10 Tips on Building a Successful SaaS Sales Team Structure

When you’re building your SaaS sales team, it’s important to think about the foundation of a strong structure. If you don’t have a solid foundation, no matter how talented your salespeople are, they won’t be able to reach their full potential and achieve success. So how can you build a team structure that supports and promotes growth?

Here are 10 tips on building a successful SaaS sales team structure:

1. Find a Sales Manager or Team Lead Who Can Inspire

The sales team is the driving force behind your company’s growth, so it’s important to find a sales manager or team lead who can inspire and motivate others to perform at a high level. Here’s what you should look for in this role:

• This person should be a good communicator, teacher, listener and more.
• They should be able to see the big picture, while also being able to break it down into digestible pieces.
• They  should be able to hold their own with both technical and non-technical people, as well as see the big picture and break it down into digestible pieces.

2. Create a Sales Enablement Role

Sales enablement is a team within your organization that’s responsible for helping your sales team succeed. It’s an important part of any SaaS business because it covers a lot of areas that are vital for growing your company and generating revenue.

Sales enablement is a key part of every SaaS business. It’s the function that brings together all the elements of your organization to help drive revenue and growth.

Sales enablement means different things to different people, but it can be defined as: The process by which an organization creates and delivers content, tools, processes and technologies specifically designed to help its sales team succeed.

3. Be Sure to Balance Out Your Sales Reps

When building your SaaS sales team, it’s important to keep a balance between the reps. Here are some things to consider:

• Technical and business. A good SaaS sales rep should have both technical and business knowledge. If you only hire people who know how to code, or if you only hire people who can understand all aspects of the product, you’ll be missing out on half of the picture.
• Different levels of experience. It’s also important that your reps have different levels of experience in their respective roles—whether it’s customer success or marketing—so that there is more than one person bringing new ideas into meetings with prospects and customers.
• Reps with different backgrounds. When it comes to hiring SaaS sales reps, it’s important to have a diverse team. This can help you avoid echo chambers and get different perspectives on how to solve your customers’ problems.For example, if you hire a sales rep who’s been in the industry for a long time and has worked at several companies with different products and target customers, they may have more experience than a new hire who just graduated from college. But that doesn’t mean that new hires can’t be valuable—they can bring an outsider’s perspective to your team.
• The same goes for customer success reps. It’s important that your team has different levels of experience, so that you can find someone who knows how to work with customers who have similar needs to yours. For example, if you only hire people who know how to code, or if you only hire people who can understand all aspects of the product, you’ll be missing out on half of the picture.

The key is to hire people who can bring value to your company. If you don’t have any sales reps with some experience under their belt, then it might be worth hiring someone who’s new but has a strong background in customer service.

Similarly, if you don’t have anyone on your team who understands how customers use your product, then it’s worth considering someone who might not have as much experience as other applicants but can still offer valuable insight into what they need from your product or service.

4. Establish Incentives and Rewards

Rewards are an important part of employee motivation. They keep your team focused on the big picture, while also keeping them feeling like they’re making progress toward a common goal.

It’s important that you incentivize employees in the right ways to keep them motivated and productive. So, it’s vital that you have a clear idea of what exactly you want your employees to be doing with their time, as well as how much longer it will take for them to complete those tasks.

By establishing clear goals and timelines for each project or milestone in your SaaS sales cycle process, you can then match these targets with rewards at certain checkpoints along the way.

For example: If one of your clients has been working with another SaaS company for six months but isn’t quite ready yet due to factors outside of their control (such as changes in leadership), then perhaps there’s something else going on within their organization that needs fixing first before moving forward with signing up for another service provider like yours! 

In this case, instead of offering incentives right away when speaking with potential new clients during cold calls or emails sent out via MailChimp campaigns while waiting patiently until they’re ready—as many other companies would do—you might instead decide not to offer any sort of incentive yet.

This is because there aren’t enough tangible results yet from which one could base decisions off upon seeing some evidence that shows progress being made towards reaching specific milestones outlined beforehand.

However once those changes occur within an organization after talking about how these constraints can be overcome, then you can offer your services again once they’re ready.

5. Use Hiring as An Opportunity to Innovate

Hiring is your opportunity to build a team that has the right attitude, culture and values, rather than just people who have the right skills.

For example, it’s better for you to hire someone who can figure out how to do something if they don’t know than someone who knows but isn’t willing to learn.

When hiring for a sales team structure, make sure you’re hiring for their personality type rather than just what they can or cannot do in order to get things done.

6. Give Your Sales Reps the Right Tools

Your sales reps need tools in order to do their job. In particular, you should provide them with tools that help them achieve the following goals:

• Identify new leads and generate interest in your product/service.
• Qualify prospects based on lead scoring criteria that you’ve determined is important.
• Nurture prospects until they’re ready for a demo or another step in the buying process (such as signing up for a free trial).

You can find these types of tools by looking at your competitors’ websites or by searching for “SaaS lead generation” on Google and looking at the results from vendors like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot and others who specialize in this type of software.

