The Situation
Like many SaaS companies, this company had grown through a founder-led sales process. For many customers, the risk of buying a newer product can be offset by a relationship with the founder that builds trust and confidence. Founders are often effective at sales – their natural bias for innovation and speed helps them to see how their software can solve a prospect’s problems and adapt their pitch to highlight that opportunity to create value for the customer.
The downside of the founder-led sales process is that it isn’t really a scalable process. The actions taken and messaging can be different across various accounts. Without a consistent process, how do you determine where you need to improve to drive better win rates?
The management team and our PE sponsors were aligned that we needed a more robust sales process – one that followed the buyer’s journey, facilitated the tracking of pipeline quality metrics like conversion rates, could be consistently executed, and, most of all, one that helped us to win more business at higher margins.Enter the SaaS Playbooks
Our PE sponsors shared some SaaS sales playbooks with us. They were insightful. They hit on ideas that we now also view as basic: doing more discovery in initial meetings / calls, ensuring that your sales stages align with the buyer’s journey, not your seller’s actions, and having objective exit criteria for each sales stage.
The most valuable framework was the highest level one – “The Three Whys”: Why Buy Anything, Why Buy from You, and Why Buy Now? We were familiar with the concept as part of the MEDDICC value program. But this was an opportunity to make these ideas the core of the sales process. The simplicity would make it easier for sellers to understand and adopt the new process.
Another helpful aspect of MEDDICC that we adopted was the description of various roles within a buying group. We had long held the adage that “No deal closes without a champion,” but the playbook was helpful in clearly defining a “Champion” as someone who understands their company’s pain and believes in our ability to solve it, and someone with the ability to find money to make the change happen. Getting all of our sellers aligned on that definition would prove to be valuable.
But as we dug into the detail of the playbooks, we found less applicability to this particular business. For example, most playbooks assumed some volume of inbound leads, and had detailed steps to aid in the qualification process and to include “handoffs” from Marketing to Sales (i.e., iMQL to MQL to SAL). Effectively, the playbooks were built for products with a more transactional sales process: an in-market buyer finds your company and your process is designed to maximize your chances of winning the deal.
For this company, however, sales were not transactional. Buyers were often not in-market in the initial conversation. They had to be educated about the product and the pain points that it would resolve. And sales were more “big ticket” items ($250k ASP) that required more stakeholders, longer cycles, and more proof points. It was clear that there was much to be learned from the playbooks, but that they were certainly not “plug and play.”
Making it Ours
We needed to transform the standard, transactional sales playbooks into a “trusted advisor” sales process that fit our business.
We spoke with both sellers and customers about why they bought from us. One theme that consistently emerged was that making this level of investment was perceived as risky, even though the expected ROI was extremely strong. Buying groups saw “signing up” for a strong ROI to be a risky endeavor.
In our founder-led sales process, founders served an important role as Subject Matter Experts who built trust in the solution. Our best sellers were less salespeople and more “trusted advisors,” like consultants who sell high value services by giving clients the confidence that the investment will deliver the expected ROI.
We also saw a pattern that for our biggest deals, we often performed some kind of “proof of value” work, such as an analysis to highlight the problems with the current state, a proof-of-concept with our client’s data to quantify the ROI potential, or a full pilot for a few weeks or months to prove the efficacy of the software. Win rates were much higher on bigger deals with some “proof of value” than smaller deals without one.
Creating a Tailored Process
Through a series of workshops with our PE sponsors, the management team, and our key sellers, we developed a tailored sales process that adapted standard SaaS best practices to the unique aspects of our business.
The diagram below shows the sales process we built. Five stages—Identify, Discover, Pursue, Prove, Close—mapped directly to the Three Whys.
Each of the stages included other important elements to ensure the process worked and to arm the sellers to have success in the stage:
- Job aids and tools – Call plans, discovery questions, thought leadership pieces, case studies, etc.
- Sales Plays to maintain or regain momentum – Experiences, proactive customer references, “meet the team” workshops, executive touch points, etc.
- Exit criteria – Objective criteria for exiting a stage that must be captured in Salesforce
Subject Matter Experts took on critical roles in the Discover, Pursue, and Prove stages. We found that their credibility helped prospects open up about their pain points and share obstacles to moving the deal forward.
The Critical Success Factors for each stage capture many of the important customizations. For example, the process involved Subject Matter Experts in the Discover stage. Additionally, quantifying the cost of inaction in the Discover stage involved a specific analysis of the prospect’s data.
The “Prove” stage was our most significant innovation. Requiring a Proof of Value analysis alongside delivery of a proposal aligned with what we'd observed. Our highest win rates came when buyers saw concrete evidence—whether through data analysis, proof-of-concept, or pilot—before we asked for commitment. And delivering the Proof of Value in conjunction with the proposal ensured a strong business case when the proposal circulated within the prospect’s buying group.
From Strategy to Execution
We started with the creation of our go-to-market pods. In order to pull this off, we needed sales, marketing, customer success, and product working in tight alignment. From there, the training could begin. Training is important to get a team aligned on a new sales process, particularly in a complex, team-based sale scenario. But many managers think the deployment is complete once the training is done. Seasoned operators know that is when the real work begins.
Validation by the management team is the most vital step in driving execution of a new process. The management team must know the new process and constantly ask questions to validate that it is being followed. That’s because culture is defined by the behaviors of the leaders. Asking validating questions shows the team that the new process is important – if the leaders know it and follow it, then the team will do so as well.
In deploying this new process, we helped the management team set up a new slate of sales meetings, including new pipeline creation and review meetings, as well as “deal desk” reviews of key deals at multiple stages. The management team’s commitment to attending these meetings was also key to successful execution of the new process.
Finally, Salesforce needed to be updated to facilitate the execution of the process. We adopted the saying, “if it isn’t in Salesforce, it didn’t happen.” That helped to ensure consistency of execution and quality of data.
The Impact
Defining metrics to measure success was a key element of this strategic initiative. After all, "that which is measured improves.” For this initiative, our KPIs were to:
- Improve performance against pipeline creation targets
- Drive increases in conversion rates
- Reduce deal exceptions
- Improve performance vs. quarterly new bookings plans
- Increase next quarter pipeline coverage
Over the course of the 3 quarters following deployment of the new, tailored sales process, we observed improvements in each of those KPIs. New pipeline creation was up 31%. And importantly, conversion rates from Stage 1 conversations to Stage 2 “Discovery” were up by 10 percentage points, from 48% to 58%. Deal exceptions were down by 45%. And, finally, win rates improved by 33%. The result was a healthier sales pipeline, improved quarterly sales forecasting accuracy, and improved performance against plan/budget.
As quarters went by and the management team continued to champion the new process, the trusted advisor sales process became muscle memory. Sellers knew how to spot a deal stuck in Stage 2. Pipeline review calls focused on CSF completion, not gut feel. And the Prove stage—our biggest customization—became our biggest differentiator. Prospects expected it. Sellers relied on it. Win rates proved it worked.
The lesson was clear: playbooks provide insight and structure, but customization and execution deliver concrete results.