How to grow SAAS revenues efficiently

Is the route to growing SAAS revenues efficiently through hiring salespeople?

Many SAAS investors, founders and revenue leaders believe that hiring sellers is the pathway to growing SAAS revenues efficiently. In my experience, adding more salespeople without a solid pipeline and proof of product-market fit will increase your burn rate and rarely drive growth. It also is unpleasant for both existing and new sellers.

So, what’s the solution? Growing your SAAS sales efficiently requires a strategic approach that prioritizes pipeline growth through marketing, driving productivity among your existing sales team, and adding new sellers when there’s enough demand to support their contribution to the business.

Growing SAAS revenues efficiently starts with marketing

Start by focusing on marketing efforts that attract high-quality prospects within your ICP who show urgent interest in your product or service. My friend and colleague Rhonda Giedt wrote an excellent post that sets timeline expectations from marketing investments. It’s important to factor in the time to results for your marketing within your strategic growth plan. Build a strong digital presence, create compelling content, and utilize targeted advertising to reach your ideal customer base.

Existing sales team should be productive

Concurrently, optimize the productivity of your existing sales team. Ensure they have the tools, training, and support they need to perform at their best. This includes effective sales enablement, streamlined processes, and ongoing coaching and feedback.

Churn quietly makes it hard to grow SAAS revenues efficiently

Keep an eagle eye on real indicators of product-market fit. It’s not enough to sell your product, you need proof that users are adopting it and getting value. If they don’t see enough value, the probability that you will have a leaky boat with churn undermining your revenue growth is very high. If your product requires high levels of customer success to drive adoption and utilization, use those experts to inform both refinement of your ICP (market and sell to those that realize the most value because they have the most urgent pain) AND improvement of your product – what can drive adoption and show value without a customer success person.

Add sellers when they can succeed

Finally, only add new salespeople when there is enough quality demand that outstrips your current sales team’s ability to capture it. This will help ensure that new hires can contribute efficiently to the business without increasing your burn rate.

In short, growing SAAS sales efficiently isn’t about adding more salespeople to your team. It’s about building a solid foundation through marketing, productivity optimization, product-market fit improvement and strategic hiring. What do you think? #pipeline #success #marketing #sales

This post was previously published as a LinkedIn Post.

How To Create An MVP B2B SaaS Marketing Budget

Welcome to the world of B2B SaaS enterprise solutions, where marketing budgets and revenue targets rule the game. But fear not, fellow marketer and fellow finance leaders, we’re here to guide you through the maze of numbers with a touch of humor and a dash of professionalism. So, grab your coffee/chai/RedBull and let’s dive in!

Crunching the Numbers: Revenue Goals, Average Selling Price, and Win Rate

First things first, let’s talk numbers. To create a marketing budget that hits the bullseye, you need to start with your revenue goals, average selling price, and win rate. Crunch those numbers and determine how many sales qualified opportunities you need to meet your revenue target. Add in the average sales cycle to know when you need to create those opportunities in order to have adequate qualified pipeline for your monthly/quarterly/annual targets. It’s like solving a puzzle, but with math – the ultimate brain teaser for marketers!

Decoding CAC: What Can You Afford to Spend?

Once you’ve wrapped your head around your revenue goals, it’s time to tackle the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Think of it as the magic number that reveals how much you can afford to spend on all your sales and marketing efforts to acquire a customer. It’s like finding the perfect balance between splurging and saving – a budgeting masterstroke!

crop man getting dollars from wallet — Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

Allocating the Marketing Moolah: The 33% Rule and Sales Productivity Target

Now that you know your CAC, it’s time to allocate the marketing moolah. Many experts suggest allocating around 33% of your budget to marketing, including people and program costs. But remember, every business is unique, so feel free to tweak the percentages to fit your needs. Oh, and don’t forget to consider your sales productivity target – that elusive number that impacts your sales budget. On average, sales teams achieve about 70% of their quota, so factor that in as you work your budget magic. Don’t be duped by false hope and fantasy forecasts!

