How to efficiently scale your sales process from startup to big team success
Sales efficiency starts out easy.
When you’re a small business you have an intimate sales team – often including (or only consisting of) the founder.
That makes it pretty simple to get alignment, tell the same story, know your product inside out, have a clear idea of your potential customer, and get visibility on the small number of customers in your pipeline. You adapt to each customer’s need to secure the deal.
Before you know it, you’ve got a growing team of sales reps that are disconnected from your story, your customer profile, and your company values.
A perfect recipe for inefficiency.
And while there’s no single perfect sales methodology to use, the good news is with a solid strategy in place keeping your sales efficiency as you scale doesn’t have to be a troublesome task.
In this eBook, we will take you through how to build scalable, efficient practices through each stage of the sales process:
At each stage we’ll talk about the high-impact moves you can make to build and scale sales, reduce friction, win more deals and get satisfied customers.
We’ll also explore how you can avoid the many pitfalls on the journey with top tips from our experts (including the lessons they learned – often the hard way).
This is a valuable 15-minute read but if you only have two minutes, you can jump to the key takeaways.
Let’s meet the brains behind this eBook’s insights:
— Founder, Baaboom
Per has immense experience from B2B sales. He is also founder of Baaboom that helps software companies become successful with simple and effective methodologies for finding product-market fit and growth execution, generating in full pipeline, shorter sales cycles and streamlined delivery processes. Per works with some of the world’s fastest growing software companies, such as Deel and Couchbase, as well as start ups.
— CEO, Hypergene
Urban Bucht is currently CEO of Hypergene and has a long background from being a leader in SaaS and tech companies. He is passionate about building high growth, scalable teams and profitable businesses. He has previously been heading sales at several tech companies for many years.
— Head of Nordics, Baltics and Eastern Europe, Vonage
Charlotte is a recognized leader in the SaaS and telco industry with 20+ years of experience in leading international sales teams, currently responsible for Northern-, Eastern Europe and Central Asia at Ericsson-owned Vonage. With 15 years in Silicon Valley Charlotte is equally at home in the start-up community as in the corporate world. She has a proven track record of building effective sales, account management, sales engineering and sales ops teams to drive both revenue and margin.
— Operations Lead at Monterro, former CEO of Lime Technologies
Erik is a veteran of the B2B SaaS world and he’s passionate about sales. Having spent nearly 20 years at the CRM-provider Lime, as CEO, COO and heading Sales, he’s delved into all bits and pieces in sales. He’s learnt the how to succeed – the hard way. At Monterro, Erik provides operational support to our portfolio companies, as well as having several board positions.
Without the fundamentals in place, there will be friction at every stage of your sales pipeline. No ifs, no buts.
You need to commit genuine time and effort to set the fundamentals and positioning:
Know who you’re for, who you’re not for, and who you’re up against
Who do you solve this problem for? What is your ideal customer like? What do they care about? What size of company are you targeting? And crucially what is their buying process like?
This is going to impact how your business approaches the sales process (and how your business runs overall), and the kinds of salespeople who are going to flourish at your business.
The salespeople will also be much better equipped if you’ve got a very clear idea of where you sit in the market. What is your USP? Who are your competitors? How do you differentiate?
You need to have a clear understanding of the problem your business solves, and how you add value to your target market and customers. Make sure you have a highly business critical use case. You also need to be able to articulate it in a way that’s easy to understand and communicate.
Erik Syrén“If you don’t know who your competitors are, who you are for, and how you add value – how can you expect your sales process to be efficient?”
Top tip: A bad business is all things to all people.
Once you’ve identified your target customers, and your business critical use case – stick with them.
This does not mean you’re leaving money on the table by missing out on customers – it means they’re not the most valuable customers for your business.
If marketing is promoting different use cases of your product than your sales team is, prospects will quickly get confused and sales teams frustrated.
Get marketing and sales on the same page. This will give marketing a clearer view of the leads (and their needs), and sales a clear view of the kinds of prospects they should expect.
Per Lange“Your whole company needs to decide on ONE critical business process — It’s hard enough to break through with one message, if you have 50, it’s impossible.”
And it doesn’t stop there. Get your product, development, and customer success teams aligned too. Once your whole business is singing from the same song sheet – based on your positioning – then you’re well placed to reduce friction from your sales process.
Off the back of alignment, there are some other crucial people-centric moves you can make to maximise your sales efficiency…
Sales cannot be a dirty word in your organisation.
Sales team members need to be seen as a crucial link in building deep customer relationships and taking your positioning to market.
