humans make decisions emotionally, and then justify rationally. Focus first on the emotional impact. Principle 3. Educate through storytelling; do not pitch Trust that if you educate the customer, they will make the best decision. Therefore, help your customer think through the problem they are experiencing, and share best practices of others who experienced the same. Principle 4. Assist the buying process People hate being sold, but they love to buy. Principle 5. Provide value in every interaction Don’t just do check-ins; provide value in every interaction with every client, every time. Offer market information, insights, use-cases and whatever else you can to add value. (Location 44565)
Moment #1: Reach out to customers who have pain When we ask our customers who their prospects are, they often mention a job title in a vertical market, such as the CTO at a financial institution. Many companies buy, and/or create a list of prospects that hold a specific title, in a particular vertical market, and are in a certain region with a specific size. They then enrich the database with email addresses, telephone numbers and social handles. This will only lead to an ineffective outreach email like the one in the next example. (Location 45439)
Horizontally across the content map, you see the journey your customer goes through (as will be explained in Chapter 8 on Data). Vertically down the map, the customer goes through four stages: 1) People first do research and understand the problem 2) Shortly after, they look for and research the solution 3) They look for a way to see it work in action 4) Then they take an action: download something, click on trial, or start to chat on the website (Location 40196)