The Attribution Dilemma: Multiple Touch Points and Channel Champions

As you gear up to conquer the marketing budget challenge, there’s one obstacle you need to be aware of – the attribution dilemma. For products sold for over $5000 per year, attribution to a single marketing effort is as elusive as a unicorn. With multiple people and touch points involved, it’s like playing a game of ‘who touched the opportunity?’ But fret not, you can still attribute channels or programs to different stages of the sales process – from pre-qualification to winning, expanding, and renewing. Avoid setting MQL targets and bonuses. Managing your marketing budget is like being a detective, uncovering the channel champions that drive results!

Monitoring and Optimizing: A Budgeting Adventure

Congratulations, you’ve crafted a marketing budget that’s ready to rock! But don’t rest on your laurels just yet – the adventure continues. Keep a watchful eye on your expenses, measure the performance of your marketing efforts (I’ve used Bizable, now Adobe Marketing Measure, which takes effort to set up but is a strong way to answer attribution contribution questions), and make data-driven decisions to optimize your budget allocation. It’s like a thrilling quest, where you tweak, test, and triumph!

In conclusion, creating a marketing budget for your B2B SaaS enterprise solution requires a mix of numbers, strategy, and a lot of creativity. With a clear understanding of your revenue goals, average selling price, win rate, CAC, and sales productivity target, you can create a budget that sets you up for success. And remember, while attribution may be a challenge, monitoring and optimizing your budget is an ongoing adventure. So, embrace the budgeting game like a boss, and watch your marketing efforts drive results and take your business to new heights! Happy budgeting!

Need Product Market Fit? It’s all about Urgency

In the world of startups, product-market fit is key to success. It’s the process of matching a product or service with a target market that has an urgent need for it. And no one understands this better than Figma. This tech company had early success by targeting other start-ups.

The urgency driver was almost always the desire to be able to get whole groups & orgs moving faster to design with a shared understanding—everyone looking for efficiency wins while fighting with org growth & complexity.
John Lilly, Investor

Figma provided what these start-ups were looking for—something more collaborative than Adobe Creative Suite, and something that could help speed up the process of designing web and mobile products. Let’s break down how Figma found its product market fit through urgency and pain points.

Understanding Urgency

Finding product-market fit means understanding customer needs on both a micro and macro level. On a micro level, companies must understand what their customers are looking for in terms of features, usability, and cost. On a macro level, they must understand customer needs in terms of urgency—what is happening for the individual or for their company that makes that pain incredibly important to address, RIGHT NOW. In Figma’s case, it was the need for these mobile-first start-ups like AirBNB and Uber to iterate product design faster than the market.

Identifying Pain Points

Every founder and go-to-market executive knows they must identify pain points within their target market—problems that customers want solved but don’t yet have the tools or resources to do so themselves. In Figma’s case, the problem was simple: Adobe Creative Suite was not designed for product design and did not make it easy for the design and product team to collaborate Figma identified this pain point and created a solution that not only addressed it but also offered much more in terms of collaboration between teams and individuals alike. (Adobe bought Figma in September 2022 for $20B so clearly they recognized the new market opportunity).

Creating Solutions That Match the Pain

Once companies have identified customer needs on both levels—urgency and pain points—they can begin creating solutions that address those needs while also offering unique features or benefits that set them apart from competitors in the space. For example, even though Figma offers collaboration capabilities similar to those found in Adobe Creative Suite, it also offers team sharing options so multiple people can work on projects simultaneously without having to worry about overwriting each other’s work or losing track of changes made along the way. This feature alone sets them apart from competitors and ensures that customers will keep coming back for more.

