Align your teams around your PMF
In our industry things change very quickly, but we still need to do our homework, even if what we have done today has to be updated within the next 6 months.
Very very first step any Saas company should do is to fill-in the following table and share it with the Product, Marketing, Sales and Success teams, if you have such teams.
It will give everyone a pretty good overview of how your solutions is supposed to help your customers.
The following step will be to describe your ideal customer profile in the most detailed way possible. This profil can include characteristic related to their size, revenues, quantity of employees, technologies used, country origin, etc.
Once you know to whom you will sell your solution, the next question will be to determine the minimum deal size your sales team should be taking care of.
An easy way would be to consider your sales rep salary, multiply it by 4 to get his goal, and divide it by 12 to get his monthly goal. So let’s say with an OTE $150k salary, you rep should close $50K ARR every month, or a bit more than $4K MRR.
This rep will have different options to reach this goal: either close 10 deals at $400 MRR each or 5 deals at $800 MRR each. How many deals can you reps handle a month?
You can easily understand that any deal below these thresholds will be a waste of time for them and that self-service options will be more relevant. This is where scoring your leads to route them appropriately starts to make sense.
Score your signups and customers
Scoring signups is not a very new practice, it has been around for years.
Now that you know which type of companies will be the best fit for you, it is time to translate it into scores so you can provide relevant leads to your sales team and trigger appropriate engagement to your signups.
When you get started, you can actually split your signups into 2 groups: good fit for the sales team, and good fit for self-service plans. Once you will have learnt enough from your customers you will be able to work on a more granular vision of your scores, but we recommend you to not overthink these scores at the beginning.
To get powerful scores to surface your Product-Qualified Leads, you need to score your leads according to your ICP and according to their in-app behavior to understand which milestones they reached.
You can easily start designing these scores by defining signals and apply them weights, as follow:
Customer fit:
Product Adoption:
With such scores you will be able to very quickly understand what kind of signups are bringing your marketing campaigns and how efficient is your trial conversion process.
Now is time to work on actions that will help you improve your trial conversion rate!
Trigger appropriate actions
Depending on your strategy, you may want to focus on self-service plan conversion, bring more leads and specially Product-Qualified Leads to your sales team, etc.
Think about your scores with the following schema and how your signups will land into each group:
Main topics to address:
• Review your marketing campaigns: if your focus is to bring more leads to your sales team and that majority of your signups match the self-service customer profile, you may want to improve your targeting.
• Make sure to maximize your product adoption: there is nothing worst than someone signing-up and never coming back. To make sure to have as “low” as possible signups in the low adoption segment, keep working on your activation and product-adoption processes.
• Improve your sales engagement and outreach to maximize the reply-rate by providing more value and context to your signups.
Next article is about: Build a world class conversion
