The Ultimate Framework to Build your First SaaS Sales Team
If you are a CEO, founder or leader looking to get started with your B2B sales team, look no further. Ten simple steps to build your first Sales Team.
1. Target Market & Geographies
Pick two territories you are present and want to tackle.
Make sure to have customers, success stories, brand awareness, support and product market fit.
2. Tier and segmentation
You can start by tiering down by the number of employees which is easy and very effective, as follows:
SMB (Small & Medium Business) with up to 50 employees
MM (Mid-Market) up to 999 employees
ENT (Enterprise) >1000 employees
3. Ideal Customer Profile
Sit down with your team and co-founders and brainstorm around the following:
The roles and the companies that are buying or might buy your product/solution
What are their pains and challenges
How your product/software can serve them, uniquely.
What is the unique advantage you have vs your competitors?
Write down their top challenges, needs and software/product advantages.
ICP definition template
4. Hiring & Staffing the team
Define each role and responsibility.
Sales Development Representative: prospect and book meetings for AE.
Account Executive: prospecting, running demos and presentations, close.
Account Manager Runs onboarding, renewals and upsells.
Customer Success Manager: Focus on customer success only, customer health index, and churn reduction.
Bonus point: you can have AE doing hybrid which means they can keep the accounts they close and upsell too.
5. Outbound
Targeting
Start from your ICP. Put down 3 ICPs to contact.
Build your lists. Here is the info you need:
Name
Surname
Phone
Email
Role
Company Name
Recent job changes or behaviours.
Use tools like Apollo, and Sales Navigator and upload them into your CRM. Enrich them with data, and insights.
You can also run the outbound campaigns on Apollo and move only the ones that are interested into your CRM.
Prepare your sales scripts and the materials needed for each ICP.
Use sequences, emails, calls, Linkedin, and Videos. Have an 8-10 steps sequence that lasts 30 days. Do not skip the calls.
Have a sequence for each role, language and industry.
One fully automated for low-score leads and one manual for high-score leads.
Always analyse your efforts:
See if the % response rate picks up and you start booking meetings.
Look at your KPIs every day. Aim for perfection here.
Suggested KPIs:
>50% open rate
>10% reply rate
>10% click rate
>5% meeting rate (even though meetings can come from different sources)
<5% bounce rate
Useful Resources 👇
6. Sales Collaterals
Here are a few documents and materials to start from - store them on Notion.
Sales Playbook
Sales Onboarding
Pricing
Full deck
Short deck
Demo accounts
One pager
Three Success stories
7. Sales Stack
CRM (HubSpot recommended) where you run the whole process, pipeline management, goals, sequences, and forecast.
Gong or cheaper alternative to record your calls and coach the team.
Apollo to connect to Hubspot and prepare the lists for the sales team.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Enterprise prospecting and insights.
Notion - sales repository.
8. Goals & Compensation
Here is a compensation plan system you can use:
Set the goal and the OTE
Pay salespeople based on their % achievement vs set goal.
The average SaaS AE can bring an average €250-350K ARR.
Aim for a 2-3X Cost of Revenue Ratio for the first time. (salary+bonus+taxes vs revenue).
In addition, assign to each sales role (SDR, AEs, AM, CSM) a yearly bonus. Then deploy a system that pays monthly or quarterly depending on your financials.
Payout Scale
Use a scale that allows you to pay salespeople when they hit a specific achievement %.
In this way, you have a minimum revenue guaranteed before paying out. Also, have a lower limit (i.e. 50%) and an upper limit together with a kicker/penalty.
Example:
Commission= Monthly bonus x % achievement x Penalty/Kicker.
Range 50-70% achievement--->60% penalty
Range 90-110%--> 100% kicker
Range 120-150%--> 140% kicker
Cap vs Uncap
Commission plans for quota carrying (i.e AEs) sales reps are uncapped. Instead, SDRs or CSMs can be capped.
Clawback Clause
Have a three months clause if your won customers don't pay.
At this stage, there might be emotional buying and customers not paying. Have a system that claws back the commissions paid if there is a fallback in getting the money in.
Refine Every Quarter
Comp plan at your company's stage should be quarterly.
The whole system needs refinement based on data until you hit the right one.
Useful Resources 👇
9. Sales Cycle
New business: write down the new business sales cycle together with your CRM pipeline. Understand each step and what is required to move to the next one.
Existing Business: Now that is won you have to manage your existing customers. From onboarding to churn mitigation and upselling, make sure to have an existing business sales cycle managed by AM and CSM teams.
Useful Resources 👇
10. Sales Onboarding
I'm not going to focus much since last week's newsletter was entirely around sales onboarding.
However, it's crucial to have your sales onboarding set right from the beginning. Make sure you have an onboarding schedule and that new hires know what to do every day.
Do not let them shadow anyone in the first week, start with the fundamentals: product, product, product.
Then you move into the sales playbook and sales best practices. Then to role plays and live calls. After 4 weeks you have their graduation.