Hunting for Urgency Rather than Creating It

For years, sellers and marketers have focused on qualifying prospects who have the pain their solution addresses. But often, go-to-market (GTM) teams do not know what was the urgency trigger within their customers that made them BUY NOW. Purchasing software, especially for an enterprise larger than a small business requires internal navigation that is difficult. Not only does the champion need to align with their colleagues, but they often have to achieve buy-in from finance, data privacy, security and others. It’s “minefieldy” according to former Gartner Distinguished Vice President Brent Adamson. To navigate the minefield, the champion has to be very motivated and vendors have to enable these buyers. Discounts and incentives may help, but finding champions who have an urgency trigger is a much more reliable and profitable strategy.

Common Urgency Triggers:

New Leader – change in leadership can slow down purchases, but often the new leader has an agenda or mandate. If your product definitively accelerates his/her mandate, you win. Best case scenario – the new leader has leveraged you previously in another role and you are their winning playbook. New leader can be internal or externally sourced. Track your customers’ job moves and if you have enough customers, User Gems can be helpful.
Market embarrassment – competitors using your solution are measurably winning over your prospect – and they know it. They need a quick fix that can catch them up or give them an edge. You cannot make this up – if you claim that you are the secret sauce, count on people knowing people and asking. Product Designers were happy to share what an advantage Figma was giving them. Customer advocates come naturally.
Looming Deadlines – if a product or launch or initiative has a deadline and is unlikely to make it, people worry about their jobs and their prospects. If your solution can put a project back on track and keep people from looking bad, that’s urgency. It’s personal. IT means your product has to be easy to buy, easy to deploy and easy to use. If it’s not, this urgency trigger is not for you.

Conclusion

By understanding the power of pain and urgency, sellers and marketers can create a product-market fit that maximizes their success and their growth efficiency. Pain helps to locate a target market and urgency gives them the necessary push to invest in your product. It’s up to you as the seller or marketer to make sure you understand both these aspects, use them strategically together and gauge the impact. Remember: pain tells us the needs of your customers, while urgency points to their behavior – when they need it and why they need it now.

Ultimately, pain+urgency = increased conversion rates which is what all sellers and marketers want. Take time out today to validate your product-market fit by finding out what urgent circumstances are motivating your buyers. Use that knowledge as a tool to refine your offering based on current needs. After all, something can be most desired – but no matter how luxurious it may be – if there’s no urgency attached to it, prospects aren’t likely to buy it anytime soon!

Too often, we believe we can CREATE urgency. Urgency exists without our solutions. Either buyers find you because of urgency or you hunt it to help them discover you.
Joelle Gropper Kaufman

Ready to take the next steps? Want to discover the urgency trigger driving your sales? Let’s talk–we can help you find those answers.

Key Trends in Category Creation

At Dynamic Signal, we created the employee engagement platform category with the help of Zoom Marketing. Through a research based approach including interviews and focus groups, Zoom Marketing has worked with many leading technology and biotechnology brands. Below, I outline some of the pros and cons to creating a category rather than disrupting one. At Bloomreach, we started with Category Creation, but the company thrived when it pivoted to Category Disruption. Adify, Firefly, Dynamic Signal and WorkBoard are all category creators. Unquestionably, every company needs a clear and differentiated positioning statement. Zoom Marketing shared the trends and leading companies they’ve seen in 2022 and it’s worth the quick read.

Strategy	Pro	Con
Category Creation	– Defined to your differentiated strengths – Category winners capture most of the value – Narrative is one you control	– Buyers don’t know what budget to use to buy you – Slower sales cycles (unless a disruptive GTM) – Very evangelical – lots of teaching
Category Disruption	– Existing buyer – Existing budget – Press & analysts are “familiar” – There are RFPs and purchase cycles already	– Existing vendors define capabilities – Need an innovator’s dilemma disruptive offering (underserved market segment)

Focus On Your “wallet Share”, Not Your Product

photograph of person holding black leather wallet with money

Building a product is not the challenge – building a business is. Silicon Valley investors often lead entrepreneurs astray according to two-time unicorn founder, Ashutosh Garg. During our conversation about founder wisdom, he rejected the conventional wisdom to do one thing, stay focused, then be super successful. His experience is that the truth is the opposite of that – you need to “get married to the market, not the product.” You have to identify a big market, maximize your “wallet share” in that market and then build products that will capture that share. Focus on your wallet share, not your product.

