Getting the right people in the right seats is the single most important job for any CEO

In the same way that mixing a cocktail involves getting just the right mix of ingredients applied in the correct way, the same is true for your B2B SaaS sales machine. You need to look carefully at your target customers , map their buying process, and then design your sales process to support that, then you need to decide on the best cocktail of sales disciplines to service this process.

There are several things to consider here, the first question is do we need field sales people turning up at our customers sites and presenting a value proposition face to face, or can we use an inside sales approach where we connect to the customer remotely using technology (phone, skype, screen share, social media, etc)? For the purpose of this article I am going to concentrate on inside sales disciplines as that is most common in SaaS B2B companies. The purpose of this post is to just give a very high level overview of the various roles to make it easier for you to decide what your business needs. Also its worth bearing in mind that as your business changes and evolves your best GTM strategy will change too, so you need to always be adaptable in terms of your sales team structure.

There are 6 main roles that you need to consider and I’ll try to outline these below.

1. Inbound Sales Development Rep (SDR). If you have an inbound lead generation strategy that uses content to pull prospects to your website then you will try to convert some of these visitors into leads. This usually happens by capturing their contact details in return for some gated (premium) content, or when they sign up for a trial of your product. It’s unlikely that every person that gives you their contact details will be a genuine sales opportunity so you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is the role of the SDR, they contact your MQL’s (explained in a separate post) and qualify them in or out of the sales process. If the SDR believes that the lead is a genuine sales opportunity then they will qualify it and pass that along to the AE’s to progress. In my opinion most companies do a poor job with their SDR’s, when they contact you their product knowledge isn’t very good, and all they seem to care about is figuring out if I am a genuine prospect. This is a shame as it’s often the first human contact that a prospect has with your company and its an opportunity to wow them and to differentiate from the competition. If you train your SDR’s well and compensate them correctly it can be a real competitive advantage. SDR’s are measured on the number of SQL’s that they pass to the AE team on a monthly basis. Leading indicators will be contact rate and the various conversion rates on the journey from MQL to SQL.
2. Outbound Business Development Rep (BDR). These are reps who go and find you leads. Usually they will find a way to compile a list of potential companies who seem to match your Ideal Customer Personas (ICP) and then attempt to strike up a conversation with the prospect with the aim of (1) uncovering a pain point that you can solve, (2) introducing your product as a way to relive that pain, and (3) getting the prospect to commit to evaluating the product. At this point the lead is passed to the AE team to progress. At the very least if you get this right you create brand awareness and can learn a huge amount about your value proposition, what resonates etc. This information can be fed into marketing so that they can sharpen the messaging. You will hear lots of rubbish about cold calling being dead, this is simply not true. Yes things have changed, and social media has made it easier and more important to research a person/company before calling into them, but at the end of the day you still have to pick up the phone and call the individual at some point. In my experience the best approach is a mix of social, email, and phone in order to arrange the conversation. You can use social to sow the seed and get your brand in front of the product, then use email to pique their interest, and finally the phone to uncover the pain point and suggest a solution. BDR’s are measured on the number of SQL’s that they pass to the AE team on a monthly basis.
3. Account Executive (AE). These are your closers, they turn opportunities into customers. In a fairly standard SaaS sales machine you have the BDR’s and the SDR’s feeding qualified leads (SQL’s) into the AE team for them to progress. It’s usually the AE who will provide a web based demo to the prospect, who will do the really detailed needs assessment with the prospect, who will discuss payment plans etc. But most importantly it is the AE who will ask the prospect to sign on the dotted line and start paying you. Once the AE has signed the customer up then the ownership of the customer passes to the CSM’s (discussed below). The AE’s are measured and compensated on the volume of closed business that they generate within a set time frame, usually monthly. But leading indicators to revenue will be the various conversion rates.
4. Customer Success Managers (CSM). The CSM’s are there to ensure that new customers onboard onto the platform successfully, and that means that the customers actually activate. An activated customer is one who is actively using your product and gaining value from doing so, this is what you want. It’s great that someone has signed up and started paying you, but its only after they have activated that they are no longer a major churn risk. This hopefully explains how important your CSM’s are to your business. The CSM’s are also responsible for the renewal of the plan at the end of the contract term, so they are measured on retention or the inverse of retention which is churn. Churn can be measured in terms of logo churn (accounts leaving) or revenue churn (money leaving).
5. Account Development Reps (ADR). These reps are tasked with growing the value of your existing customers, so their role is focused on up-sell and cross-sell. Many of your customers will sign up for a plan that is less than they actually need, they do this to test the water and to save some cash. They may want to see how your product works in production, how your support team handle issues, how fast you respond to questions etc. There are also a large number of accounts that will sign up for a lesser account because they don’t fully understand the value of the higher plans features. It is the role of the ADR’s to spot these opportunities and work with the customer to ensure that they are using the best value plan for their needs.
6. Partnership Manager (PM). The above 5 roles are all direct sales, where the company deals directly with the end user of the product. But you might also want to have indirect or channel sales in place, this is where the end user interacts with a 3rd party partner (re-seller) to deal with the above, and that partner then works with the company to service the end users needs. The re-seller will usually work on a margin basis whereby they handle the entire sale of the product and once the customer closes then the company pay a percentage of the monthly fee back to the re-seller. Partnerships are a great way to break into a new market as it gives you local knowledge, language, and an existing customer base. Its also a very scalable model. However you do get issues with channel conflict and sometimes customer service issues that you need to work around. Its often difficult to have both a direct and a channel model working in the same territory for obvious reasons. The PM’s role is to recruit, on-board, and then manage the relationship with the re-sellers. They act as a go-between and ensure that the re-seller is well equipped to maximize on every sales opportunity and that the company’s product and support teams are adequately supporting the re-seller. When done well the re-sellers sales teams become an extension of your own sales force.

There are a few other ingredients to this cocktail that need to be mentioned here, (1) specialization, and (2) handovers.

Specialization: As soon as its practical to do so you should specialize your sales team. What this means is that you need a different person or team handling each individual discipline explained above, rather than having one person spanning disciplines. The specific skills required to be great at each one are very different and specializing allows you to properly focus on each area. You will be able to clearly see which area isn’t working when you get a sales blockage for example. You can also use the specialization to create a talent pipeline by hiring into the BDR or SDR roles and then promoting reps into AE’s or CSM’s etc.

Handovers: The process outlined above relies on a customer being passed between roles and thus people. The experience of being passed for the customer must be seamless and the reason for the different roles must make sense to the customer too. Therefore you need to spend time on making the handovers perfect, much like a baton pass on a relay team you need to practice this over and over again.

Once you have decided on the type of sale you want to run, put the correct specialized roles in place, given them a set process to follow including clear handovers then you have the makings of a delicious cocktail. Then it all comes down to Kaizen, measure, improve, and repeat.