Author: Adam Richardson

SaaS companies around the world are focusing on one of the most competitive yet lucrative goals an organisation can have: business growth. Whether it’s scaling your startup or doing everything you can to achieve hypergrowth, growing a business is no mean feat.

Knowing what to invest in, what to avoid, how to hire the right people, how to align your sales and marketing teams and how to brand your organisation are just some of the challenges companies face during business growth.

One topic that isn’t addressed as often as it should be is how business owners keep their go-to-market teams focused during periods of significant business growth. With your GTM team being central to growing your business, there are a number of key elements you should consider when aiming to keep your employees focused, in order to avoid burnout.

 

1. PROMOTE EMPLOYEE INCENTIVES INTERNALLY

Communicating employee incentives with your team is vital to keep everyone aligned with the business goals and focused on the two main priorities – onboarding new customers, and retaining and expanding existing customers. 

As your business grows, so will your number of employees, and thus your number of customers. However, as more employees join your GTM team, it can be easy for people to lack focus and become unmotivated if they feel like a small fish in a big pond.

It is completely up to business owners and team leaders to decide what specific incentives for employees are. The key is to consistently communicate these incentives with your employees to ensure their focus remains on what they are individually doing to not only earn more money for themselves, but also contribute to the success of the overall business.

We often suggest to our clients that they have two separate incentives to ensure your employees are as invested in retaining existing customers as they are in onboarding new ones. For example, a set financial bonus for onboarding new customers, with company holidays or social events as an incentive for customer retention, will help your people keep individual and business goals at the forefront of their minds.

Founder and CEO of Drift, David Cancel, mentioned an easy solution during his speech at SaaSFest 2015: “design your internal metrics for every department to incentivise customer retention”. It was his belief, based on experience, that this one simple change could help SaaS companies drastically improve their customer retention rates.

 

2. COMMUNICATE YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY AND HOW ALL EMPLOYEES ARE INVOLVED

One problem SaaS business owners often face during periods of intense growth is a sudden distance set between the owners and senior management, and the rest of the business.

If your GTM team feels that they don’t know the directors very well, or they aren’t completely clear on what the business is aiming to achieve in the next 12 to 18 months, it will be easy for employees to lose focus.

Hold monthly meetings to communicate the following with all employees:

• What the business goals are and what the strategy is to achieve these goals
• What is changing in the business
• Which teams are growing – the best way to introduce new employees during mass recruitment is to have photos, names, job titles and teams communicated in a presentation
• Big wins and who was responsible for them
• What each team is doing well, and what can be improved
• How much money employees can earn based on business growth goals

 

3. INVEST IN TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT

If you offer your employees a competitive salary, impressive commission structure and plenty of additional benefits, it is likely that your employees will, for the most part, feel valued. But it is vital that you invest in training and development for individuals and teams on a regular basis. 

Employees need to see the opportunity to grow and develop their careers where they work. Not only does training demonstrate to your employees that you value them within your organisation, but it shows that you are also invested in helping to develop their individual careers. 

Your people will be less inclined to leave if they feel appreciated and valued by their employer, and if they are feeling valued, their focus will remain on their role and how it contributes to the growth of your business. Despite the main purpose of training being to develop the capabilities of the individual team member, it also helps contribute to your business growth by prioritising employee retention.

 

4. PROVIDE FEEDBACK AND OFFER SUPPORT TO AVOID BURNOUT

If employees start to feel like their voices aren’t being heard, their hard work isn’t being recognised or their efforts aren’t being noticed, it is likely that their focus will diminish.

Communication with your GTM team is key to keeping everyone focused and on the same page. Ensure that managers and team leaders are offering individual feedback on performance, and encourage employees to provide feedback on their role and processes involved. 

If, for example, employees want their employers to invest in new software to improve their productivity, managers need to ensure this feedback is heard and considered. Why? Because if your GTM team is providing feedback but not receiving the support or communication they require, it is likely that they will become burnt out over time, resulting in a lack of focus and thus a decline in performance over time.

 

GET IN TOUCH

Here at Strive, we source top tier sales talent for hypergrowth tech companies. To learn more about how we can help your business scale, contact our team on 0203 983 0770 or email hello@scalewithstrive.com.

