The majority of revenue-generating systems are ineffective because the operational procedures for them are not utilized as a tool to operate under rigid expectations.
A guide will provide the sales representatives with specific steps to take, and it will provide the managers with specific proof that they need to request from the sales representatives. Finally, it will point the operations teams to the particular phase of the pipeline that needs improvement.
A multiprocessing standard operating procedure (SOP) will be created that contains every step of the process, from lead generation to upselling.
How to Inspect Your Revenue
The existing documentation for your sales process is only a collection of buyer personas and a description of product features, so it is not a sales engine; it is a training manual.
A properly functioning system will eliminate guesswork from the floor. It will compel the sales representatives to gather tangible evidence before proceeding to close the sale. It will prevent the managers from accepting unrealistic expectations as legitimate forecasts. The main purpose of this saas sales playbook is to maintain strict control of your sales pipeline.
You need to define who your target market is, how the opportunities move through your pipeline, and how you measure the creation of revenue. You will have to develop stage-entry and stage-exit metrics for your opportunities. You will have to provide sample discovery guidelines, create a metric-definition tracking system, and create a maintenance schedule to keep the system current as consumer behaviour changes.
We are going to map out all of the necessary criteria, the software tools, and the data standards required to run a scalable software business.
How to Build Your SaaS Sales Playbook
To create a process for repeating sales successfully, it is vital to separate what is real from what is unrealistic.
Creating Your First Basic Framework
You do not want to create a theoretical manual that is sixty pages in length before getting to the facts.
You are focusing on developing a minimum viable framework before bringing on your first outside sales person. We need to write down the ideal customer profile (ICP) and the disqualifiers that would let our team know if it's not going to be a good fit.
We also need to define the buyers committee. You need to identify the active triggers that make an account a prospect for a call today. If your rep doesn't know what triggers have caused a buyer to search for a software solution, the deal is already dead. The first version of this system should be simple enough to create within two to four weeks.
It should be between 15 and 30 pages long. Usable templates should be included in the system; an ICP worksheet, a discovery checklist, and a manager's weekly inspection agenda.
A common pitfall when creating this framework is using it as a blanket strategy for the entire company.
The framework is set up to be a working guide. If a rep has to look for an appropriate talk track, qualification question, or stage requirement while on a live call, the framework is not working. The framework must be made searchable and have structured workspaces for all reps. Each entry in the framework has to be connected to a specific action. When defining the personas, it is equally important to write down the exact scripts to use with them.
Each source of leads must be documented along with the exact timing of emails and calls used to access those sources. The manager's weekly inspection agenda is critical, as they will use the agenda to audit live deals and find out whether the rep has filled out the required CRM fields, or if they just guessed.
Matching Product Value to Sales Complexity
It is important to consider that a product's value is not necessarily correlating to the complexity of the enterprise sale. Due to the sheer number of vendors in the PLG space, finding product market fit (PMF) is challenging for many founders.
However, the vendor report from Prospeo reflects that most vendors with PMF have less than $5k in annual contract value (ACV). The hybrid sales process covers ACVs between $1k and $50k, with pure sales processes reserved for those deals that exceed $50k in ACV. Think of the previous three statements as guiding thoughts and hypotheses rather than strict rules.
Moving From Founder-Led Sales to a Team
Typically, founders are ‘founder led’ in the sales process until they hire or train a sales team. The founder will know every deal that he or she has closed is a real deal because of an emotional connection.
New team members do not have that same level of emotional connection to customers or products. If, at the time of purchase, an indicator of interest is the frequency of product usage, but your sales team does not know when or how to contact users that are trialing your product, there is an opportunity for a large gap in the sales process.
If you determine the products that are "qualified" based on the actions of the users, your team will be better prepared to convert that lead to an actual sale. According to vendor data, product qualified leads (PQL) convert 5 to 10 times faster than a standard marketing lead. This only works if your sales process includes the PQL determination and an automatic means of notifying the representative to initiate the contact process.
