Winning at SaaS is a playbook for CEOs and CROs about sales strategies and how you scale an early-stage SaaS business that’s different from a traditional software license business. The Tafaro Growth Accelerator™ is the system that was developed, adopted, and mastered by many SaaS companies in live sales settings to accelerate growth and return value to investors. Let’s get into it.
Implementing the Tafaro Growth Accelerator SaaS Sales Process
The SaaS business is different in both your approach to sales and customers. For SaaS growth, you need to think in terms of recurring revenue and long-term client relationships with an emphasis on customers for life.
The Tafaro Growth Accelerator is a SaaS sales process configured for new account salespeople and account managers. The process consists of five phases: Qualify, Verify, Position, Solve and Confirm. Each phase includes measurable and repeatable selling steps that salespeople and account managers are required to perform before moving a prospect to the next phase.
By executing the process, salespeople and account managers 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.
Implementation consists of the following three-step plan that has been tested and proven to be successful.
Step 1: Education
Every employee in lead development, sales, and account management must learn the foundational elements and principles inherent in the Tafaro Growth Accelerator. Knowing how to execute the techniques and processes are also vital for success. As you read through the playbook, you’ll see that every aspect of selling to a new or existing client is meticulously laid out providing you with the educational content that needs to be presented and learned.
Step 2: Personalization and Configuration
Once the foundational elements and principles are understood, the SaaS sales process can be personalized and configured to fit the needs and objectives of your business, your market, and your customers’ buying behavior. Everyone who will be involved in its execution should be invited to provide input to the configuration and personalization effort. As issues are raised, discussed, and resolved, common ground is reached, and ownership of the system belongs to the team members. This is where you build team alignment and equity.
Step 3: Changing Behavior
It’s important to remember that you will be requiring salespeople and account managers to shift their methodology from promoting products and services to solving problems, and this requires behavioral change. That’s why it’s hard. Having worked with hundreds of salespeople and account managers, it’s been my experience that when someone learns a new behavior, that behavior needs to be positively reinforced and developed for the person to become proficient at what they’ve learned. We’ve all witnessed the tendency for salespeople and account managers to fall back to their old methods after they’ve been trained in new ones. It happens all the time because the new methods were not practiced and reinforced.
After personalizing and configuring the Tafaro Growth Accelerator, it’s essential for leadership to measure how each salesperson and account manager is executing the selling steps in each phase. This includes identifying areas requiring remediation and providing on-going coaching until each salesperson and account manager is executing properly and achieving the expected results.
In my experience, this is best done through one-to-one pipeline reviews conducted twice a month for a period of three months. Once leadership is comfortable with everyone’s ability to execute the system properly, monthly reviews and situational sessions will provide the continued reinforcement necessary.
“The CEOs and CROs Sales Playbook for Early SaaS Success isn’t just a book—it’s a strategic playbook that illuminates the path to implementing the Tafaro Growth Accelerator, a sales and marketing system that stands as a beacon of success in the SaaS landscape.” – Ben Harrison, Co-founder, DealCloud
Learn more about generating revenue and profitability in a SaaS business by scheduling a consultation with Steve with the form below.