Understand who is the buyer; what motivates the buyer; and how much they spend. Music to a marketer’s ears!

Per this world-class engineer, now CEO, it is sales processes (consumer or B2B) that are the most effective way of testing demand. It’s way cheaper to test demand and value proposition than it is to build the product.

Hire an SDR;
Give them a pitch;
Call 100 companies to see how many will take the meeting

If those meetings don’t convert into sales opportunities, then you have your answer – there is no market for what you want to build.

At the end of the day, it’s not about building the product; it’s about building a successful business. Ashutosh suggests that often, Silicon Valley investors push founders to rapidly prototype product focused on one problem as the route to super success. This is not necessarily the best advice. The best approach is to focus on the market first, test demand and then build a product around the demand that resonated. This approach to product-last has been the foundation of Ashutosh’s success. By listening to the customer, understanding the market and testing demand through sales, entrepreneurs can increase their chances of product-market fit. In Ashutosh’s words, focus on the wallet share competition – not just getting a share of the pie but having more than your fair share.

This approach transcends initial offerings into expansion products. When Ashutosh founded Eightfold.ai, he focused on leveraging massive data in applicant tracking systems to better identify potential talent and minimize bias. Then, Ashu met a leader at Tata India. They said you promised us that in addition to identifying ideal talent from large data sets, we will be able to search across our employees as well as applicants. In serving the market, Ashutosh realized that talent acquisition makes sense but talent mobility was new – and with Covid, internal mobility became crucial. As Eightfold.ai continues to focus on wallet share, offering solutions for managing and developing flexible talent have been introduced. Eightfold.ai created new products to capture more wallet share from their motivated customers. But each new product was market demand tested through sales before anything was built.

With his contrarian approach to maximize wallet share for his core buyer, he has built two unicorns – Eightfold.ai and Bloomreach. Most people give up too soon – it’s not about the product, it’s about the market and wallet share.

5 Tips for Making the Most Out of Getting Fired

an elderly man trying to check information that he is dismissed

It’s happened to the best of us. We go into work one day, and are called into a meeting with our boss. They tell us that we’ve been fired – it’s over, we’re done. For many people, this experience is devastating. It can leave them feeling ashamed, anxious and lost. Getting fired is an eventuality for sales and marketing leaders in high-growth companies. In fact, one should plan on it. The average tenure of a venture-backed CMO is 18 months. Personally, my CMO tenures were 3 – 4 – 5 – 3 years with 6-9 month interludes between them when I was fired. Firing doesn’t have to be the worst thing that happens to you professionally. In fact, there are multiple steps to making the most out of getting fired.

woman organizing her belongings — Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

In this post, we will give you five tips for making the most out of getting fired. We will help you reframe the experience and alleviate some of the pain you may be feeling. Plus, we’ll give you some actions you can take throughout your career to make yourself more resilient and marketable!

Tip 1 – Begin with the end in mind (thanks Stephen Covey)

You need to think about your exit before you join a company. The best time to negotiate fair terms upon your departure is when the company wants you most. Normal severance terms can include 3-12 months of salary and COBRA (US Healthcare coverage is insane).

If you didn’t negotiate in advance, don’t despair, negotiation is still an option. If you have a strong relationship with your boss, you may be able to negotiate for an extension of your health insurance and/or a role on an advisory board. If you remain as an advisor, you don’t need to signal that you’ve left your job on LinkedIn (but you can set yourself as open to new opportunities). And if the company wants you to sign a release in order to receive your separation offer, that’s another negotiation opportunity.

If you can afford an employment attorney, engaging one while negotiating your offer is a very effective way to ensure your exit is fair and unemotional.