Selling Through Marketplaces
The way software is purchased is changing due to changes in the marketplace and distribution models, as evidenced by the data provided by vendors. According to many vendors, as many as 40% or more of an industry's revenues are now generated through channels such as AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Commercial Marketplace, and Google Cloud Marketplace. When a company sells through one or more of those channels, it is critical to develop a dedicated workflow for managing those types of transactions.
Knowing When to Disqualify a Lead
As there are clear indicators that an opportunity to buy exists, it is equally important to know when to "disqualify" an opportunity. Disqualification can be just as important as determining if a lead is qualified. Every organization should have written step-by-step instructions detailing when a sales representative must decommission a sales prospect.
What are the consequences if a customer does not provide their estimated budget? What is the process to follow if the customer misrepresents their actual decision maker? The sales guide should respond to these questions concretely: "Do not advance to the next step of this opportunity." A stage checklist with an established column titled "Do Not Advance" could save sales professionals thousands of hours of wasted time.
Real Example: Selling to Logistics Companies
The prospect in this example is a software program sold to 3PL companies.
The main buyer is an operations leader, the impetus for the purchase is hiring employees quickly, and the result is more manual mistakes. If the sales representative cannot confirm that the buyer's organization has an owner of the process and a measurable operational problem, the sale cannot proceed. Relying on a demo as an option for next steps is useless under these circumstances.
You should include these exact examples in your saas sales playbook and communicate to the sales representatives that they have the authority to close this opportunity and pursue a different lead.
If the buyer refuses to disclose who has the purchase authority, or when they intend to purchase, then the sales person should be instructed by the automated system to immediately withdraw the opportunity from the active pipeline.
How to Build Your SaaS Sales Playbook Stages
Opportunities can only progress to the next stage in the funnel when objective criteria have changed.
Enforcing Exit Rules With Hard Proof
A generic stage can lead to a lack of objectivity which results in inaccurate sales forecasts. A stage must have objective criteria to enter and exit that stage. Sales representatives mistakenly associate qualified status for an opportunity based only on a good conversation. Sales managers do not have any evidence from their sales representatives to validate their sales forecasts. You must build a stage checklist that requires verifiable evidence to exit each stage of the funnel.
For each opportunity at the discovery stage, you should require that the sales representative document a quantifiable amount of lost weekly sales due to the operational problem; the name of the individual who will be the economic buyer; the person responsible for the implementation; and the expected date to commence implementation. The pipeline will remain in the discovery phase until this is gathered.
The maximum age for an opportunity to be in any stage should also be defined. If a deal sits in the demonstration phase for 40 days and the average sales cycle is 84 days, that deal will probably be already dead. There has to be a rule for the representative to close the deal as "Lost" or "Push to Nurturing Campaign" to keep the pipeline clean and to ensure that the manager is looking at true numbers rather than wishful thinking. If you have no limit on how long a deal sits in the pipeline, the conversion metrics will become useless for financial planning.
Connecting Qualification Rules to Your CRM
A qualification methodology will not have any value if it is not in your CRM.
Qualification frameworks (i.e., MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, BANT, SPIN, Challenger, Sandler) are some of the most prevalent methods of getting sales representatives to think critically and ask tough questions.
However, merely telling the sales team to use MEDDPICC is not sufficient. You need to create a direct correlation between those qualification fields and your CRM (Salesforce or HubSpot) by making those fields mandatory. A representative should not be allowed to move an opportunity to a proposal stage in Salesforce until the "Economic Buyer" field has been completed with the verified name.
Setting Up MEDDIC in Your System
When you choose MEDDIC for your qualification methodology, your CRM must have the following fields identical to MEDDIC: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion. Create your own rules for each of these fields. For example, in the "Champion" field, a representative should not be permitted to just write down a name. A Champion should have been verified. The champion's approval of budget access will be confirmed by checking a box.
Use this method of enforcement for the desired behaviour.
