How to set up a scalable sales team for B2B SaaS companies

If your business is growing its sales exponentially, and you need help figuring out how to scale your sales team in order to grow your revenue and product-market fit, then you’ll need the help of a specialist tech stack.

However, building and scaling a sales team with B2B software requires more than buying all the latest software and hoping for the best. You’ll need a strategy, and you need to have a system in place, which will act as a foundation for future scaling so that you can consistently generate more revenue. This will also help you in producing a predictable revenue stream that you can manage on your journey to success.

Here’s our advice when it comes to planning and growing a scalable sales team for B2B software companies.

Fundamentals: the know who

The first thing you need to know when scaling your sales is your ideal customer profile (ICP), in other words, the ideal person, company, or brand you think you have the best chance of selling to. To do this, start defining your buyer personas and influencers.

Within a company, there are two key personas:

• Decision-makers: the buyers, AKA the people who make the final call on a sale

• Influencers: those who don’t make the final decision but have an influence on the decision-makers

Note down what each of these personas’ pains and gains are and which USP of your product best fits that market persona. Also, remember that every person is different.

This process – also known as mapping, will tell you how to communicate most effectively to each of them. Next, find out which are the best three channels to use to reach these people, for example, phone, email, or online. If it’s online, find out where their biggest presence is, for example, LinkedIn or Twitter, and hone in on that. 

This is by far the best way to earn yourself some sales-generated leads.

Task-driven cadence: a structured outreach process

For any business wanting to scale its sales team, it’s important to have a task-driven cadence.

Not a lot of companies work with this approach at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s not super important. For those unfamiliar, it involves having a structured outreach process when it comes to targeting your ICP. For example, keeping track of how many times you have attempted to make contact, when and what the outcome is. The goal is not to lose momentum. The task-driven cadence details all of this so that the risk is minimised if not leaving it too long between contact attempts so that they forget you, but at the same time not overdoing it and giving off stalker vibes. 

To do this successfully, you should have X amount of outreaches on three different platforms to every persona and influencer. Use CRM software to automate this and to assign tasks to salespeople, so they get reminders and tasks that tell them when to reach out on what platform to which person. After the x amount of outreaches, the sequence ends and within a few months, the process starts again. Within those months marketing will nurture the leads that were outreached to but didn't convert.

Weekly sales planning: a tight schedule

To be most effective the sales team needs a tight weekly schedule. 

There's a way almost everyone structures their day (morning, lunch, and end-of-day meetings, etc), so plan your sales activities around how people structure their day to be most effective. For example, anticipating the best, most convenient moments to make contact and create an outreach strategy around this.

Gathering data: better understand your ICPs

The moment your ICP come into your sales pipeline you need to make sure you start collecting data: what sort of target persona they are, what’s their main problem and how you can help them. 

You should aim to gather as much relevant data as possible. The main areas of focus should be to find out:

• How are conversions between stages, personas, and influencers?

• Why stages and/or personas don't convert?

  
  

Gathering this information can help you keep tabs on the sales process and improves your understanding why some ICPs fell through the net and some were converted. It will also help you see how to improve your sales technique, nurture relationships and provide better content.

Next, attempt to loop this feedback back to your marketing team, as marketing can extract more data out of it to fine-tune their targeting and know which buttons to push for which target personas.

Here you’ll see why it’s important that marketing and sales work as one team instead of two different disciplines.