Tip 2 – Get fired with grace and smarts

The way you respond when you get fired says a lot about you as a leader and sets the tone for how you will be perceived in the market. It’s important to be professional and graceful when you’re fired. You never know when you’ll run into your former boss or colleagues. Plus, the way you handle getting fired says a lot about your character. Spend time thinking about the best way to communicate internally that creates stability for the company and dignity for you. Do not take any intellectual property from the company.

If you are asked to sign a release in order to receive your severance package, consider having an employment attorney in your state review the document. Do not sign without reading it carefully.

Tip 3 – Always keep LinkedIn and your resume current

LinkedIn and your resume (or CV) should always be up to date and full of quantifiable impact. Set notifications so that your network is NOT alerted when you update your profile. You don’t want to tip anyone off that you might be looking for a new opportunity. Make a quarterly appointment with yourself to update your LinkedIn and CV. You won’t be caught flat-footed when you are fired.

Tip 4 – Don’t take it personally

Getting fired is not personal, it’s business. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person or that you’re not good at your job. In most cases, it has nothing to do with you. Companies are constantly evolving and changing direction. As a result, the team that was brought in to achieve one set of objectives is often different from the team that’s needed to achieve the next set of objectives. If you take it personally, it will be harder for you to move on and find your next opportunity. The vast majority of hiring managers in high growth industries have themselves been fired for reasons they could not control.

Tip 5 – Compose your narrative

The way you tell your story about ~~getting fired~~ leaving a company matters. When you’re interviewing for your next role, you’ll be asked about what happened at your last company. For the most part, companies cannot and won’t disclose the circumstances under which you left the company (unless you broke the law or are accused of doing so – then you should engage legal counsel ASAP). Prior employers will confirm your dates of employment and often nothing else. You can frame the story to reflect what you learned, why you want a new challenge and what you will bring to a new venture. Be sure to focus on the positive and highlight the impact you delivered. Expect people to do “back-door” references so be precise and accurate about your contribution and don’t embellish. You did enough!

Getting fired is not the end of the world. It is a new beginning.

No one is satisfied working at a job where they aren’t succeeding. No one is secure if their company is struggling to survive. You have a chance to reframe your story and start writing the next chapter. Be sure to keep these tips in mind as you move forward in your career!

4 Founder Insights That Will Change Your Company’s Future

Ashutosh Garg talks and thinks remarkably fast. He understands complexity with ease and his drive to create is unstoppable. I had the pleasure of meeting Ashutosh when I interviewed to be the first Head of Marketing for Bloomreach – one of two unicorns Ashutosh has founded (Eightfold.ai, where he is the CEO, is the second one). He and his co-founder, Raj DeDatta, were meticulous about nurturing the culture of Bloomreach and maintaining high standards for hiring. They spent over a year seeking to fill my role and I was honored to partner with them. Ashutosh and I come from completely different pedagogical orientations – he’s a data scientist to whom engineers clamor to collaborate. I’m an MBA with a penchant for group psychology and how to recognize, nurture and capture energy to drive companies and people forward. Ashutosh drew upon data to share with me his founder insights. We share a deep respect for each other and Ashutosh’s unique, clear view of what a successful founder must do was unexpectedly unique and compelling. I hope you enjoy Ashutosh’s four insights.

Ashutosh Garg, Founder & CEO, Eightfold.ai

Founder Insight 1:

Be patient when hiring initial talent – optimize for great DNA for the company

Per Ashutosh, not having enough patience when it comes to hiring initial talent can be a huge mistake for any founder. When it comes to building a successful startup, there are a lot of things that need to fall into place. However, one of the most important things is having the right team in place. This can be a challenge, especially for founders who are moving quickly to bring their vision to market.

One of the biggest mistakes that Ashutosh sees founders make is that they try to hire too quickly. They see a problem that needs to be solved and they want to solve it immediately. However, this often leads to them hiring the wrong people.

Instead of rushing into hiring, he recommends you take the time to think about the type of people you need on your team. What kind of skills do they need to have? What kind of personality do you want them to have? Once you have a good understanding of the type of people you need, you can start to slowly build your team.