By requiring that representatives gather the relevant data during the call, CRM enforcement allows revenue operations management teams to pinpoint where delays occur in the deal process. The system will not allow them to move forward with a deal without this data. For example, if 70% of deals are on hold because the "Decision Criteria" field is blank, the manager will know exactly what to train their team on next week.
If 33% of sales teams do not employ artificial intelligence in their selling activities, they are missing an opportunity to automate data input into their CRM. You can utilize tools to populate these qualification fields by analysing transcripts of prior phone conversations, thereby removing manual effort and ensuring compliance with company data entry protocols.
How to Handle Discovery and Objections
Discovery is an investigation, not a casual conversation.
Your saas sales playbook should contain an example of a discovery framework along with the questions representatives should ask in order to identify the customer’s business challenge. The manual should also incorporate an objection matrix, so representatives will not need to speculate about what response they should make when a customer reacts negatively due to price. These responses should be specified in the system.
Building Your Objection Library
The objection library should be created based on actual phone call recordings.
Using Gong as a resource, the objection library is established from the data extracted from each representative’s calls where they experienced a challenge closing a sale. The top performers' exact words will be documented in the operational manual. Finally, you will want to incorporate a section on how your company positions itself regarding its competitors.
As soon as a buyer brings up any of your competitors, the software vendor must have a good understanding of all three distinctions that your software has over that competitor immediately, without faltering.
Keeping Customers and Growing Revenue
The software revenue lifecycle does not stop when the deal is closed and won.
Closing the deal does not end the revenue lifecycle. The closing process occurs just before the beginning of the revenue cycle.
Handing Off Accounts to Customer Success
Clearly document the handoff process for customers from the sales rep to customer success. Clearly define what data is transferred from sales rep to customer success. Customer success must understand the exact business problem that the customer is trying to address. If customer success starts the onboarding call with, "Can you repeat what you said to the sales rep?", the customer will instantly become distrustful.
Develop a detailed handoff protocol for your sales representatives.
The sales representative must record what the customer and sales rep agreed that the metrics of success were. The onboarding team will then use these metrics to develop the implementation plan for the customer. This ensures they receive value from their investment quickly, which is the only way to guarantee a future renewal. The playbook must specify what happens to a customer if they miss the first onboarding meeting and provide specific ongoing actions to take.
How to Execute Renewals and Expansions
Expansion follows the same strict guidelines as selling into outbound.
The customer success data must feed into the expanded plays. As a customer's use of the product approaches their seat limit, this is an active trigger. The system must provide exact emails and calls to be made to the account manager. It is not reliable to depend on your account managers to make random follow-up calls to your customers.
The most critical measure to determine whether your software is healthy is the net revenue retention (NRR) number.
According to vendor reports used by RemoteReps, a healthy NRR figure would be one greater than 110% and considered excellent if above 120%. To achieve these numbers, there must be defined plays in the manual based upon buying signals. For instance, if there are three new departments added by a customer to the software suite then the account manager would apply the cross-sell methodology. If a customer stops logging into the software, then the account manager would use the rescue methodology. Every action taken must be outlined and defined beforehand.
How to Measure Your Sales Data
Without the right mathematical baseline, it is impossible to determine whether you have achieved success.
Testing Your Conversion Numbers
Never base your financial model on validated marketing claims.
There are countless vendors who sell software services that report fictitious statistics to make their products appear attractive and necessary. RemoteReps states that the average duration of an enterprise-wide software sales cycle lasts an estimated 84 days, with existing clients receiving their first purchase through 90 to 180+ days. Conversely, Prospeo has published a sales cycle for enterprise software companies that will take between six and twelve months.
In addition, Prospeo reports free trial conversion benchmarks for top-tier, product-led companies range from 15% to 25%. It would be critical to record the free trial conversion percentages as "vendor reported." The aforementioned statistics represent hypotheses that can be tested; they are not accepted as true statements.