YOUR BUSINESS GROWTH CHECKLIST – HOW TO GET TO IPO

To recap Part 1 of our Building a Strategy for Business Hypergrowth blog series, the SaaS industry is growing at an exponential scale, with over 2,000 SaaS companies in the UK alone. New SaaS companies typically enjoy an initial phase of fast growth, but without a solid strategy for hyper growth they are competing in an extremely competitive market that may see this growth slow.

In this article we’ll look at how to build the sales process and model that is going to enable your business to sell the products and services that you offer. 

 

WHAT IS HYPERGROWTH?

Traditional growth usually has a CAGR of up to 10%; whereas businesses that experience hypergrowth maintain a 40%+ average annual growth rate for more than one year. There are stages of growth that every breakthrough company, product, service or idea transitions through. For hypergrowth, these are often referred to as the ‘hypergrowth curve’ and consist of the following three stages:

1. The Edison stage

This is the very first stage of a market, named after Thomas Edison who went through this experience when inventing the lightbulb. This is the stage where you question everything and invest all of your time into questioning the realistic possibilities of designing a product or service and bringing it to fruition. 

When Salesforce, for example, came into the market and started to build software as a service, they were going through The Edison stage. They were the first to take on-premises software and bring it into the cloud.

2. Model T stage

Every new product or service needs to figure out how to supply a larger audience in order to scale; much like Henry Ford did when he took something that had already been invented and supplied it en masse.

Generally at this stage there is low competition, but in order to advance to the next stage on the hypergrowth curve, where competition is far greater, you’ll need to adapt your approach whilst resisting the urge to use quick fixes. 

3. The P&G stage

This is where your product or service goes global, and it gets there by differentiating itself entirely from its competition. By investing heavily in your brand, you’ll need to create desire, individuality and consumer preference – much like MailChimp did. One year after launching their freemium model in 2009, their userbase had grown five times and their profit (yes, profit) was up 650%. This can be largely attributed to the investment in their branding and is explained brilliantly in this case study. 

MailChimp’s offering wasn’t the first of its kind, but they made themselves the more desirable option for email marketing. 

 

BUSINESS GROWTH CHECKLIST

Businesses looking to achieve hypergrowth need to see beyond hitting the next revenue number. Use our business growth checklist to stay on track when scaling your organisation:

• Conduct secondary research to enable market analysis, competitive analysis and identify trends
• Conduct primary research, which will allow you to ask more specific questions around your product/service
• Analyse product/service scalability, ensuring hypergrowth is a realistic possibility
• Refine your processes to improve operational efficiency
• Identify and assess the likelihood of potential risks, as well as the impact they could have and how you’ll treat them
• Look at hiring as a top priority – hiring the right people is essential, as well as promoting within at the right time
• Consider creating a hiring team
• Ensure you can afford the build-up in working capital, equipment, hiring and capacity expansion that comes with hypergrowth; and secure investment or funding where needed
• Consider the need for proper finance processes and accounting functions
• Use this hypergrowth calculator to help plan your finances
• Invest in technology that can scale with your business
• Be agile – you’ll need the ability to adapt to internal and external challenges, at speed
• Maintain a customer-focused approach at all times – being customer-driven is essential to hypergrowth

 

EXAMPLES OF HYPERGROWTH COMPANIES AND HOW THEY GOT TO WHERE THEY ARE

It can be inspiring to see how a business grew from nothing to the world-renowned organisation you see today. Here’s a look at 5 SaaS businesses that achieved hypergrowth:

SEMRush

SEMRush is a Search Engine Marketing tool, founded in 2008 and currently $124.9million in revenue. They went public in March 2021, and revolutionised the market by providing transparent insights and solutions to SEO, keyword research, competitor analysis and more; helping their customers improve web visibility. 

Not without their challenges, SEMRush has run its business without raising funds since its formation, except for the $40 Million raised in 2018. The company listed its IPO in NYSE on 24th March 2021 and managed to raise $140 Million on the first day. Their revenue for the 3rd quarter of 2021 was up 53% year on year. 

Focusing largely on their marketing and brand, SEMRush identified a niche in the market and has made itself the first option for SEO help and advice. Like MailChimp, they offer a free version so that customers can ‘try before they buy’, and their customer-centric approach sees their brand being extremely active across all social networks. 

Monzo

Monzo is a digital bank that launched in 2016 which, by 2018, had welcomed its millionth customer and boosted its value to $1billion. The company has not yet gone public, but plans to by 2023. 

Monzo entered the market at a time when mobile banking users had risen to 47%, and had clearly paid close attention to shifts and trends in the market. Another company with a customer-focused approach, Monzo encouraged its users to provide suggestions to improve its product, and utilised social media and public forums to build a community. 