Once you’ve short-listed a few options from each category (lead generation/qualification/nurturing), it’s time to test out each tool with your team so that everyone understands how it works before committing any resources (both financial and temporal) towards implementing it across multiple departments within your organization.

The last thing you want to do is force your sales and marketing teams to use a tool that doesn’t fit their needs or provide them with any value. So make sure to test out each tool before deciding whether or not it’s right for your company.

7. Develop Training Programs That Will Help Your Reps Succeed

You must develop training programs that will help your reps succeed. This is important for several reasons:

• The sales rep is the face of your company, and you do not want them to fumble when it comes to talking about your product or service. This can be a huge turnoff for customers who are looking for professional services and products. You want someone who is knowledgeable about what they’re selling, but also able to engage with people on a personal level by sharing stories about how their lives have been changed by using whatever it is you’re selling (e.g., a CRM system).
• If your sales staff isn’t trained properly, then there’s no telling what kind of mistakes they might make while trying to sell something over the phone or via email—and those mistakes could cost you more than just some lost business; they could damage customer relationships as well!

There are a number of ways to make sure your salespeople are properly trained. You can hold one-on-one meetings with them, or even have them attend seminars where they can learn from industry experts who have been through the same experiences that they’re currently going through.

Many businesses hire outside consultants to provide training for their sales reps; this is generally more expensive than doing it in-house, but it could be worth it if you have a large enough budget.

8. Provide Ongoing Feedback and Regularly Evaluate Performance

As the sales leader, you should be providing ongoing feedback to your reps. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for this, but it is important to provide feedback that is constructive and helpful. 

Feedback should not just be a quarterly thing—it can be given daily or weekly as necessary. A good rule of thumb is to evaluate your reps’ performance regularly so they know where they stand with respect to their quotas and goals before they get too far off track.

The best way to give feedback is face-to-face or over the phone rather than via email or other digital platforms if possible; this allows you both better communication as well as time for questions/answers without interruptions from other coworkers walking by in the hallway outside their office door!

It’s also important that your employees understand what kind of behaviors are appropriate when interacting with customers (and others outside of work).

For example, if a rep is not following up with leads within 24 hours of receiving them from sales support or marketing, this may be due to poor communication with their manager or other coworkers.

If there’s a problem with the sales process that needs to be addressed immediately and it involves more than one person being involved, then you should address it in person or over the phone so everyone knows what’s going on and how they can help fix it.

9. Don’t Be Afraid to Let People Go When the Time is Right

Letting go of underperforming sales reps is one of the hardest things a manager can do, but it’s also one of the most important.

The impact on your team and your company is significant when you let someone go. This is why you should give serious consideration to making sure you are retaining the right people for your SaaS Sales Team.

How do you know if someone needs to be let go? As with everything else we’ve covered in this article, there is no single way to determine whether or not an employee will be successful at what they do in your organization or not. There are some warning signs however that may indicate it may be time for a change:

• They’re not producing enough leads or opportunities
• Their pipeline isn’t growing
• Their conversion rates aren’t improving over time
• They’re not meeting their sales quota. You’ve tried coaching them, and they’re still not able to deliver the results you need from them. 
• They don’t mesh well with your culture.
• They’re not improving over time, but your sales team is. 

It’s important to note that the above list isn’t exhaustive—there are many other factors in play here. You can also use these points as a checklist for yourself when you’re considering hiring someone new.

10. Use Data to Understand Performance and Drive Success

One of the best ways to improve your SaaS sales team structure is by using data. The more you know about what’s working and what isn’t, the easier it will be to tweak your team structure and help you achieve even better results.

To start, you can use data to understand performance and drive success. Use information like conversion rates, average deal size, number of deals closed per rep per month or quarter. This will help identify areas of improvement within your existing structure and help set benchmarks for future success metrics as well as identify gaps in your current sales team structure that need addressing immediately.

Next, use data to determine your ideal sales team structure and hire accordingly. Start by analyzing the performance of each position in your current team structure and comparing it to industry benchmarks. This will help you understand where you’re excelling and where there are opportunities for improvement. 

Once you have a clear picture of how your sales reps are performing, you can better identify gaps in talent across all levels of the organization including managers and executives.

Once you have a clear picture of where your sales team is excelling and where there are opportunities for improvement, you can use this information to determine the ideal structure for your company. 

Some factors to consider include: 

• How many different types of sales roles do you need? 
• How many reps should be in each role? 
• What kind of experience do they need (e.g., industry expertise, technical skills)? 
• Do certain positions require more management oversight while others require less?

Once you’ve answered these questions and determined what type of team structure will be most effective for your business, it’s time to hire new talent!

Final Thoughts

In summary, the most important thing to remember is that every SaaS company needs a sales team. To build one, you need to put in place the right organizational structure and then hire the best people for each role. You also need to make sure that all your salespeople have access to training programs and ongoing feedback so they can improve their performance over time. It’s not easy work for anyone involved but it will pay off if you put in the time and effort needed!

If you need more tips on growing your SaaS business, don’t forget to check out our blog regularly.