It’s pretty rare for a growth-stage B2B SaaS company to not have any sales, marketing, or CS process. It’s not that rare for the GTM team to ignore that process, though. Again and again, we see companies put all this time and money into methodologies, process design, and training – just to be forgotten.

In fact, studies show that the majority of training in general is forgotten days later. This is why reinforcement is so critical. In business, we call this driving adoption. In sports we call it practice.

If we want our GTM team to execute efficiently, we need to build management systems that drive adoption of the GTM process. (Click here to see our GTM Process Index.)

What makes the difference between process adoption and failure?

• Processes must be embedded in tools
• Reporting must highlight adoption failures
• Frontline managers must enforce execution
• There must be accountability at the Executive level

We’ve all seen the alternative to this. We wait 6 months and one day we pull up a report. All we see is incomplete junk data. It’s obvious the team isn’t executing the processes we spent so much time and money to design and train.

Even more frustrating? We’re usually pulling this report because we missed a target and want to know why. When we open the hood, we see we’re not even doing the basic things we set out to do.

Let’s break down how to drive process adoption across the 4 main GTM functions:

Pipeline Management and Forecasting

Most sales teams have a sales methodology and sales process. Few are hitting targets consistently, quarter after quarter and forecasting within 5% accuracy. Salesforce is one of those few and I experienced this first-hand every day for three years when I worked there. Here’s how they do it:

Embed Process into CRM 

The methodology and process is baked into the CRM so no sales rep is ever left wondering what they should know about a deal, how to run it, or its risk factors. It’s staring them in the face right in the CRM. Automation also forces reps to answer critical questions at each stage of the deal.

Build Reporting 

Reps and management both have visibility into gaps across the pipeline in a “real time all the time” reporting culture. Anyone can look at the entire pipeline and/or individual deals and see what’s happening in seconds, so long as they know what to look for.

Create a Pipeline Review Process

Reps don’t always know what to look for though, especially new reps, so management has a consistent process to review the pipeline and reinforce sales training with reps. Salesforce’s “real time all the time” culture means that there’s never an excuse not to have a sales opportunity updated so management can and will call out gaps at any time, any day.

When this happened to me the first time it set off a panic. The second time it was frustrating. But after that, I learned pretty quickly what was expected, and it was pretty easy to remember how to follow the process and keep my pipeline clean every single day.

Use Data for 1:1 Sales Coaching

With a clean pipeline, sales managers can do a lot better than telling reps to “make more calls” and “just work harder.” We can see reps’ exact close rates, average sales prices, sales cycles, and pipeline generation. If that’s not enough to get reps to quota, we can share those numbers with them and ask them where they think they want to improve most. We can share averages and best metrics across the team so they can benchmark themselves.

Think about what a radical departure this is from the way many of us were coached as reps. Think about how empowered reps are with their own data, with visibility into exactly where they will land if they don’t improve and where they can improve to reach their goals.

Forecast with Confidence

Want to know the secret to how Salesforce forecasted within 5% accuracy quarter after quarter after quarter? It’s really not much of a secret. Simply doing what’s laid out above means reps and managers walk into a forecast meeting with a clean pipeline and clear visibility on the risks of each deal. That and large numbers gets you 99% of the way to a forecast that’s as accurate as it can be.

Outbound

We started with Pipeline because measuring it accurately enables us to more accurately measure the efforts to build it, namely our outbound and inbound processes. With messy pipelines we’re aiming at a moving target.

Outbound teams often struggle with process adoption because reps naturally take the path of least resistance. If there are no hard guardrails, they’ll prospect whoever they want – which dilutes pipeline quality and wastes resources.

Here’s how sales managers can help enforce and drive process adoption with their outbound reps:

Cover the Right Prospects

There’s just no easier way to succeed in sales than to call the right people. We all know this and reps fight over territory because this is obvious. Unfortunately, when reps are scrambling to hit activity targets, they don’t always call the best accounts.

This is why it’s critical to identify those accounts and track how well our sales teams are covering them. If accounts are being neglected, we need to notify reps and move those accounts if things don’t improve. The top rep isn’t the best one to own an account if they never call them.

The same goes for the individuals in those accounts. We need reports and a management review process to ensure reps cover the right people in the right accounts.

Drive Activity

We all know it takes multiple activities to convert most prospects. Assuming we’ve defined how many attempts we should make before walking away, we should see which prospects saw this level of effort, especially our Tier 1 prospects.

To ensure this happens, management should have reporting to show this and review it regularly, especially for SDRs and new AEs. Whether we’re tracking an overall daily activity level or not, we should be sure reps focus their energies enough to convert prospects and don’t spread themselves too thin.

