Inc - 15 Ways to Help Your Sales Team in 2024

2024 — the year we’re now fully in the New Age of Efficiency. Sales folks have to truly bring in 4x-5x what they take home, marketers are on budgets that seem too tight, and customer success has been transformed into agents of upsell.

A few ideas on how to help the sales team make this your best year so far:

Hire dedicated sales / revenue ops. Many of you will have little to no dedicated help in sales operations, even up to $10m ARR or beyond. Who’s making sure the reps have the right collateral? Getting routing the right leads? Are being trained properly? Are being paid properly? If that’s you, or your VP of Sales, or even your VP of Marketing … it can sort of work for a while.  But the thing is, that’s a bad use of time. Hire a director+ of sales ops to take the administrative side of sales off the plate of folks that should opening and closing.  Get them more leverage to do what they do best.

Invest (more) in training and onboarding. While we’ve gotten better since we all went distributed, sales teams often still do some of the worst onboarding of almost any function. They throw new reps in the mix, give them a ramp-up period, but training usually is weak. Do the opposite. Invest heavily in training your reps. Build a “bible” and update it quarterly. Make it at least an 8-part course. If you force yourself to build an 8-step new rep training course, that alone will likely be 8x better than what you do today.  Start off with a buddy system, if you can make that work. Listen to tons of Gong or Chrous or Salesloft calls of your new reps (whatever tool you use).

Specialize. If you haven’t done this yet, specialize more next year. This will take some of the pressure off the sales team. Hire more folks to acquire, manage and qualify leads for your reps. Let your closers be closers.

Have sane quotas. Make sure the majority of your reps can hit quota. If they can’t, even today, something’s wrong.  No one can succeed when they know they are set up for failure.

Accurate sales forecasting is more critical to business success than most realize. Having a predictable pipeline enables more effective decision-making, from headcount planning to strategic investments in technology and beyond. During SaaStr Annual, Eric Huff, VP of Sales Strategy and Programs, and Theresa Stevens, Regional VP of the SMB sales team, shared an “under the hood” look at how Salesforce does its internal forecasting using Salesforce.

While it may sound simple, this is actually one of Salesforce’s most requested sessions in their executive briefing center since running accurate forecasts is so critical to business success, yet it’s not always easy to execute. 

Limited Partners or “LPs” are the folks that give the VC partners (the “General Partners”) the actual money to invest. There are many types of LPs, but the vast majority of the money comes from large endowments, non-profits, and sovereign wealth funds. Folks with billions and billions to invest over the long term.

A few LP risks in a VC fund:

• A risk the General Partners make significant money, but the LPs do not. This is an inherent risk in the fee structure of VC funds. About 20% of the fund goes to the GPs as “fees”, even if the fund does not return any capital. This happens somewhat frequently.
• A risk they can’t stop funding a fund they’ve lost confidence in. LPs don’t fund 100% of their commitment up front, they fund it over many years. If they lose confidence in the GPs and stop funding, they can lose 100% of their investment.
• A timing risk in capital calls. GPs call capital to get it. LPs fund that capital. LPs model out a pacing here for all their managers and GPs, but can get caught if everyone asks for their cash at the same time. Especially if the rest of their assets are less liquid than planned.
• A general risk of not understanding underlying fund performance, and of performance being overstated. Especially at smaller and earlier-stage funds, the nominal value of the investments has a lot of discretion to it. The assets may not really be worth what the GPs say.

Team risk in GPs. There is a fair amount of partner turnover at VC funds. As an LP, you have very limited say here other than some “key man” provision clauses.

You sort of have to Hope and Pray a bit as an LP. This is one of many reasons LPs tend to “re-up” and concentrate in proven managers.

Jameson Yung, SVP of Sales at Gong, and Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and previous CRO at Brex, share five tactical ways to get back to growing and hitting revenue targets. 

The days of working a little for big returns are behind us in the Boom of ‘21, so what can you do to start hitting revenue targets? 

Up Next: Wednesday, November 29th @ 10AM

Topic: Moving Upmarket & Nailing Enterprise Sales in Today's Macro Environment with Salesforce Ventures

Speaker: Moving Upmarket & Nailing Enterprise Sales in Today's Macro Environment with Salesforce Ventures

Workshop Wednesdays is new series where we’ll be bringing some of the best SaaStr speakers to you LIVE, every Wednesday. 

Each workshop will be hosted in a live, interactive 30-minute format at 10am Pacific each and every Wednesday. This workshop will be 100% LIVE, not pre-recorded, and will be hosted in an, interactive 30-minute format, including Q&A.

If you’ve raised $10m-$15m, I’m assuming you are somewhere between $2m and $10m in ARR (revenue).

The most important thing you can do at a high level is to go hire Great VPs. 

• A great VP of Sales to keep the engine scaling
• A great VP of Marketing to keep the leads coming in
• A great VP of Customer Success to make all those hard won customers happy

After $5m-$6m in ARR or so, it’s really hard to scale without a strong VP heading most core functions.  With $10m+ in the bank, you can start making those hires now.

The most important thing you can do at a tactical level is almost always the same: use the capital at this stage to double down on what is working.

You’ll be tempted to use the capital to enter new markets, to expand into new segments, to try out new verticals.

Tiny experiments are OK, and investing in segments that are just starting to take off is good. But almost always, the fastest and easiest way to go from $1m to $10m is to double down on what is working:

• Sell more to the types of customers you already have.
• Upgrade the management team.
• Hire more sales reps, to sell to the same basic segments that you already have customers in.
• Spend more on demand gen — to any customer segment that makes up more than 10% of your revenue.
• Give the biggest customers more attention.
• Hire more engineers to close the feature gaps the existing customers and prospects are already complaining about.
• Have a customer conference.
• Do more top tier events, if events work for you.
• Drive your deal sizes up, by providing more value.

You just won’t have a big enough team, enough redundancy, enough “extra” to spend much of that now on areas where you have no revenue traction yet. Even if you really want to enter those areas. Even if your competition is killing it there. You have to be patient.

“My App Stack” is a new series where we dig in with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs and CEOs on just what apps they’re really using to run their business.  I always learn a lot from these — they are in essence a best practices list from each leader. Last week we had a great one with Meagen Eisenberg, CMO at Lacework, check it out here.

This week we have Samyutha Reddy, Head of Enterprise Marketing at Jasper.ai!

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