To empower them to do that, involve them in your decision-making process, get their feedback, and use whatever chance you have to improve the perception of them amongst your community.
For example, if your sales leader is regularly speaking at industry events, chances are more people are going to pick up the phone when they call – listen to what they say when they do.
Erik Syrén“Even if you have the best salespeople in the world, if they don’t fit with your culture then you have to let them go.”
Elevating your sales department will of course mean you need to elevate the practices you use to hire salespeople.
That starts by hiring for experience and culture.
The experience you need is specific to the people you sell to. A salesperson who excels with patience-heavy technical enterprise sales is a very different person to the one who is great at selling to fast moving start-ups.
And when it comes to culture – you need to hire folks that align with your company values. Make this your top priority.
It’s much easier to hire the people with the right behaviour than to try to change their behaviour after they’ve joined.
Culture-based hiring needs to be backed up with the right rewards and KPI structure. If you start to reward behaviours that conflict with your company values – you’re going to have problems.
Want to find out more about instilling a winning company culture? Check out our eBook on that very subject.
If you want to reduce friction from your sales process, your sales teams need to be highly involved in prospecting – not just marketing.
And that’s going to get much easier if you do the following:
Identify the accounts most likely to become your high-value customers. Objective measures of value – like annual contract values (ACV), lifetime values (LTV), cost-of-acquiring-customers (CAC) and CAC-payback – facilitate that. They give you a clear way to segment target accounts and get go-to-market alignment.
The criteria for your ideal customer profile (ICP) need to be extensive. That means including a potential customer’s: industry, budget, revenue, size, location, pain-points, age, and potential lifetime value.
Charlotte Fors“If you think prospecting for new customers is purely a job for marketing – think again.”
Top tip: Use your current customer base
A great first step when building your ICP is to look at your current customer base. Spend time identifying the shared quantitative and qualitative data characteristics of your most valuable customers or prospect data – it will help you identify the common attributes of the most (and least) valuable accounts.
Everyone in your organisation should know what your ICP is – get everyone on the same page and give them time to ask the questions they need to.
As you grow, the strength of this alignment is going to be tested. To counter this, you need to have good lists and evangelise the importance of keeping them up to date. This way, every salesperson can see who your must wins are, what connects them, and how their needs are evolving.
Setting a clear ICP and getting everyone on board with it is the first stage. Next you need a process that helps you assess readiness to buy, gives customers the right information at the right time, and filters out bad-fit customers that have snuck under your radar.
There’s no one approach that’s superior to another. But there are some key questions you need to ask regardless of your approach…
This includes their primary needs (the overarching goal they’re trying to achieve) but also their secondary needs. This includes everything from regulatory/compliance concerns, and even specific features needs. Keep in mind that the individual’s needs are not always the same as the company’s. You need to know both.
You need to know the potential scope of the deal in front of you. This helps you quantify the level of value the customer can get from your product and how much potential value the customer holds for your business.
Who are the initiators, the influencers, and the decision makers, and what are their roles in the decision making process?
What is the tipping point for the deal? Is there a compelling event you can use as a qualification goal? And if you find that your deals are repeatedly stalling during qualification it might be that you lack a compelling event.
Charlotte Fors“One of the most common mistakes is that salespeople pass prospects through qualification too quickly. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions, like their budget, to make sure you’ll win a sale in the end before progressing.”
There will be a temptation to push the pace and aim to close fast. Our advice? Be patient.
As the deal progresses, build a relationship with all stakeholders and use it as a chance to deepen your understanding of the size, scope, and nature of the deal.
So how can you stay patient but keep momentum? There are four key moves you can make…
Your selling process needs to mirror your customer’s buying process – including the pacing, the overall length of time, and what’s involved.
That might mean you use workshops, demos, have technical meetings, set up reference meetings with other customers. Whatever you use, choose it from a customer-need perspective. And remember, the individual’s need might not be the same as the company’s. You need to get a grip of them both.
Make a plan for how that approach might adapt to the size of the deal you’re facing too. For example, a huge, multi-region enterprise is going to require a much more in-depth process than a single licence one. Try to find a good combination of in-person meetings and online.
This gives your prospects an immediate view of your team’s culture and allows you to identify what the right approach is for each prospect.
Urban Bucht“The foundation for an efficient sales process is to understand how your customers want to buy rather than how you want to sell.”
Use the collateral that your marketing department has created and create a shared vision with the customer.
That means they understand the problem they’re trying to solve, how you can help them solve it, and why your specific solution to the problem is the right one.
