Want more revenue ? Get the entire organisation closer to business outcomes
You want more revenue at the same cost ? Or even at decreasing cost ?
Don’t hire more salespeople : salespeople are costly, have huge egos and are notoriously individualistic in an increasingly collective business environment.
I don’t mean to shit on salespeople, but this has broadly been my experience so far. And it’s not even their fault : the individual sales quota system fuels egos and individualistic behaviour. It’s a simple and classic case of misalignment between employee compensation and company objectives.
What we want instead is not only to bet more on marketing to scale, but go one step further : to bring product and customer success CLOSER to the business rather than keeping them at arm’s length, as is the case today.
I’m not advocating for putting revenue targets on marketing, product and customer success necessarily, although in a PLG motion, product ABSOLUTELY needs to own revenue targets.
What I’m advocating for is to create stronger, more obvious links between departments other than sales with the revenue of the business.
Marketing
For instance, marketing shouldn’t just be incentivized on leads. This creates siloed, short term thinking.
Marketing should be owning the ENTIRE customer journey from lead to closed won deal and beyond so the link between leads and long term value for the company is obvious, and marketing can finally step off the hamster wheel of lead generation and short-term marketing tactics.
Product
On the product side, if your business already has a PLG motion, then your product team needs to own revenue ASAP.
If not, your product team needs to understand the customer like no-one’s business, and drive feature development through the lens of benefit and UX to the ideal customer. Period. The roadmap should only be geared towards the ideal customer, and if your business is still fairly new, ONE use-case. Complex roadmaps are the highway to a product that’ll end up looking like Frankenstein, i.e. bits and bobs of functionalities appealing to different people but with no cohesive user-experience and therefore no stickiness.
Customer success
I might be off the mark here, but I believe the future of customer success will be 2 functions merged into one : sales and customer success. If your target market is small to mid-market enterprises, you might not even need a salesteam if you have a rock solid marketing strategy and execution.
The best way to find out if marketing is doing a great job is if the leads coming in are already ready to sign on the dotted line and want to interact with customer success faster.
So my guess is that customer success is already closer to revenue generation than it thinks it is, and should learn the ropes of closing easy, not-too complex deals the moment marketing hands them over so there is an easy transition from marketing to customer success without having a salesperson in the middle not doing much.
What of the salesteam then ?
Which leaves complex, enterprise level buyers for the salesteam, which is exactly as it should be since this is where salespeople are the very best at : telling a compelling story to the clients that have custom needs that product or marketing isn’t able to tell on such a personal level.
I see way too many B2B SaaS businesses operating like we’re in the 90s, with marketing acting as a support function to sales, and product just shipping features and being disconnected to business results.
Our business software needs a major organisational upgrade. Customers are moving faster than businesses are. Is your B2B SaaS business ready to catch up ?