It may take a little longer to get things off the ground this way, but it will be worth it in the long run. Hiring the right people is critical, but so is building the right culture.

Founder Insight 2:

Do whatever job is most important at the time

As a startup founder, you will likely wear many hats during the early days of your company. You may be responsible for sales, marketing, product development, customer support, and a whole host of other things.

This can be tough for many people, especially those who are used to having a more specialized role. However, it’s important to be comfortable doing whatever job is required to succeed at the time.

The reality is that, in the early days of a startup, the most important thing is to get things off the ground. This means that you need to be willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

So, if you need to spend a few months doing sales or customer support, do it. If you need to spend a year working on product development, do it. The most important thing is that you get the company off the ground and to a point where it can start to scale.

Founder Insight 3:

Appearances can be deceiving – in both directions

Remember – the outside view looks rosier than it is. The inside view looks worse than it is.

One of the things that Ashutosh learned from his experience as a startup founder is that appearances can be deceiving. This is true in both directions.

From the outside, it can often look like a startup is doing much better than it is. This is because people only see the successes and they don’t see all of the failures that happen behind the scenes.

However, it’s also important to remember that the inside view often looks worse than it is. This is because founders are much closer to the business and they see all of the problems that need to be fixed.

It’s important to keep this in mind when you are comparing your startup to others. Just because a startup looks like it is doing well from the outside, doesn’t mean that it is. Likewise, just because your startup doesn’t look like it is doing well from the inside, doesn’t mean that it isn’t.

The most important thing is to focus on your own business, progress to the milestones that matter to your growth and learn from the inevitable setbacks that will occur.

Founder Insight 4:

Focus on continuously increasing your total available market (TAM)

As a startup founder, it’s important to focus on continuously increasing your total available market (TAM). This is the number of potential customers that you have for your product or service.

It’s the key to sustaining long-term growth.

Identify the buyer – that’s a function of what you start with – be focused and precise in the definition of that customer profile.

Understand every dollar your motivated, target buyer spends and identify which dollars you can compete for – maximizing the wallet share of your company.

To do this, you need to have a good understanding of your product or service and what problem it solves. You also need to understand your target market and what motivates them. Additionally, you need to be always looking for new ways to reach more potential customers and expand your penetration within existing ones.

These four insights do not guarantee the success of your venture. A good idea in a large market developed by the right team with healthy doses of luck and grit increases the odds of that success.

Content Marketing from the Pulitzer Perspective

Content marketing is often the only truly unique, differentiated marketing deliverable. Marketing changes fast – as soon as a marketer figures out a channel, a message or an audience, technology has made it effortless for competitors to replicate it. While imitation is flattery, it also makes the job of breaking through the noise harder and harder.

Except with great content. Not good content. Not above average content. I’m talking about great content. The type of content that you want to immediately copy the link and share with people (not because they asked you to but because it’s that good). The type of content that teaches you something without you realizing you were learning. And I’ve had the honor of working with multiple Pulitzer Prize winning and nominated journalists who became content marketers. Mark Emmons is one of those gems and his medium post of what every content marketer should know is the latest addition to my required reading list for new team members.

The Accidental Content Marketer

The Growth Puzzle – Your company is missing its forecasts

Is your B2B company missing its forecasts? Is that derailing strategic planning, board meetings and fundraising? My colleague, Philippe Bouissou, applied his 4 alignment axis model to the question of forecast accuracy, marketing attribution and the role of revops.

His answer is misunderstanding of revops, false specificity in attribution and misalignment. The misalignment is between the levers that drive the forecast and the forecast itself. I recommend reading his detailed article.

Want to know why most B2B companies are not making their numbers?

It was a pleasure to be a thought partner, editor and provacateur for this blog (originally posted on BlueDotsPartners.com).

