How can we grow pipeline in our SaaS company
I was listening to the latest edition of CRO Confidential - a SaaStr podcast series led by Sam Blond - ex-CRO of Brex and now partner at Founder’s Fund.
In this episode Sam interviews Jameson Yung, long time friend and current SVP Sales at Gong about five ways to get your SaaS revenue back on track (full video linked at bottom of this post).
Sam highlights a trend he sees across the companies he’s worked in, and that he advises.
Four times out of five, when a company is struggling to hit their revenue goals, the problem is a pipeline problem, not a conversion or closing problem.
Later in the session Sam comes back to the point - that if you can fix the demand challenge, and double the number of leads coming into the top of the funnel, and everything else remains constant, then you’ve just doubled sales.
It is much easier to double the number of leads than it is to double the conversion ratio or double the average order size.
So increasing pipeline needs to be the primary focus for most SaaS companies - it is the bottleneck that is causing failure in other areas of the business.
Who is responsible for pipeline in a Series A SaaS business?
At Series A the founder is the one with ultimate revenue responsibility and ownership of pipeline.
You should not have a Chief Revenue Officer at this stage. Your Marketing, Sales and Customer Success teams should be led by director level, or at most VP Level roles - still focused on execution rather than process and scale.
If the founder is not responsible for pipeline then you quickly end up with silos.
Marketing focused on creating Marketing Qualified Leads, website visitors, event attendees, and at best Sales Accepted Leads. “We did our job.”
Sales is focused on converting leads into opportunities, “We don’t have enough leads to work on,” “The leads are poor - we have to recycle most of them”
Customer Success is focused on adoption in existing customers, “We aren’t sales people - just pass us the closed deals and we’ll get to work.”
These siloes are the source of poor pipeline, and the reverse - if they work as one team you start creating pipeline.
Create a cross-functional pipeline team
Solve this challenge by spinning up a cross-functional pipeline team that is an additional role for individuals from each of your Go To Market teams (plus members from product and finance).
I’d suggest membership of the team is voluntary - the members nominate themselves so that you get people that are passionate about solving the problem.
Membership should rotate on a half year or yearly basis so that fresh input is provided.
Members should get rewarded or recognised for their effort - by a spot bonus, some dinners and swag, and recognition at all hands meetings.
Who should be in a pipeline team?
A typical pipeline team might include:
A chairperson: maybe a RevOps team member to coordinate the team’s work
Marketing: maybe a couple of individuals from demand gen, content, field marketing roles
Sales: maybe a couple of individuals covering SDRs, AEs, different customer segments, different regions
Customer Success: individuals with insight into how different customer segments are using the product, how they onboard, any templates or frameworks being used by customers.
Product: individuals that have insight into the product, the roadmap, the competitive landscape.
Finance: individuals with insight into the pricing model, bundles, margins. Could also be someone from RevOps Deal Desk if you have one.
These individuals are individual contributors - not senior leaders. We want ideas from those as close to the customers as possible.
How often should the pipeline team meet?
The number one goal for this team is to drive increased demand, and this is an always on exercise.
The team should have an internal Slack or Teams channel that allows them to share ideas and challenges as they occur.
These suggestions should be in the form of a hypothesis.
“I believe that if we were to do X, then the outcome would be Y”
“I believe that if we were to do a customer webinar then we would drive 100 new opportunities”
Every month the team should meet - in person if possible, or virtually if not.
What is the agenda for the pipeline team meeting?
In preparation for that meeting the chairperson should document two or three of the suggestions from the team for review and testing.
The team will evaluate the suggested ideas - instead of trying to shoot ideas down the conversation should be in the form of,
“What would need to occur for this hypothesis to be proved true?”
For a webinar to generate 100 new opportunities:
We’d need a valuable speaker
We’d need to have at least 300 registrants
Those registrants would need to be in our ICP
We’d need to have confirmed their attendence the day before the event
We’d need a clear and valuable call to action
Our sellers would need to be aware of the content of the webinar
And so on…
Having determined what would need to be true to prove each hypothesis,
the team can then vote using the ICE framework to prioritise which tests will be put into practice.
The ICE framework comes from Hacking Growth, by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown and stands for:
Impact: if this hypothesis is true, what would the impact be to our pipeline?
Confidence: how confident are we that this hypothesis will be proved true?
Ease of implementation: if proved true, how easy would it be to roll this idea out fully?
Each member of the team scores 1-10 for each of these three dimensions, giving a maximum score of 30.
This is averaged across the members of the team to provide a clear prioritisation of which tests to proceed with.
How should the pipeline team test the prioritised ideas?
Having selected one or two ideas to test out, they should consider the simplest way of proving the hypothesis.
For the example of the webinar - you could create a simple landing page, and work with one team of sellers to start recruiting attendees.
You wouldn’t need the exact content, you wouldn’t need the exact speaker - you’d just want to prove that the topic itself was attractive enough to generate registrations from your target buyer persona.
If you had a test for generating customer referrals with some customised merch, could you go to customers that have previously provided referrals and send them some existing merch as a thank-you and ask if they have others in mind.
Rolling out tests to full production
Having completed your test you should have either proved or disproved your hypothesis.
By testing at least one hypotheses a month, this should give you two or three proven ways of growing pipeline each quarter, and these can be taken to roll out to your full go to market teams by your Revenue Operations team supported by the individual functions.
This ongoing cycle of innovation in your pipeline growth, led by individual contributors across your go to market teams will put you in a very small minority of SaaS businesses.
And as Sam says - if you double the leads into the top of the funnel, and everything else remains constant - you just doubled sales.
How do you handle pipeline development initiatives?
Who ‘owns’ pipeline in your organisation?
I’d love to hear how you are approaching demand gen in your company.
Watch the full interview between Sam and Jameson here:
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