B2B SaaS is facing serious challenges in 2023. Banks are going under. Capital is expensive and very hard to obtain. Budgets are getting slashed. Every revenue team is being asked to produce more with less.

In 2020, as the VP of RevOps at a previous company, we faced our own challenges. We also needed to do more with less and found a way to triple sales production per rep without spending any more money. In this article I’ll share how we did this.

Data-Driven Cost Cutting

In tough times, companies need to spend less money. Business leaders might want to cut costs quickly, but they should be careful about how they do that. RevOps can help leaders figure out which parts of the company are worth investing in and which are not. If they need to cut things, they should only cut the programs that have the lowest return on investment. This can help the company be more efficient and might save someone’s job.

During the last economic decline, I showed my leadership the ROI of each of our different channels and roles. We used that information to make a plan to reorganize our team instead of just firing people. We moved some Account Executives into new jobs in Business Development and made sure we were spending our money in Demand Generation the best way possible.

Capacity Modeling!

We also looked at how much work our team could handle and found out we needed fewer people closing business but more people to help generate pipeline.

If we didn’t fix this problem, our sales team would have too little work to do. So we moved resources from Sales into Marketing and made sure everything was back in balance. This made our company work better because everyone was utilized.

More Salespeople Isn’t Always The Answer

During the downturn, we figured out that we had too many salespeople relative to leads. If your Sales team spends a large portion of their day prospecting you may have this out of balance.

The unfortunate reality is that if you’ve over-expanded, you will need to make cuts. We did have to do a little of that. Doing what you can to minimize them, then making those changes will help the business. Changing this “more reps = growth” mindset helps you to bounce back stronger.

Political Will in a Crisis

When a company needs to become more efficient, it can be hard to get everyone to agree on what to do. It’s even harder when leaders believe in the “hiring more salespeople is the best way to make more money” idea.

But when the company is having a hard time, it’s a good chance to push for change. I had tried to tell my executives about how we could organize our work better for a long time, but no one listened until the pandemic happened.

In RevOps, we were lucky enough to have our ducks in a row and it ended up creating an opportunity for us. If you know a lot about how the company works, you can help make it work better when things are hard.

Conclusion

When the last economic downturn happened, we were lucky to have our metrics and models in order. We knew capacity limits throughout the whole customer journey. We used this to figure out where we needed more help and where we had too many people. We moved some workers from one job to another and stopped doing some things that weren’t making us much money.

After doing all of that, we were able to bounce back quickly and sell 3x more per rep, and 30% more overall than we ever had before! All of this happened despite the downturn and it set us up well to bounce back when things got better.

SUMMARY

• Understand the capacity of each person in each role

• Craft a plan to balance lead sources with deal makers
• Instead of cutting blindly, shift roles where possible for the right balance
• Focus on putting people in places to succeed
• If you must cut headcount, make sure it is low performers or low ROI efforts
• Crafting an Organization this way will make it ready to bounce back
• Always look at things with the big picture in mind > based on capacity and throughput & never hire extra Salespeople and hope it works out