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A SaaS sales teamâs work is never easy.Â
But due to a confluence of factors â like a wobbly economy, smaller budgets, and struggling to convince the team to return to the office â sales organizations face increasingly complex challenges as they prepare their 2024 strategies.
To help sales teams better prepare for the upcoming year and set attainable goals, our VP of Marketing Joerg Kohler hosted a webinar called 2024 sales blueprint: How to prepare your GTM team for a new year that featured:
Keep reading to learn some of the tips, tricks, and insights James and Lucas shared during the webinar to find out what some of todayâs top-performing sales teams are doing to get ready for a new year.
As SaaS organizations prepare for 2024, James encourages them to focus on optimizing the SDR experience, which âhas always been an afterthought for organizations.â
âAs SDR teams get bigger and bigger, they really need to focus on the enablement,â he explains. âIâve even seen organizations hiring sales enablement professionals that only focus on SDR teams. If you donât have that luxury, please speak with your enablement team to really get that track going.âÂ
While tons of sales teams adopted remote and hybrid working models in response to the pandemic, more and more organizations are finally going back to the office.
âI think sales and sales development teams were the biggest victims of COVID,â James continues. âWith everybody going remote, you miss out on that team dynamic â the lunches, the after-work happy hours.âÂ
In an age where professionals increasingly prefer remote work, sales teams will have to figure out how to convince teams to return to the office of move to hybrid/flexible models.
As someone coming from the analytics space, Lucas knows a thing or two about market saturation. Now that he finds himself working in AI, he believes organizations building with artificial intelligence will face a similar level of competition.
âI think a very common term youâre going to see a lot these days is AI for blank,â he says. âI think itâs going to be a really competitive market and one where itâs going to take some time for folks to really separate themselves from other organizations.â
Additionally, Lucas thinks that the state of the economy is going to force SaaS sales teams to rethink their approach.
âSelling enterprise SaaS is different now,â he says. âHow can you help organizations and prospects youâre working with evaluate your product on their own terms in their own time â the way they want to â without necessarily falling into sort of the traditional sales motion? Organizations that find a way to perfect that art are going to be really successful.â
The way James sees it, sales success starts with bringing sales and marketing leadership together and getting them aligned. Itâs important to begin planning goals for the upcoming year as soon as possible â even kickstarting the process in August â using historical data to better predict what might be possible in the future.
âIf youâve got a new SDR team, itâs a little bit more difficult because you donât have the historical data,â he says. âBut if you do have the data, you can really understand the ratios between soft success metrics like emails, phone calls, live phone calls, email responses to what I call âcommissionable KPIsâ â meetings or new opportunities generated.â
While James encourages teams to use historical data to set goals, itâs also important to consider the organizationâs future goals and make sure that proper headcount is in place to achieve those objectives.
Lucas also believes in the power of data. But for him, itâs important to consider how many pieces of activity reps need to take to get the outcomes that youâre looking for â whether thatâs the total number of opportunities or pipeline generated â and see how that breaks down on a per-rep basis.
âMaybe you had a lower quantity but you had a smaller team and actually that team was a lot more efficient than when you had a larger team,â Lucas says. âOr maybe you see that, as headcount has changed over time, the amount of meetings generated per rep has actually stayed flat â that reducing hasnât been able to generate more meetings per rep. If you know thatâs going to essentially remain flat, then you know, based on historical numbers, to achieve a certain quantity you might need more people.â
Our uncertain economic climate presents new challenges for SaaS sales teams. To achieve goals, Lucas says itâs critical to ensure the right incentives are in place that drive SDRs toward organizational goals without stifling their earnings potential.
âI think you also just need to make sure that youâre setting your team up for success as much as possible in terms of the tech stack you have in place,â he explains.Â
At the same time, sales leaders need to make sure their teams have a strong understanding of their ICP and the right number of accounts to target.
To beat economic uncertainty, James suggests getting in front of every single person who could touch your product and using account-based intent data to inform your outbound strategy.Â
âIf youâre just blindly firing into the night, youâre going to have a really tough time cold calling,â James says. âBut if youâre using intelligence coming from the data â especially partnering with your account-based marketers â youâre going to be far more successful getting traction in an even more competitive market.âÂ
Itâs never too early to start getting ready for another new year.Â
Since youâre reading these words, we suspect youâre interested in learning everything you can about how you can cover more ground in 2024 and exceed your sales goals.
Check out the full webinar below to learn how you can ensure your next sales kickoff event is a success, how to think about team capacity and team quotas, why sales leaders should be allowed to experiment with different tactics, some GTM strategies both Lucas and James are planning to utilize in 2024, and more.