Finding Your True Conversion Rates
You must calculate your unique conversion rates by developing your own cohort. An example would be: Find 100 leads from January, track how many became qualified opportunities, and how many ultimately closed. To assume your company's opportunity-to-close metric falls between 20% and 39% solely because of an external claim may create challenges if your company operates differently and defines success differently than others.
To define the performance metrics within your own organization, you need to calculate these metrics using mathematical formulas. Examples of these formulas include how effectively you are tracking efficiency and pipeline health. If you don't create an efficient system to manage customer growth, you will ruin your business.
Your operational system must have measurements that dictate how much it costs to acquire customers (CAC). Ideally, your business should achieve CAC payback periods in timeframes less than 12 months. Additionally, it is important to have metrics that track the ratio of LTV to CAC, with 3:1 being acceptable for most companies, but top cadence companies have a benchmark ratio of 6:1.
To effectively evaluate your organization's pipeline coverage, you need to calculate its coverage mathematically through analysis. Most businesses aim to maintain three to four times their annual quota in their organization's healthy pipeline coverage. If it falls below this goal, then an immediate outbound strategy should commence.
Tracking Tool Usage and Burn Rates
If you want your new operational model to provide revenue results, you must first monitor the usage rates of your own operations guide. For example, if managers listen to representative calls and find that they only use the documented approved talk tracks 30% of the time or less, then the operations guide has failed. You should also be tracking the time it takes for new hire ramping to occur.
If historical data shows that it took the new hire six months to meet quota and the new operational model reduced the time frame to four months, then the new operational model worked. Finally, you should track your organization’s current burn multiple. Most businesses strive to maintain burn multiples below 1.5. However, if your organization's sales process has a large cash burn, then RevOps will need to re-engineer the outbound plays in order to aim at higher-value accounts.
Connecting Your Workflow to Your Tools
Your process needs to be integrated with your software stack.
Creating an Outbound Contact Sequence
Cold calling is not effective without a comprehensive plan.
The team may have a sequencing tool; however, if they are working off a stale list of contacts without active buying signals, then they will fail. An outbound sequence typically has 10 to 14 touches over the course of 30 days. You must outline the specific events of days 1, 3, and 7 and the exact email copy and voicemail scripts. Monitor bounce rates for your emails as:
According to vendor reports, bounce rates above 5% can lead to loss of domain health and can jeopardize business operations. Bounce rates above 30% provide an exponential risk to domain health, leading to irreparable damage.
You must have an integrated system with a clearly defined process for maintaining and updating your data refresh rate so representatives do not work with stale contacts.
You can utilize Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clay, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for researching accounts and finding leads.
Giving Clear Rules for Software Use
You must provide the representatives with specific workflow guidelines to follow when using LinkedIn to locate a trigger, Apollo to capture contact information, and Outreach or Salesloft to send out an outbound sequence.
Your saas sales playbook will instruct your representatives how to use each of the previous tools to prevent wasted hours transferring data from one tool to another.
Getting Rid of Old Sales Strategies
After 6 months, a static guide is going to be obsolete.
The way buyers behave is constantly evolving. Competitors are launching new products that create a disruption to a large degree of the previous competition's strategy. Lots of pricing strategies are being updated. Our method for removing ineffective outbound plays should reflect these factors. If a play has a bounce rate greater than 5% and a reply rate below 1%, you should terminate the play. Just because a manager created an ineffective play last year, does not mean you keep it indefinitely.
Updating Your Plays Using Data
Your guide should also contain a changelog and assigned ownership.
The revenue operations team should review conversion metrics on a monthly basis. If the conversion statistics indicate that the deals are being stalled at the proposal stage, then the team needs to rewrite the proposal play. You must establish an update schedule based on events and data every quarter and not just once a year.
Stop Letting Your Sales Guide Fail
Will you treat this system like a static guide, or will you force the management team to audit and update every quarter based on a loss of deals? Implementing a framework that does not acknowledge the reality of erosion in real-time business data is worse than not having any framework at all.