ZScaler

Zscaler has revolutionised cloud security for enterprise companies. Founded in 2008, the company uses the largest security cloud on the planet to provide secure, seamless access to cloud resources. ZScaler went public in 2018 and in July 2020 it was valued at $15billion.

By identifying a specific audience, and providing a service to meet their needs, Zscaler created the perfect conditions for exponential growth; and is in fact experiencing growing revenue at 63% per annum.

Snowflake

Snowflake is a fully managed SaaS that provides a single platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and secure sharing and consumption of real-time / shared data. The business went public in 2020.

In the year prior to their IPO, Snowflake experienced sky-high revenue growth of 173%. Like other SaaS companies to experience hypergrowth, Snowflake spotted a gap in the market and set out to revive the data warehousing industry. Their pricing is unique, based on utilisation; and they doubled-down on account-based marketing. 

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a leading marketing technology company. It was founded in 2009 in New York and, today, is a worldwide SaaS company. Another story of a customer-centric brand that identified a gap in the market, Sprinklr offered a Unified Front Office as well as enterprise-class security, privacy and governance; securing customers like Dell, Cisco, Microsoft and Nike in the initial stages of their growth (all of whom are still Sprinklr’s clients).

Sprinklr experienced hypergrowth from $80million to $2.7billion and 100 to 1500 employees in just four years. The company went public in 2021.

 

GET IN TOUCH

Looking at our five examples, it is clear to see that the commonalities include researching the market enough to identify a fillable gap, consistently and continuously listening to their customers, and identifying changes and trends in their markets. 

Here at Strive, we source top tier sales talent for hyper-growth tech companies. To learn more about how we can help your business scale, contact our team on 0203 983 0770 or email hello@scalewithstrive.com.

The SaaS industry has increased in size by around 500% over the past seven years and is thought to be the most important tech in business success. In the UK alone, there are currently over 2,000 SaaS companies with a combined revenue of $26.6 billion, and 158,000+ employees. That’s incredible. 

So, in such a competitive and fast growing space, what can SaaS companies do to build a strategy for hypergrowth?

You may find it interesting to know that the term “hypergrowth” first appeared in the April 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, which defined it as “the steep part of the S-curve that most young markets and industries experience at some point, where the winners get sorted from the losers.”

But building a strategy for business hypergrowth is somewhat different to the traditional growth model. Let’s take a look:

 

TRADITIONAL PROCESSES FOR BUSINESS GROWTH

The traditional business growth cycle can be divided in to 5 key stages:

1. Existence 

Already being in existence assumes that the business has already thoroughly researched their market, product placement, audience, USPs and developed a GTM (go-to-market) strategy. In this stage the main problems of the business are obtaining customers and delivering their product or service.

The goal? To remain active in the market. 

Businesses at this stage are yet to stabilise either production or product quality; and, sadly, many never become viable.

2. Survival

A good customer base that is sufficiently satisfied places businesses in the survival stage. The key concerns during this phase are balancing the relationship between revenue and expenditure. 

Many businesses spend their lifetime at this stage, unable to grow in size, earning marginal ROI and eventually disappearing from the marketplace. 

3. Success

At this stage, business owners will choose expansion vs stability/profitability. 

It’s likely that, by now, the owner has gone through the phase of hiring people to help run the business; giving them more flexibility to step away. Many companies spend their lifetime in this phase, while others consolidate resources for growth, take more risks and invest more time.

4. Take-off

The question at this stage is how to grow quickly. Business owners will often delegate responsibility and will need to keep an eye on cashflow, investments and speed of growth in order to succeed. 

5. Resource Maturity

This stage is all about balance. Ensuring the business has enough tools and staff, in order to cope with growth and change in demand, is essential. 

 

BUILDING A HYPERGROWTH STRATEGY

Traditional growth usually has a CAGR of up to 10%; whereas businesses that experience hypergrowth maintain a 40%+ average annual growth rate for more than one year. Businesses looking to achieve this level of growth need to consider the following as a part of their business strategy and growth plans:

Markets and Clients

Market research is a huge portion of any new product or service, and SaaS is no exception. Thoroughly researching your product/market fit will determine most of your success.

Scalability

Some products and services just aren’t scalable. Consider this when developing your product. 

Operations

A solid foundation for growth needs operational efficiency, which means finding more efficient and optimised workflows for your back office functions.