5 Steps to make your Executive Sponsorship Program Soar

Clarify the purpose of the program

Executive Sponsors should:

Build sustaining relationships with prospects & customers
Help buyers and customers solve problems
Represent the buyer’s perspective in strategic planning

Executive Sponsors should NOT:

Lean on executive sponsors to hit quota or bonus numbers
Burn relationships for short-term results (i.e. hard sell)
Swoop in as a hero to “rescue a deal” by undermining pricing or terms

Establish customer candidate criteria

Which accounts and executives should you invest in? Sales, Marketing and Customer Success teams can recommend an account and individual for executive sponsorship. Each candidate should be assessed using a known, objective criteria.

Create and continuously improve a sponsee brief about the individual and the account. The brief should include:

Why sponsor this person and account,
Unique interests,
Potential things in common,
Account business conditions and strategic considerations
ideal outcome of the executive relationship.

Briefs should be updated quarterly by the account team to ensure the executive is always current and insightful on their sponsee.

Establish criteria such as:

Potential lifetime account value
Account influence or impact on market
Individual influence or impact on market
Interest or commitment to you
Near term capacity for growth

Create a weighted scoring system to assess candidates

Create bands of “hard data” to inform scores for consistent scoring
Marketing program manager can score candidates and existing sponsorees – some sponsorees may need to transitioned out of the program
Every quarter, the GTM Leadership team should assess candidates, score and outcomes
Evaluate the list – is the weighting of the criteria generating a list of candidates that matches intuitive priority? Don’t be afraid to re-weight the criteria and re-score if not. It’s an iterative process.
Eliminate candidates that do not qualify at this time – your executive cannot only serve a few executive sponsorees

Executive sponsors should be:

Comfortable building relationships with strangers
Willing to work hard, both internally (going to bat for customers) and externally (through difficult customer conversations)
Willing to spend 20% of their time on buyer enablement and sponsee engagement – at least 8 hours per week.

Create a executive sponsorship capacity plan

Number of sponsee (individuals) per executive
Number of executives who would be good sponsors
Multiply the two and that’s the maximum number of customer sponsee

Match sponsees to executives

Cut off at the number of candidates that equal the capacity number
Review the score of the candidates
Try to match personalities and interests

Templetize!

Not only do templates make engaging as an executive sponsor much easier for your busy executives, but using templates provides better data to improve upon your program and sponsorship communications. Additionally, templates allow marketing to provide very high-quality, polished communications and events to create an on-brand executive experience.

Create templates for:

Introducing the executive to the sponsee
Creating interest in meeting or talking
Sharing thought leadership materials such as slides or videos
Establishing a regular opportunity to talk about their business and challenges
Inviting the sponsee to a private event

Create a cadence and playbook

Create a playbook for the cadence of executive sponsor relationships and events (dinners, luncheons, meetings at major industry events) to create consistency
Consider using a sales cadence management system such as Salesloft or Outreach.io to ensure regular contact, visibility into contact, metrics for the program
Assign a sales or business development representative to partner with the executive on starting, stopping and improving the sequence through personalization
The executive can and should engage outside of the sequence as needed but ensure that such communications are noted in the CRM so that the account and customer success teams are informed.

Report and Review – generate monthly and quarterly reports on the executive sponsorship program – filtered by executive, region, account team, industry, customer size or other segmentation criteria in use.

Number of executives and sponsees
Number of engagements
Duration of sponsee relationships
Growth or change in accounts during relationship
NPS for sponsees and their accounts
Direct or influenced revenue from executive sponsorship program

Enable executives to be excellent sponsors

The Account Executive is the quarterback of the account. Working with Marketing (see Templetize), the AE can either using an automated outreach system or create a cadence of ticklers for the executive to touch base. Make it easy for them to do so:

Provide detailed updates on the state of the sale/account prior to executive outreach
Shortcut executives from having to remember key actions – keep it on your calendar, don’t expect it on theirs.
Facilitate executives’ action with draft emails and personal touches for the relationship
Correlate directly to activity on an account – make the timing make sense and not be self-serving.
Measure and monitor so you can iterate from experience to improve your future processes