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.
Dan Gorrod
Senior Business Development Manager & Team Lead