Risk Management

This is a crucial element of any successful business plan. Because hypergrowth is a form of extremely rapid growth, the risks can change just as rapidly. It’s important to try and identify and assess the likelihood of potential risks, as well as the impact they could have and how you’ll treat them.

Hiring Talent

For a business looking to achieve hypergrowth, hiring should be your number one priority. And remember that to some team members, hypergrowth will be the most rewarding journey of their lives. To others, it will be totally overwhelming. Ensure you create a culture that caters to both where possible.

Finance

Finance will likely fall under one of your areas for risk when producing your strategy for hypergrowth. Consider the need for proper financial processes and accounting functions. When hypergrowth kicks in, companies need capital to ensure they can afford the build-up in working capital, equipment, hiring and capacity expansion.

Technology

The technology you use as a business will impact the scalability, operations and risk factors. Investing in technology that can scale with your business is really a significant hurdle for any company.

Business Agility

The ability to adapt to internal and external challenges is especially important during a hypergrowth phase. Everything moves much quicker, so it’s important that the business is agile enough to navigate through at the same speed.

Staying Customer-centric

Being customer focussed is essential to the success of any business. Zoom, Zapier, Stripe and many other brands that have experienced hypergrowth have one thing in common: they are customer driven. 

They achieved hypergrowth by listening to the needs and concerns of their customers, optimising processes for their happiness, their success, and adapting to their changing preferences.

 

THE CHALLENGES BUSINESSES CURRENTLY FACE

As of 2022, globally, the SaaS industry is worth over $170 billion. In such a fast-growing, competitive industry, business owners are facing a number of different challenges.

The story of Monzo in the financial sector is one that has left the high-street banks feeling threatened. Launched in 2016, the business grew its customer base by 75% within 2 years alone, signing up 20,000 new users per week. In terms of market share, at least 15% of new current accounts are opened through Monzo and its users spend around £4 billion through its cards. That’s hypergrowth. 

And although there are sector specific challenges, a broad overview of the difficulties businesses are facing right now looks more like this:

• Talent shortages across most industries, which affects a company’s ability to scale
• Increasing cost of living which, in turn, is accelerating the costs of suppliers, production, logistics, salaries etc…
• The ability to raise capital that will allow for growth
• The potential of recessions which may impact a business’s survival

Of course, most of these challenges are manageable with a good, solid business strategy for hypergrowth.  

Here at Strive, we source top tier sales talent for hyper-growth tech companies. To learn more about how we can help your business scale, contact our team on 0203 983 0770 or email hello@scalewithstrive.com.

It is no surprise to business leaders and hiring managers that sourcing talent for your GTM team has become more challenging in recent years, particularly given the changing ways in which people work, along with the Great Resignation. 

The global talent shortage most industries and sectors are currently facing, along with the candidate-driven element of the existing market, makes the talent pool for organisations that are hiring extremely competitive.

 

CHALLENGES SAAS COMPANIES ARE FACING IN 2022

Along with the points mentioned above, SaaS companies are faced with additional challenges when hiring, including:

Young businesses up against well-established large companies

Many SaaS companies are in the early stages of business and lack the experience and resources to be able to scale quickly. Unfortunately, this can be a disadvantage if they are unable to keep up with the rapid rate at which their competition in the market is growing. In addition to this, larger organisations that are already well-established in their sector will be well versed in taking on new challenges and adapting to market changes in order to grow their SaaS businesses, unlike some younger companies.

Businesses being inexperienced in growing their teams is often down to them being too risk-averse. Understandably, early on in a business’ lifespan, business leaders want to avoid anything that may impact their revenue or future growth, which can sometimes lead to lying stagnant whilst other organisations in their space develop and grow.

It is vital for hiring managers in SaaS companies to focus on creating and nurturing a strong foundation early on and then scale gradually as you gain further experience and become well-equipped to handle large volumes of business.

With that being said, hypergrowth isn’t out of the question for young businesses that have the product or services to fill a gap in the market – it’s simply about knowing how to find the right people who will help you get there. 

Adopting and adapting to new technology

SaaS companies are also under pressure to stay up to date with the technology needed to provide their employees and customers with the best experience possible. 

Following on from lessons learned during the pandemic when businesses had to quickly switch to a mainly digital way of working, organisations are now expected to continue with their digital transformations. Software used by SaaS companies often enables employees to do their jobs day-to-day, meaning the requirement is there for it to be the best possible tech to make processes smooth and reporting easy to produce. Similarly, consumers of the products or services being sold need to be easily accessible and understood, meaning technology needs to have an impeccable UX. 

