Designing a Sales-Driven Vertical SaaS GTM strategy for North America
Designing a Sales-Driven Vertical SaaS GTM strategy for North America
This is an articulation on my learnings on building a GTM strategy for a vertical SaaS Company, based out of India, and selling to North American market.
Organization design - Revenue & Business
Headed by a VP of Revenue, or a Co-founder for business growth.
Sales & Business Development
Head of Sales role is to coach the Sales reps.
Pod-structure - An account executive, paired with a junior account executive and 2/3 Business development representatives. This structure enables the account executive to focus on closing deals, while the junior account executive and business development representatives focus on research, prospecting and lead generation.
Inside Sales Managers - 10-15 per SDR, for coaching, performance management, and ramping the SDRs.
Key Metrics:
- Incremental ARR per month
- Sales pipeline
- Sales conversion rate
Marketing
Product Marketing - Create decks for supporting Sales team
Marketing head - Own the demand generation pipeline - identify across multiple channels.
SEO is going to be your biggest friend in the early days. Content authority
Key Metrics:
- Leads per month
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
- Traffic (SEO)
- Acquisition-channel specific success metrics
Customer Success
Head of Customer Success - manage a team of 2-3 Senior Customer Success Managers (CSMs), 2-3 regular CSMs, and a couple of interns
Onboarding
For a Sales-driven company, the onboarding process is critical.
Sales-Ops
CRM, and CRM Adoption,
Work timings:
Your business teams should be working 6pm-3am IST. This means the team is working from 7:30AM Eastern time, to 4:30PM Eastern Time (1:30 PM Pacific Time)
For employees working in these times, there are naturally a lot of sacrifices they have to make.
This applies to Customer Success just as much as it applies to Sales.
Sales-driven companies thrive because they are able to build a connection with their customers.
Post-purchase, your Customer Success team needs to build trust & confidence with the customer.
That is because incremental revenue through upsells and renewals can be a big source of growth of revenue.