I’ve spent the past 33 years helping software and technology services organizations build the capabilities necessary to accelerate sales growth and improve business value. To drive growth and value in your early-stage SaaS business, you need to start by building a solid sales process as a foundation.
Winning at SaaS is the playbook I’ve helped SaaS companies follow to sustainable growth and life-changing success. My purpose here is to share with you the sales and marketing foundations, tools, and skills that make up the Tafaro Growth Accelerator™, the system that was adopted and mastered by these companies to accelerate growth and return value to investors.
The content within Winning at SaaS is based on years of learning from prominent experts and has been rigorously tested, refined, and proven in real-world laboratories of companies just like yours. It’s built around the core belief that sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin and must be viewed as a unified process in which strategy and tactics are aligned within the company.
Building A Sales Foundation
The sales foundation consists of the following four components:
- The sales process.
- The Power Index to uncover buyer needs and issues.
- The Sales Productivity Index (SPI) to measure team and individual progress toward meeting performance goals.
- Sales reporting and pipeline review.
In this blog, I’ll focus on the Tafaro Growth Accelerator sales process which includes a planned system of measurable and repeatable selling steps a salesperson is required to perform. The process consists of five phases: Qualify, Verify, Position, Solve, and Confirm.
Each phase incorporates selling steps and tactics that must be performed before moving a prospect to the next phase. By executing the process, salespeople will improve the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of the actions they can control. As they gain experience with the process, every interaction with a buyer will have greater impact and contribute to the objective of building long-term, profitable customers. These activities are based on scientific research about how people buy and how buyers mentally construct buying decisions.
In addition, productivity factors are established for each phase of the sales process and are consistently measured and evaluated. These include win rates by phase, the elapsed time to execute each phase, the average value of a sale, and the remaining months in the sales year. The productivity factors are used to produce the Sales Productivity Index (SPI).
It’s important to emphasize that each phase within the sales process consists of a phase description, which is generic to the process. However, the specific selling activities that must be performed in each phase and the associated productivity factors can be different for each company. This should be configured based on your selling environment and how buying decisions are made.
These are the objectives we’re trying to achieve:
- Improve the sales win rate.
- Compress the sales cycle time.
- Eliminate “no decisions.”
- Accurately forecast new business.
- Measure and improve the key criteria affecting sales performance.
The Tafaro Growth Accelerator sales process is built on the concept of value-based selling. It all starts with a discussion about a prospect’s current situation and what they are trying to achieve. As discussed in Principle Four[1] in Winning at SaaS: If buyers are either looking for a solution to a stated need, willing to discuss the fact that a problem exists, or admits dissatisfaction with a current situation, then a sale can potentially occur. This leads us to Principle Five[2]: Value is defined as the economic benefit achieved by “closing the gap.”
The sales process is designed for salespeople to engage buyers (individual members of the buying team) through a rational process by helping them diagnose a specific problem or issue using the Power Index, and then work to determine what was causing it to exist.
Once buyers understand the impact of the problem and what caused it to exist, the salesperson can show the buyer how your software and/or service can solve the problem—or fill the gap.
I’ll stop here for now. You will find more detail with practical examples in the Winning at SaaS playbook. In it, you’ll hear from executives of successful SaaS companies who have built their businesses from inception to market leaders, and investors who provide valuable insight as to how to maximize shareholder value.
Learn more: If you’re having sales issues and you’re not comfortable with your sales process and results, you can schedule a consultation with Steve using the form below.
Get started: If you’re ready to get started by arranging for a workshop applying the principles in Winning at SaaS configured to the needs of your team, reach out to Steve using the form below.
[1] Winning at SaaS, page 26, 4. Create a Power Index to uncover buyer needs and issues.
[2] Winning at SaaS, page 30, 5. Implement a pre-sales capability with lead scoring.
