Dialing In Effective Process with a Growing Sales Team

It’s impossible to bring a B2B SaaS concept from idea to reality without relentless focus on controlling what you can control. Each day, founding teams focus on the tasks they can gain traction on, whether it is pitching investors, conducting a demo, or supporting customers. Sales is just one part of this persistence.

When SaaS businesses start to grow, sales teams scale up fast, bringing growing pains and hiccups in the revenue stream. The 2020 GTM study from Redpoint Ventures shows that sales maintains its 1:2 ratio with engineers developing the product up until about the $5MM ARR mark, at which point sales rapidly starts to catch up.

The Redpoint study also reveals that sales teams mature quickly, with a VP of Sales hire occurring between $1-5MM ARR, long before marketing or customer success teams move to be led by a VP.

In fact, the shift to a VP of Sales usually occurs around $1-2MM in ARR, when founder-led sales starts to slow down. This can be a long process—both recognizing there’s a slowdown, and remedying it by hiring a dedicated sales leader—in large part because selling into complex buying centers means SaaS sales cycles today are very long. When a new leader is hired, there is no guarantee they will immediately be effective at their role, any more than a new sales hire.

Hiring a VP of Sales isn’t a magic bullet, but there is a way that effective founders replicate their success across rapidly growing sales organizations, VP or no VP: a repeatable, monitorable process. Much of the conversation about process in sales focuses on the micro-tactical level: how many words in an email subject header, how many minutes, exactly, to prepare for each call. This level of focus is more micromanagement, however, than it is effective leadership.

There’s a reason why “Control What You Can Control” is a Maestro Pillar and “Process” is one of our Seven Ps of Sales Professionalism. These concepts are essentials that can apply a transformative lens to every area of a sales organization—if they are done correctly.

THE PROBLEMS WITH OPTIMIZING PROCESS

In the cover story of the current issue of Harvard Business Review, “Stop Overengineering People Management,” Wharton’s Peter Capelli delivers a thought-provoking review of generations of scientific management and organizational psychology. He details the conflict between two schools of thought in management.

On the one hand, leaders desire to identify an optimal process and ensure that all workers use it to avoid wasted time and resources. In sales, there’s innumerable areas with room for process optimization. Just thinking about meetings, I know our team teaches:

• Use agendas before and during internal and external meetings.
• Use a slide deck and rehearse with it beforehand.
• Begin live meetings and any call with more than two people on it with framed introductions.

We can get into the data that demonstrate that it’s worth spending time on these steps, and the psychology behind why they matter, in a separate blog post. For now, suffice it to say they work. This approach to management makes a lot of sense to the one-third of major-corporation CEOs who come out of software engineering, where failure to follow best practices of code hygiene or version control can mean days wasted looking for bugs later.

The second major thread in management science calls for empowering workers to own their roles. It’s dispiriting when a job is reduced to a prescribed series of tasks, limited to the minimum amount of time needed to achieve each task. Psychologists initially recognized this in the context of the manufacturing jobs of the 1950s, where scientifically managed factories were turning out flawed products because of disaffected laborers. Sales, too, is a field with a large number of rote tasks and a lot of pressure, so if process and monitoring is implemented incorrectly, there’s a lot of risk of burnout, disaffection, and turnover.

What’s the solution? Capelli argues for a middle way modeled on the “lean production” approach innovated by Toyota. Essentially, smart managers will institute an optimized process—but give employees the agency to tweak it if they see a way to improve quality.

LEAN PROCESS IN SALES

Leaders can institute a “lean” process approach in sales, too. It’s a lot of work. If it’s outside your capacity, it may be time to hire a strong VP of Sales or bring in a training organization, such as Maestro, to assess your sales team and instill best practices across the organization. The first two steps take place at the operational level:

1.      Establish strategic sales goals. The Redpoint study gives an example: pipeline value versus meeting count for setting goals for SDRs and BDRs, and basically concludes it doesn’t matter which measurements you choose. You just have to set goals. Goals should be set and reviewed regularly and correctly incentivized.

2.      Monitor those goals. Implementing a CRM system or even a simple Excel spreadsheet, identifying the most important KPIs, and tracking effectively gives strategic insight and allows sales leaders to spot problems quickly and work to solve them.

After company leadership has set goals and a system for tracking progress toward them, the focus can turn toward the sales team itself. In Maestro trainings, we talk about these three steps as “Memorialize, Professionalize, and Personalize.”

3.      Identify an optimal process to achieve the goals. If you’re the founder and you’ve handled most of the sales up until now, this may mean auditing and memorializing your process so it’s replicable by new hires. If you already have a few salespeople, it means studying their performance to understand why the high performers are having more success selling your product or solution. (Memorialize)

4.      Train the whole sales team in the optimal process. Depending on the goals, this may include time blocking, email cadences, CRM use, role plays, and many other ways to internalize learnings. Rather than establishing strict rules about tactics and micromanaging them, the focus should stay on how these techniques provide efficiency and serve the strategic goals. (Professionalize)

5.      Adjust together. After each salesperson has internalized the basic process, give them ownership of their performance. (Personalize)

Owning the sales process is essential for high performance. One way that Maestro encourages this level of personalization of the sales process is through the DRIVE information-gathering framework. Salespeople learn to ask questions of prospects in five major areas of information. For example, D uncovers information about decisionmakers in the buying center and the decision-making process. Rather than memorizing particular questions to ask every time, Maestro teaches that the salesperson should prepare question trees based on their own experience of the types of responses they get and need to be prepared to answer.

Sometimes, a salesperson will innovate an adjustment to the sales process that you thought was optimized. Assuming you did #1 and #2—establish goals and metrics—it’ll be easy to see whether the innovation is in fact an improvement. If it is, congratulations—as long as you have the institutional flexibility to accept ongoing change. Engaged, professional sales employees can drive continuous optimization in the sales process.

Continuous adaptation is essential in a field that changes as fast as B2B SaaS sales. Organizations need to first clearly define their goals, metrics, and sales process before they can innovate and adapt in a scientific manner. After all, establishing a control is essential to scientific experimentation.

So as your sales team expands, think about transforming what “Control What You Can Control” signifies. While it inspires a lot of smart decisions as a call to individual professionalism, it can also guide efforts to establish a well-thought-out and professional baseline process for the whole team’s efforts.

Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on developing an effective sales process.