It is up to the owners and leaders within SaaS companies to review and prioritise which technology needs to be adopted and adapted to, to ensure business success.

Sales enablement

This still remains a challenge for many SaaS companies. Understanding how to provide your team with the processes, knowledge, technology and feedback needed to enable them to work to their full potential is crucial.

Sales enablement mainly revolves around:

• Creating a uniformed way of reporting
• Regularly reviewing all sales processes
• Training and development
• Usability
• Customer feedback

Having the infrastructure in place to support your team is crucial, but also bringing in new talent needs to be a smooth process to ensure every employee has the knowledge and tools available to make sales.

Overcoming challenges by broadening your talent pool

There are a variety of ways to broaden your talent pool which will help you overcome some of the above challenges and enable you to develop and grow at the pace you’re looking to.

Consider your existing recruitment processes and ask yourself the following questions: 

– How do you normally find your candidates? 

– Do you use an expert talent provider, or do you do all the candidate searching yourself? 

– Do you usually advertise jobs in the same places?

– What is the quality of CVs like that you receive?

– Are you championing ED&I in your recruitment process?

– How accessible are your job adverts to diverse groups of people?

– Are your job adverts written effectively, or are they full job descriptions?

– How are you eliminating recruitment bias from your existing process?

– Do you have a growth map to demonstrate where your teams are expanding and when?

– Do you offer remote or hybrid working to all employees?

Your GTM team is your ultimate sales tool, and by hiring the right people you will be able to scale and grow your business in line with your existing business strategy and goals. 

Through revising your existing recruitment process, you will be able to make note of where there are improvements to be made and where you need assistance with expanding your talent pool for your business trajectory. 

By considering factors such as eliminating recruitment bias and ensuring equality, diversity and inclusion are at the forefront of your recruitment process, you will be able to expand your talent pool from the off. By including remote or hybrid working in your workplace benefits and improving the quality of your job adverts, you will similarly by reaching a wider audience who you may not have had previous access to.

 

GET IN TOUCH

If you would like to find out more about how Strive can help you expand the talent pool for your GTM team, get in touch to discuss our specialist talent services.

When building a successful sales enablement strategy for your go-to-market team, there are various requirements to be considered. 

Firstly, using the business intelligence and insights from your existing customer network to create a data-based strategy for business growth should be your starting point. 

From here, you can determine specifically what a sales enablement strategy looks like specifically for your business, in your sector and for your products or services. 

WHAT A SALES ENABLEMENT STRATEGY LOOKS LIKE 

Sales enablement is the continual process of providing your GTM team with the resources they need to make more sales. These resources can cover a wide variety of assets, including sales tools, training, content, industry knowledge and insightful information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. Ultimately, everything needed to enable them to make more sales.

In 2022, it is no secret that a salesperson’s world is driven by data. However, a constant stream of information can have a detrimental effect and hurt productivity if your salespeople become overwhelmed by too much product knowledge or training content. The key is to equip them with the right amount to close more deals and collectively grow the business, whilst also having the mental capacity to adapt to new or updated processes or service knowledge.

This not only includes a strategic marketing plan that feeds into your sales team, but also product introduction and related strategies to fully make use of the window of opportunity around consumer needs.

The best way to break down a sales enablement strategy for your go-to-market team is as follows: 

Creating a uniformed way of reporting – for organisations to be able to scale effectively, valuable insights from business data must look the same for every salesperson. That way, the data can be analysed to see where business is being won and lost, for example, and make note of any trends and improvements needed as a result.

Regularly reviewing all sales processes – an audit of your existing sales processes is the key to creating an in-depth, data-backed report of how to pinpoint areas where sales performance could be improved. Businesses looking to grow on a large scale must consider this as one of the most vital aspects of sales enablement for their GTM team, in order to spot any opportunities where there are gaps in processes that could be impacting leads or closed deals.

Training and development for your go-to-market team – whether this is training on how to use a specific piece of software internally, or continual development for employees to ensure they are consistently learning about the products and services they are offering your customer base, training and development is a vital aspect of your sales enablement strategy. 

