Managing Sales in SaaS Today is Far More Challenging Than 10 Years Ago
A good sales force is a force and a force multiplier. If you build a world-class sales force and a sales function at your company then it can be a key to your competitive advantage, differentiation, and accelerated growth that will be well ahead of your competition and all the benchmarks. Your sales force has exceptional productivity and performance. You have achieved sales force excellence and built a true sales machine.
But here is the catch. It’s not that easy. Selling and running sales in SaaS has become gradually more and more complex over the past 5-10 years.
There are many forces that are impacting the complexity of selling and managing sales, that buyers are much more knowledgeable and make 70% of their decision even before talking to your sales rep.
Additionally, there is a lot of competition in every product category and differentiating well or building a strong brand is harder than ever. The competition is also global and anyone can start a competing product anywhere in the world and can build it cheaper thus having the ability to undercut your pricing.
And, there has been a huge growth in openness and sharing of selling tips and any of the competitors can quickly learn new tactics and strategies for improving their sales effectiveness and to accelerate their sales growth. With that, there are analytical tools that make selling far more effective and data-driven than ever before – every one of your competitors has access to those and can maximize their growth.
Finally, finding talent – both sales reps and front line or more senior sales management – is harder than it was before because the competition for them is commensurate with the growth of SaaS companies in the past 5-10 years.
These trends compound the fact that selling has already been very complex from the start because there are many moving parts with many interdependencies and it’s very difficult to optimize all of these manifold and complex factors to maximize sales growth. It’s well known that solving simultaneously for more than two variables in math equations can become exponentially complex. And this is in fact part of the job of a CEO or a Sales VP.
In this context, being a very effective CEO or a VP of Sales and having deeper insights in scaling and accelerating your sales in the current increasingly more complex and competitive environment is key to a company’s success.
There is no one size fits all, no cure all, no silver bullet. The god news is that there are some SaaS sales acceleration drivers that I want to share in a separate article and if you identify which have the most impact and prioritize them effectively then you will build your sales force into a real sales machine.