How can I make my SaaS company grow faster?
SaaS companies are obsessed with growth. And rightly so, accelerated growth can make or break a tech company. But if growth is not sustainable and measurable, it will be impossible to maintain and scale your organisation.
One of the key initiatives in scaling and growing a SaaS business is the ability to accelerate the rate of new customer acquisition and revenue expansion. To do this you need four functional areas of the company directly focused on three key outcomes:
1. Creating demand
2. Generating consistent pipeline from demand
3. Converting pipeline into revenue
Sounds simple doesn’t it? It isn’t. And it amazes me that time and time again I hear and see CEOs and Board Members looking for the elusive silver bullet to stimulate “sales”. It doesn’t work that way. Success is required in all three of these key outcomes and you must go through them in process order or you will not find the predictability and repeatability that differentiates a company with good growth over a company with great growth. Now let me explain these three outcomes in more detail.
Creating demand
Creating demand for your product means that you are solving a problem that your target audience and their company in general has identified as something that warrants spending resources to fix. Typically, this is because the problem is having a negative impact on some form of the business — losing customers; costing too much to manage; meagre revenue growth, etc.
In most organizations, the Product team is responsible for ensuring your product is solving a problem of importance to your target audience. They do this by understanding the audience, what issues they are having, what functionality of a product may solve these issues, what the implication of not solving the issues are, etc. They continually work with the target audience, look for new target audiences, look for new problems to solve and build a roadmap of products and functionality that can solve these. In this way they help create demand for your product.
Customer Success is also directly tied to creating demand for your product. They are the experts on how the functionality of your product works, the problems it is best at solving and how to implement the product to achieve the outcome(s) the target audience bought it for. They are intimately involved with the customer on maximizing the usage of the solution and responsible for ensuring the customer successfully achieves the outcomes they bought the product for. They also have a front seat to the new problems a customer faces and typically how customers end up using the product in unexpected ways to solve these.
Generating pipeline from demand
This really should read generating a consistent and sufficient pipeline of target audience prospects who have identified they have a problem that needs solving which they and their company are committing resources to solve. The Marketing team typically holds responsibility for reaching the target audience (often called the Ideal Customer Profile) with messages that facilitate and accelerate their motivation to seek solutions to the problem that your product solves. In the course of doing this they help establish your company and its products as experts in solving certain problems, how your product solves them better than other alternatives and what a perfect world looks like with this problem solved. They make it easy for the right target audience to find you and reach out to you so that they can engage in a conversation about how your solution can solve their problem.
Converting pipeline into revenue
The sales team validates the prospects in the pipeline and engages them in conversation with the intent to help them find the right solution to the problem they have. To do this they understand the specific operational or technical problem the prospect is experiencing and the implication of not solving that problem to their business. They help them understand if and how your solution can solve their problem, how it does it different/better than alternatives and introduce them to other customers which had very similar problems to theirs and solved them with your solution. They also know that when Prospect A has problem X your product is the best solution and if Prospect B has problem Y a competitor has a better solution. In other words, they know who they can help the best and who is in better hands elsewhere.
The sales team also helps the prospect buy. They help build a business case for acquisition of your product, amplify the story of why your product within the decision-making unit at the prospect’s company and navigate the contract and/or procurement process.
Accelerating growth consistently and predictably requires a collaborative approach
To create a consistent and predictable level of growth it is critical that the processes and alignment between these functions and their primary accountabilities is seamless. Growth is not one departments responsibility nor is it asymmetrical to one function over another. Depending on your business the collaboration of these departments may be different but the functions and responsibilities will always come back to achieving those three outcomes in order.
What are your thoughts?