Usability – one fundamental aspect of sales enablement is that it benefits all of your salespeople, regardless of whether you have an organisation of 10 or 10,000. For this reason, it’s imperative that everything you provide your salespeople with is easy to use. When designing your sales enablement strategy, from a usability perspective, ensure resources are simple to find and easy to apply. 

Customer feedback – asking for feedback from your customers is an important component of your many business life cycles that often gets overlooked under-emphasised. Data is, of course, the first port of call when analysing your consumer acceptance and the success of your business offerings. However, gathering tangible customer feedback – both informally and formally – is a crucial component of understanding the elements of your sales strategy that work or do not work, and how to best improve them going forward. 

HOW TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL SALES ENABLEMENT STRATEGY

To begin with, look at your existing strategy, and answer the following questions:

• What reporting systems do we currently have in place? Do all sales staff use the same reporting platform? Are they accessible  to everyone? If not, why not? Can this be centralised to be monitored and analysed?
• How often are sales processes currently being reviewed? If so, how often are they reviewed and what improvements have previously been made? If not, who can monitor and review them on a regular basis, and feed back to the wider team?
• Is your GTM team fully equipped with sufficient training and development material? If so, what is their feedback? What is and is not useful? If not, what can the team be provided with for continuous improvement?
• How easy to use is our current software? Does our sales team agree that it is simple to use? If not, where can improvements be made? What other software is available?
• How do we currently receive customer feedback? Do we send follow up email surveys, or make phone calls? What is the general consensus in terms of customer satisfaction? Where can improvements be made? How is customer feedback being monitored and improved?

When the above has been answered and a sales enablement strategy for your GTM team is in place, business leaders will be able to monitor and analyse the full 360 metrics of sales enablement practices. 

Analysing all of the combined feedback from customers about their sales experience, your salespeople on usability of the software, and continually assessing the success of internal sales processes, will collectively create your 360 metrics. Information on what does and does not work is extremely valuable to business leaders, as understanding where re-investment or reallocation of resources can be made will become more connected and streamlined over time. 

SUPPORT IN DEVELOPING AN ELITE GTM TEAM FOR YOUR ORGANISATION

Here at Strive, we source top tier sales talent for hyper-growth tech companies. To learn more about how we can help your business scale, contact our team on 0203 983 0770 or email hello@scalewithstrive.com.

Once your team has built a viable product, one of the most important drivers for rapid growth and success is a talented and tenacious go-to-market (GTM) team.

A robust GTM team is made up of key roles that directly impact revenue. While there are standard GTM team set-ups, the precise structure depends on several key factors, the most important being your strategy. 

STRATEGY

Without an established strategy with milestones and goals, anyone you hire will lack the clear direction they need to make your product a success. Essentially, your GTM strategy centres around what you want to achieve, whether that’s generating revenue, winning new customers, retaining current customers, or all of the above. It also lets you draw up a realistic timeline that aligns with your resources and budget. Of course, not all GTM strategies are the same and depend on the industry, vertical and stage of the business. 

CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Without an in-depth understanding of the customer journey, you may opt for the wrong approach and fail to deliver a seamless experience. Start by drawing a timeline that depicts each touchpoint in the customer journey, from marketing message to sales process to aftercare, and ask yourself what you want them to feel at each stage. 

YOUR JOURNEY

Equipped with this information, you will better understand how your GTM team should be structured and the roles you require. According to Arnie Gullov-Singh, founder of The Revenue Architect, an online platform that helps start-up leaders realise revenue growth, there are three stages to building out a GTM team: 

Founder-led Sales. Where the founding team relies on personal networks and word-of-mouth to acquire and onboard the first batch of customers and identify the core use cases and pain points that its customers share.

Sales-as-Distribution. Adding a sales team to prospect for more customers with the core use case and pain points to retain existing customers and create a basic sales process.

Marketing-Amplifies-Sales. Adding a marketing team to generate a flow of leads for sales, remove friction for buyers and improve overall revenue predictability.

Depending on the stage your business is at influences the key hires you need to make. For example, the first hires in the Sales-as-Distribution phase would be Account Executives (responsible for prospecting and acquiring customers) and Account Managers (responsible for onboarding, retaining and growing customers). In contrast, the Marketing-Amplifies-Sales stage begins with hiring a Head of Product Marketing to remove friction from the buying process and enhance productivity. 

