Best practices for B2B software startups


How to set up a scalable sales team

How to set up a scalable sales team - by Anne Bouwmeester (RocketX)

If your business is growing its sales exponentially and you need help figuring out how to scale your sales team in order to grow your revenue and product-market fit, then you will need the help of a specialist tech stack. However, building and scaling a sales team with B2B software requires more than buying all the latest software and hoping for the best. You will need a strategy and you need to have a system in place, which will act as a foundation for future scaling so that you can consistently generate more revenue. This will also help you in producing a predictable revenue stream that you can manage on your journey to success. Here is our advice when it comes to planning and growing a scalable sales team for B2B software companies.

Fundamentals: the know who The first thing you need to know when scaling your sales is your ideal customer profile (ICP), in other words, the ideal person, company or brand you think you have the best chance of selling to. To do this, start defining your buyer personas and influencers.

Within a company, there are two key personas: - Decision-makers: the buyers, AKA the people who make the final call on a sale - Influencers: those who do not make the final decision but have an influence on the decision-makers Note down what each of these personas’ pains and gains are and which USP of your product best fits that market persona. Also, remember that every person is different. This process - also known as mapping, will tell you how to communicate most effectively to each of them. Next, find out which are the best three channels to use to reach these people, for example, phone, email, or online. If it is online, find out where their biggest presence is, for example, LinkedIn or Twitter, and hone in on that. This is one of the best ways to earn sales-generated leads.

Task-driven cadence: a structured outreach process For any business wanting to scale its sales team, it is important to have a task-driven cadence. Not a lot of companies work with this approach at the moment, but that does not mean it is not important. For those unfamiliar with the approach, it involves having a structured outreach process when it comes to targeting your ICP. For example, keeping track of how many times you have attempted to make contact, when and what the outcome is. The goal is not to lose momentum. The task-driven cadence details all of this so that the risk is minimised of not leaving it too long between contact attempts so that they forget you, but at the same time not overdoing it and giving off stalker vibes. To do this successfully, you should have X amount of outreaches on three different platforms to every persona and influencer. Use CRM software to automate this and to assign tasks to salespeople so they get reminders and tasks that tell them when to reach out on what platform to which person. After the x amount of outreaches, the sequence ends and within a few months, the process starts again. Within those months marketing will nurture the leads that were outreached to but did not convert.

Weekly sales planning: a tight schedule To be most effective the sales teams need a tight weekly schedule. There is a way almost everyone structures their day (morning, lunch, and end-of-day meetings, etc), so plan your sales activities around how people structure their day to be most effective. For example, anticipate the best, most convenient moments to make contact and create an outreach strategy around this.

Gathering data: better understand your ICPs The moment your ICP come into your sales pipeline you need to make sure you start collecting data: what sort of target persona they are, what is their main problem and how you can help them. You should aim to gather as much relevant data as possible. The main areas of focus should be to find out: - How are conversions between stages, personas, and influencers? - Why stages and/or personas do not convert? Gathering this information can help you keep tabs on the sales process and better understand why some ICPs fell through the net and some were converted. It will also help you see how to improve your sales technique, nurture relationships and provide better content. Next, attempt to loop this feedback back to your marketing team, so that they can extract more data from it in order to fine tune their targeting and know which buttons to push for which target personas. Here you will see why it is important that marketing and sales work as one team instead of two different disciplines.

About RocketX RocketX provides SaaS scaleups with methodology and multidisciplinary teams that help them attract talent, fundraise and acquire new customers. Currently, RocketX is helping Newion portfolio companies Taxmodel and Objective platform, to scale their marketing and sales capabilities. Newion and RocketX are collaborating as part of Newion's quarterly newsletter, to provide B2B SaaS startups with best practice advice.

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