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.