How to Structure the Sales Process as a B2B SaaS Company: Part 1

Cambridge Dictionary defines structure as “the way in which the parts of a system or object are arranged or organized, or a system arranged in a way.”

Structure is needed to make sure that your team is working faster & smarter, not only harder. Smart & fast sales teams outsell their hardworking competitors, 7 days a week.

Structure is also needed to create speed. “Does this give us more speed?” This should be the first question you ask before making any decision wrt structuring your sales team.

Structuring a sales process is a constant work in progress. The ideas and plans you have today will change based on new knowledge, external input and your personal experiences.

First and foremost we need to put our dream process down on paper.

• What does your ideal customer look like?
• What does your ideal buyer persona look like?
• How is your current sales team structured? MDRs, SDRs, AEs, CSRs?
• Which steps should every customer go through–from prospect to deal won?
• What kind of tools do you need to make sure each individual can perform to their maximum potential?
• Do you work in the same way with SMBs as you do with Enterprise customers?

Identifying Prospects

First off you need to identify your main market.

Prospects (Businesses)

• Where are they? Local or global?
• In which industries does your product create value and return on investment (ROI)?
• How big are the companies you’re targeting? \t* Is this measured in revenue, profits, number of employees?
• What kind of tech-stack do they have?

Prospects (Buyer Personas)

• What do they do? Are they CEOs, CMOs, Sales Directors?

With this written down, you should have created a list of target customers with buyer personas.

For SalesScreen it looks like this:

Location

• Global, but preferably in countries/cities where we have some presence.

Industries

• Insurance
• Banking & Finance
• Staffing & Recruiting
• Technology - Software
• Technology - Hardware
• Telecommunications
• Oil & Energy
• Auto
• Real Estate
• Hospitality

Make sure that your sales reps know the industry they are targeting. How does this industry work? What’s important? What are they struggling with?

Size

• 11-50 employees
• 51-100 employees
• 101-200 employees
• 201-400 employees
• 400-2000 employees
• 2000+ employees

Different sized companies need different AEs. Make sure that the rep targeting the larger accounts understands how the hierarchy in a large corporation works.

If I apply these filters in our Cognism account this gives us 14,533 companies in the UK to approach. We need to narrow this down to make the prospect list even smaller.

Tech-stack

• Salesforce
• Hubspot
• Pipedrive
• Microsoft Dynamics
• Oracle Sales Cloud
• Sugar CRM

Finding this information is more difficult, but if you manage to do that you will have the SDR’s opening pitch ready.

Buyer Persona

• Chief Commercial Officer
• Chief Sales Officer
• Chief Revenue Officer
• Sales Director
• Sales Manager
• Head of Sales
• VP of Sales

Last, but not least, the buyer personas. Trying to reach the CEO of 100+ employee organization is probably not worth it–go further down and work your way up. Like Will Smith didn’t do in Pursuit of Happiness…

When this is done, you have identified your market potential. Next up is assigning these prospects to your team.

• Which marketing activities do you initiate to warm them up?
• Who should be responsible for reaching out?
• How do you divide these prospects to your team? \t* Based on geography? \t* Size? \t* Tech-stack? \t* Industry?