Maintain Quality Messaging

If we hit the right prospects with the right messaging enough times, we should convert them. But how often does management look at this? Usually not often enough. If reps aren’t converting activities to meetings enough, the first place to look is the two items above. The next is to look at the quality of messaging.

It’s impossible to review every email each rep sends, but you can skim through 10-15 pretty fast and get a sense as to whether or not reps understand what will resonate with buyers.

Inbound Lead Management Processes

One of the biggest breakdowns in GTM is when inbound leads aren’t followed up on properly. If left unchecked, leads slip through the cracks, response times drag out, and marketing’s efforts go to waste. What’s worse is that without process adoption, marketing and sales blame each other for poor lead conversion and it’s impossible to know who’s right.

Separate Hand-Raisers from other MQLs

Here’s one of the biggest misses in marketing. People that want to talk to sales are VERY different from people that just want to download content or attend a webinar. They need to be treated differently. But how often can we see this in our reporting?

It’s critical that we separate these “hand-raisers” from all other inbound leads and measure what matters to them.

Track Lead Response Time for Hand Raisers

Studies consistently show that responding to hand-raisers within 5 minutes or less will improve lead conversion exponentially! Most often these folks reach out to 3-4 vendors and the first to respond usually wins the customer.

If we wait even an hour, let alone a day or two, we might never even get the first meeting, let alone win the deal. Tracking and optimizing lead response time for these leads is critical. For other leads, it’s far less critical.

Track Inbound Cadences

Whether we’re using a tool like Outreach or Salesloft or just using basic Salesforce, we should have an idea how many times we need to follow up, and how we will follow up, before walking away, just as we do with outbound.

Management should have reporting to see all leads that didn’t convert and what activities were logged. Just like with outbound, if leads aren’t converting, management should look at the quantity and quality and provide reps with feedback and coaching.

Create Accountability via Team Dashboards

At Salesforce, we had a “Clean Your Room” dashboard that publicly flagged leads sitting untouched for more than two days. As mentioned above, this is pretty atrocious and this kind of visibility forces reps to take follow-up seriously.

Customer Success

Customer success has multiple processes – sales handoff, onboarding, retention, expansion – but none of them matter if they aren’t being followed consistently. To drive adoption, we need a way to measure execution, hold the team accountable, and course-correct when things break down.

Sales Handoff

What specifically do we require our sales reps to do to set CS and their new customer up for success? The answer is different for every company, every product, and often for every type of customer, but we need to answer these questions and track them carefully. Management should have reporting on these critical data points and review them regularly to coach sales and CS on the right activities.

Onboarding/Implementation

As CS takes the reins, the process can be as simple as a single welcome email or call, or it can be as complex as a months or years long implementation project. Either way, we need to identify what milestones need to be tracked so we can report on them and coach the team on what needs done.

At USC, we implement Salesforce and other tools for our customers, often from the moment they buy, acting as an outsourced implementation team to these companies. These are often complex implementations so we have robust project management tools and detailed reporting to ensure our team is on the ball. It’s not easy, but unfortunately there’s just no other way.

Customer Health

Assuming the onboarding/implementation went well, we’d hope the customer would adopt the software and become a healthy customer, likely to renew. If not, and we wait until the renewal to identify this, we have almost zero chance of retaining them.

Instead, we need visibility into customer health and usage, plus a process to address unhealthy customers. Management needs reporting on which customers are/were unhealthy and what actions CS has or will take. This, alongside reporting on improvement of those customers’ health rating is critical to optimizing retention rates. Like all processes, management needs to stay on top of the team to be sure it’s being executed.

Expansion

Expansion sales is a big topic in and of itself and it’s similar to new business pipeline management and outbound, albeit for existing customers.

We need a way to report on healthy customers that present expansion opportunities and the efforts to expand them. We also need to monitor the expansion pipeline. At Salesforce both of these items were treated very similarly to new business. Management looked at activities, meetings, pipeline generated and pipeline managed for both new business and existing in very similar fashions.

This may or may not work for each B2B SaaS company. Ultimately management needs to decide what needs done and how to track it for expansion pipeline as well as new business.

Renewals

Lastly, we arrive at renewals.  If we’ve done a great job executing the above processes, the renewal will be about as easy as it can be. If we haven’t, it’s probably too late to save it. Regardless, we do need to design an effective renewal process and make sure it’s executed.

Usually that starts with the first notification, ideally much earlier than 30 days before the renewal. Then we need to reach out and/or take actions a certain number of times to maximize renewal rates. To ensure the team is doing this, management should have reporting on this and review it regularly with the CS team or the renewals team, if there is one.