CORE TEAM FUNCTIONS

Whichever stage you’re at, your GTM team can be broken down into three distinct functions – lead generation, sales and customer success. Let’s explore each of these: 

1. LEAD GENERATION / MARKETING

Situated at the start of the sales process, this function is responsible for generating customer demand and developing inbound traction. Building a lead generation function from the outset helps create a constant stream of leads and grow a healthy pipeline for your sales team to manage and close. Typical roles include: 

– Head of Marketing

– Head of Lead Generation 

– Head of Communications 

– Head of Product Marketing

– Head of Retention Marketing 

– Head of Enablement 

– Content Marketing 

– Head of Content 

– Head of Social Media 

– Social Media Manager 

– Events Manager 

– Email Marketer.

 

2. SALES 

An excellent sales team will not just accelerate your company’s growth; they will enrich your company’s culture and help you build better products and services in the long term. Key responsibilities within the sales function are split across various specialised role types, such as: 

Business Development (BD). Focused on inbound leads, BD professionals are aligned with the marketing side of the sales process, qualifying inbound leads and passing them to AE’s. 

Sales Development (SD). Concentrating on outbound sales and generating new leads, whether that’s by targeting different verticals, demographics or geographical areas. Once a new lead is generated, this is then passed to AE’s.

Account Executive (AE). A specialised role that concentrates on closing net new logo deals.

Solutions Engineer / Sales Engineer (SE). A specialised, technical sales role which is heavily involved in the sales cycle, responsible for technical demonstrations with potential, and existing customers and there to alleviate technical fear during the sales cycle.

Account Management (AM). A specialised role that works on established accounts, grows relationships and closes active sales pipelines.

Channel Sales. Professionals who work with potential and existing channel partners to drive sales.

 

3. CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Software businesses are geared around delivering lifetime value for customers, which makes the customer success function integral to any growing start-up or scale-up. Typical roles in this function include: 

Onboarding/Implementation Manager. Ensuring customers are onboarded seamlessly. Smaller companies will often amalgamate onboarding and implementation into one role, whereas larger businesses would have dedicated professionals or teams for each area. 

Customer Success Manager. Focused on making sure customers are happy and getting the most value out of the product. This responsibility can sometimes fall to account managers to ensure the customer has a single point of contact.

 

SUPPORT IN BUILDING YOUR GTM TEAM

At Strive, we source top tier sales talent for hyper-growth tech companies. To learn more about how Strive can help your business scale, contact our team on 0203 983 0770 or email hello@scalewithstrive.com. 

If you want to boost sales productivity, you need to hire more sales reps – right? This is one way to force up conversions, but there could be a better way. It’s time to look more closely at presales.  

Presales support offers is a highly effective opportunity for growth, but it’s so often overlooked. When done well, it can improve everything from conversion to revenue.  

In fact, a survey by McKinsey and Company found that a good presales approach can increase revenue by up to 13%, sales by as much as 20% and boost conversion rates by a whole 5 points.  

What actually is presales?  

Presales expertise covers a whole range of crucial tasks, all of which are designed to optimise the middle area of the sales funnel. Think of it as laying the groundwork before the deal is done. key areas of presales include: 

Technical discovery: This involves filtering out prospects that aren’t the right technical fit for your products and services, thereby reducing funnel noise and bringing forward opportunities that are worth pursuing.  

Product presentation: One of the most useful things a presales engineer can do for your sales team is to build the bulk of the sales presentation. This means demonstrating the merits of the product and precisely matching those benefits with the needs of the target customer. Presales experts can weave powerful stories to inspire the customer, rather than focusing solely on functionality and features.  

Product demonstration: Building on the work done on product presentation, the presales function can also deliver a hard-hitting demonstration. This establishes product value, tells a story that resonates with the customer and drives the process one step closer towards making the sale.  

Solution development: As all sales experts know, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for every customer. Presales work can help your sales team be flexible and creative, to utilise the product portfolio to develop the right tailored solutions for each prospect.  

Evaluation management: The presales team are perfectly placed to handle evaluation work, including using playbooks and templates to help increase your ‘technical win’ conversion rate.  

 

So, is it worth investing in presales?  

If your ambition for the coming year is to drive up sales and conversions, you need to pick the most cost-effective approach. You could simply throw more sales reps at the problem, and increase the headcount there. Or, you could look into whether presales investment is a wiser use of your money.  

It may involve a period of trial-and-error, and getting the ratio of presales engineers to account executives right is crucial for your ROI. TechCrunch has some useful insights on getting this ratio right, with a range of scenarios to optimise presales productivity. It could be worth reading up before you make any major changes.  

 

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