By Hal Callais

How To Develop and Maintain a Disciplined SaaS Sales Process

For young Software as a Service (SaaS) startups, the founding team has an MVP that they are beginning to sell in the market. By focusing on attaining milestones, they believe they will be in a position to secure the additional funding that they need to continue to accelerate growth and improve their product offering. Many times, some SaaS startups struggle to transition themselves into an effective sales driven organization. After working with several of our SaaS portfolio companies and years of seeing how SaaS companies develop their sales program, I wanted to impart the best practices that we have developed around structure, discipline, and delegation to successfully pull together an effective sales organization for SaaS companies.

Structure

Think through your journey. Try to outline what you did to achieve your sales milestones. Usually in SaaS, the goal is to get as many prospective leads to a demo as possible. The sequence and key steps are generally to: 1.  Identify and contact, 2. Pitch and qualify the lead, 3. Product demo, 4. Quote and contract, and 5. Close and Onboard. 6. Customer Success and retention.

There will inevitably be some ideal way to standardize this process for your business and distribute out the responsibilities internally based on relevant industry parameters and customer behaviors and each of these key steps, but the general process remains the same. You should have some system for tracking information (like a CRM) and measuring individual sales team goals and KPI’s. By the Series A, you should have some idea of how the baseline of this process works so you can better scale the sales team and understand your strengths, weaknesses, and needs as a team.

Delegation

Sales teams are like other departmental teams you may have in that culture matters. It is important that you have some assigned leader for the sales organization, to be held accountable for departmental goals and establish execution specifics. As a leader transitioning away from the day to day of the sales process, you need to have a team or individual that you can push top line objectives to perform that can be trusted to execute on the mandate.

Culture comes into play when you hire a departmental leader. A sales leader’s job is to carry out the mandate set by the CEO as set by the board. It’s easy to set goals, its hard to execute and balance the line between management and micromanagement. The sales lead is incentivized to hold their team accountable to ensure they can achieve their objectives. The paradigm of this relationship can be muddied by micromanagement and CEO involvement. Because of this, it is important to retain the trust and culture by relying on your people, sticking to the established delegation standards, manage through proxy, and use objective metrics and KPI’s to be effective and retain the best organizational structure.

Accountability

Practicing consistency and allocating adequate resources to the sales team are important to developing the right discipline and accountability. Culture plays a big role in how discipline is maintained. The sales team leader needs to have the personality to maintain this organizational discipline and culture of accountability.

Discipline is necessary to ensure that across the organization, each team member carries out their goals and focuses on the projects or areas that they have been delegated. Without discipline, the structure you worked so hard to establish can fall apart. In short, discipline and attainable goal setting is the glue that holds together structure and allows you to delegate effectively.

As SaaS investors, we care greatly that the founders take the time and invest in the sales team and organize them appropriately based on the key activities and specializations that can drive the most value for the company. Like other aspects of the startup, you need to solve for these issues to ensure you have a business that can best achieve its milestones. When in doubt, keep it simple and easy, but make sure that you stick to your guns and don’t waver.

Disclaimer: Investing in early stage companies and funds can result in a full loss of your investment. Please consult your financial advisor if venture capital and early-stage company investing is appropriate for you given your own investment goals and risk tolerances. This article is meant to be informative and does not constitute investment advice and is the opinion of the author alone.