It’s not just funding killing B2B SaaS.

It’s sloppy GTM practices as well.

With less capital available and MUCH more competition for both capital and customers, we simply need to acquire, retain and grow customers more efficiently.

Here are some ways we’ve failed recently:

#1 – Generating a High Volume of Low Intent MQLS

Marketing’s primary job is to hit an MQL target. There are two ways to hit this target. They can lower the lead score for MQLs and/or generate more form fills from activities like white paper downloads and webinar registrations.

These are extremely low intent leads that burn up a lot of selling time and don’t convert. The people filling out these forms have very little interest in speaking to sales. Often, they’re not even in the right roles or the right companies and/or give fake emails and phone numbers.

It is extremely expensive to acquire customers this way. It’s unsustainable.

The solution to this is to change the goal. Marketing should ultimately be measured on revenue, not MQLs. Conversion rates to revenue should be carefully measured for each lead source and optimized. Lead Scores should then be continuously optimized to achieve a sustainable conversion rate where the cost to acquire these customers is not more than it’s worth.

Marketing can then focus on continuing to nurture the leads that have yet to hit that Lead Score while also focussing on getting more people to request meetings with sales, which convert at substantially higher rates.

#2 – Routing the Best Leads to Least Experienced Reps

People that actually want to talk to sales are routed to the least experienced people in the company, Inbound SDRs. They’re not equipped to answer questions and instead run through scripted qualification questions like “Do you have an approved budget?”

This often happens because all leads are mixed together. SDRs receive a flood of leads, most of which are the Low Intent MQLs described above. There are too many to respond quickly so the most valuable leads get neglected. The competition reaches them first, usually setting the tone for the entire evaluation and winning their business.

The solution is to route these leads differently, ideally to experienced Account Executives. Even better, you can use tools like Chili Piper or Calendly to allow potential customers to book a call right on the website. This is what we do at Union Square Consulting and it works very well.

#3 – Spray and Pray Outbound

Sales is told to make more calls and hit extremely high activity quotas. This makes it impossible to do any research and results in spray and pray outbound that isn’t relevant to prospects and doesn’t resonate with them. Conversion rates are terrible so activity quotas are set even higher. It’s a vicious cycle.

The solution is to remove activity quotas and focus on meetings, pipeline and, primarily, revenue. RevOps should carefully segment prospecting lists and build workflows to make it easy for sales to call the same types of people at the same time, quickly accessing intel to tailor their messaging. Templates can still be used to work faster but should be relevant to the audience in each segment.

Then conversion rates from activity to meetings to pipeline to close should be measured so that sales and RevOps can continue to optimize the process, ultimately optimizing revenue generation and lowering the Customer Acquisition Cost.

#4 – Poor Pipeline Management and Forecasting

Startups often don’t have a good process for managing their pipeline. Reps are told to build more pipe and close more deals, but aren’t shown how. Deals constantly slip. Forecasts are missed. Sales numbers are volatile and it’s incredibly hard to manage company headcount not knowing what to expect next quarter.

The solution is to integrate your sales methodology into Salesforce and use it to manage pipeline systematically. Many of the questions asked by management in deal reviews can and should be answered in Salesforce, saving a lot of time in meetings and making reps and managers much more informed. Then, a process to review the pipeline on a regular basis should be implemented.

This is how Salesforce’s own sales team. Through repetition, it’s almost impossible for sales reps not to understand the sales process or to miss critical steps. It’s staring them in the face right in the CRM and, if they miss it, they are reminded each week.

#5 – Underinvestment in Customer Success

“Growth at all costs” has often resulted in a focus solely on new business with retention and growth neglected. Unhappy customers churn and happy customers are not grown in the ways they could be.

The solution is to treat Customer Success as the most valuable revenue center in the business. That’s exactly what it is. Net Revenue Retention is the North Star and depends on executing multiple things well.

Sit down and build a process to wow your customers in the sales handoff and onboarding, to meet Service Level Agreements and respond quickly to Customer Service Requests. Build a process to identify unhealthy accounts and take action to get them healthy, long before their renewal.

Build a process to expand healthy customers by having experienced, quota carrying AEs/AMs engage more stakeholders across the organization. This is by far your easiest way to grow revenue. While you’re at it, build a process to ask happy customers for referrals to other potential customers. Finally, build a renewal process that encapsulates all of the above.

#6 – Underinvestment in RevOps

A senior RevOps Leader, working with the right Revenue Leader, can solve a lot of these problems. Instead, though, RevOps is often staffed by junior Salesforce admins with little experience who are treated as an IT helpdesk instead of a strategic advisor.

Junior Salesforce admins are worth their weight in gold IF they are given proper direction. Make sure that someone is at the helm to build a RevOps Roadmap, prioritize the most important work, and push back on the flood of requests for other, less important issues that inevitably come.

RevOps is a lot more than systems admin. Make sure you’re getting the most important work done, continuously improving the process, not just the systems, and leveraging data to get real insights into what’s working and what’s not. That requires a more senior resource.

#7 – NO True Revenue Leader

Sales, marketing and CS leaders all have different goals and metrics that define their success. If there’s a CRO they often don’t own marketing or customer success and/or don’t understand them.

Whether it’s a true CRO, a COO, or even the CEO, just make sure there is one person that can be a neutral party in managing the entire revenue team. Decide on one single North Star goal (hint, its revenue) and track all revenue teams to the same goal.

Revenue can be broken down into New Business and Net Revenue Retention and then broken down further into pipeline and demand generation. If you have the right resource in RevOps to analyze the data and deliver real Insights, you should be able to see what’s working and what’s not to drive revenue across each department and continuously optimize each stage over time.

SUMMARY

1. Track marketing on revenue, not MQLs

2. Route meeting requests to experienced AEs

3. Eliminate outbound activity quotas and focus on quality

4. Integrate your sales methodology into pipeline management

5. Build process in Customer Success to retain and grow customers

6. Obtain senior resources in Revenue Operations to execute the above

7. Assign a neutral executive to oversee all revenue and set one shared goal

If your startup is struggling with these challenges and you want some help, or simply want to get some free advice, Book a Strategy Call with us and we’ll see if we can help.