Of course, the better you laid your foundations the easier this will be.
Enterprise customers involve a lot of stakeholders – so get a handle on who they are in the prospecting stage and get their buy in.
A lot of enterprise deals stall at the proposal stage because the real decision-maker is suddenly revealed and before you know it, you’re back to qualification.
Don’t burden one sales person with all aspects of the deal.
Assemble team members with a diverse set of knowledge and expertise and match up members of your team with stakeholders in your prospect’s company.
E.g. By matching your technical lead with the IT lead on the other side of the deal will mean there’s an immediate expert-to-expert dynamic to the sales process. It’s a surefire way to increase buyer confidence.
The caveat here is you need to ensure your handoffs between team members are seamless. Total visibility on where your lead is in the buying process is a must and for that you’ll need a CRM that all team members can access.
Charlotte Fors“There will be lots of different stakeholders in the companies you’re selling to. Your teams need to match those stakeholders, and then be able to share their findings with their colleagues.”
The end of the deal is in sight. You’re nearly there – now you need to stick to the landing.
If you’ve had a rigorous proposal and negotiation process this stage can be relatively smooth but there are some fundamental things you need to ensure you have sorted.
As the finish line approaches – you’re going to get last minute jitters. Your customers may want to have some things explained again. They may want some extra meetings.
To counter these concerns, it’s essential that the sales person takes responsibility for the final straight and gets the deal over the line. Of course, they can bring specialist team members where necessary (e.g. for technical meetings) but a single point of contact a customer can rely on, will create trust and confidence right when you need it most.
Finally, don’t be afraid if they want to negotiate on price – it’s the best buying signal you can get.
Setting expectations at the beginning over the close time it will take to get the final elements of the deal square away will help you keep the momentum up – without rushing.
It will also help you allocate the right resources to the deal and highlight any potential bottlenecks or challenges ahead.
Urban Bucht“Don’t be afraid of price negotiations – it’s a good indication they’re motivated to buy. If you have established value and differentiation early in the buying process it is a great discussion.”
To ensure you have a smooth handover to your customer success team, you need to get a very clear understanding of what the post deal process and timeline will look like. Will they require any specific training or support during the transition phase?
Some enterprises might need extensive training for their teams or dedicated support during the initial stages of adoption – make sure you’ve accounted for this.
Involve and introduce your customer success team to the customer before you close the deal so everyone is on the same page on the next step.
Let the salesperson be involved in the first steps in the implementation to avoid any misunderstandings of what is included in the deal.
And before we wrap things up – here are the pipeline management and sales KPIs you need to keep your sales process at peak efficiency.
Measure conversion rates from Market Qualified Leads (MQLs) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) to Opportunities to Closed deals.
This is the cornerstone of your forecasting. Decide how many of the deals you should be likely to close when you create an opportunity (commitment rate). Follow up.
This helps you work out how much each deal is making you – which forms the basis of your target setting.
This tells you the cost of acquiring a customer and how long it takes before your costs are covered.
It lets you know how quickly a sales team closes deals and generates revenue.
LTV tells you how much total revenue is generated by each customer, in average. The higher your LTV and the lower your CAC, the faster you can grow your business.
— # of activities (meetings, calls etc) per department and person — sales per quota bearer — time from order to cash — sales ramp up time (onboarding speed metric) — % sold to ICPs (to make sure you sell to the right customers)
And that’s it. Here are our key takeaways…
Know who you’re for, who you’re not for, and who you’re up against. Know how you add value, and identify a critical business use case. Then make sure everyone in the business is clear on the story. Oh, and remember a bad business is all things to all people.
Cultivate a positive perception of the role of your sales team. Then prioritise culture (and specific experience) in your hiring practices.
Ensuring quality with qualification
Don’t rush prospects through the funnel – this is your chance to assess to full scope out the deal value and customer needs. Drop them if they don’t qualify.
Use your current customer base to draw up a rock solid Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), segment your ideal customers by their potential deal value, and make sure all your teams know all of the above.
Ensure your selling process mirrors your customers’ buying process, create a shared vision, and use a team approach to connect specific people on either side of the deal.
Make sure a responsible salesperson is in charge of getting the final deal done, be prepared for last minute nerves and negotiations and set timeline expectations. Then make sure you have a plan for the post-deal process to ensure a smooth hand over to customer success.
We’re Monterro, an investment firm (of the get-your-hands-dirty with strategy and operational support variety) that helps Nordic software companies hit their biggest growth goals.
