Scaling Sales Teams, Customer Success and CAC — Day 1 at #SaaStrAnnual

SaaStr Annual 2017 kicks off today and I’ll be recapping the sessions I’m sitting in over the course of the conference.

I’m starting off my Day 1 recap with a breakdown of tips to scale sales teams offered by Lyft’s Chief Business Officer David Baga.

How to Build a Sales Team 1–100 with Lyft’s David Baga

Experiments are Key

Executing experiments — from start to finish — is vital to evaluating their effectiveness. You need to be testing on everything and constantly adapting.

You always want to be:

• building
• measuring
• learning

Analyzing your experiments is key to then understand what you should do next time to iterate.

This comes down to basic things like core messaging and over time, product/market fit. You always need to be looking at product fit as it’s always changing.

Beware of ‘CEO Magic’

A CEO throwing out discounts or other perks to attract customers are things that don’t scale.

Be Hyper Aware of Your Customers

Understand the needs of your customers and always be sure to know the context surrounding them. Be careful of pulling someone from a sophisticated environment to the wild west.

Culture and Goals are Everything

Frontline sales employees have a very important role in ensuring your customers succeed — a direct correlation to retention and a high net promoter score.

Ultimately, the people you bring on need to be motivated and understand company values and the larger mission they’re striving for everyday.

Customer Success AMA with Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight

Metrics Matter

A lot of hard work goes into understanding your customers, and it all starts with understanding the types of metrics you need to track to monitor customer health and usage.

This is an area of your company in which you want to be proactive and not reactive — turn to analytics to know how to engage your customers.

The best metric to have is whether a customer is ready to refer you to someone. Look closely at adoption and examine the most retentive features that lead to referrals.

Monitor Retention and Churn

As Nick put it, look in the rear view mirror to see what customer has been successful so you can replicate and repeat those processes.

The same goes for customers that churn — take a look the factors involved and the reason for the attrition.

Major Key

It’s important to keep your customers engaged in an authentic way and build up your relationship with them. Make sure you don’t make a customer feel passed around from rep to rep.

Making Sure Your CAC Doesn’t Kill You: Driving Low Cost Customer Acquisition

Map It Out

Getting your buyer personas and understanding the attributes qualified leads possess is key. Always seek out the best customers, not the ones that are cheapest to acquire.

Look at all the buying journeys , drilling down to the micro journeys, and understand how those funnels look at the top.

Look at your past 10 wins and map out how you won them and all relevant data points. Examine what content brought them into your funnel, and what type of content helped close them.

When talking to VCs know the top of the funnel and have a theory on how you will convert those leads in the funnel.

Bottom line: know who your customer is and focus on them -you can’t be everything to everybody. Start small and focus on a segment -and get it right.

Measurement is Key

Keep trying all kinds of tools to keep track of your funnel and analytics, such as:

• Gainsight
• Clearbit
• Marketo
• HubSpot

Nurturing Customers

Don’t be afraid to experiment with email communications to customers — reach out to them to start the conversation.

Be able to show value and convey that there’s a low implementation effort.

Source data and then personalize the correspondence.

If you can, try to be first in market like the ads feature in Quora, which is new.

For more updates and session recaps follow me on Twitter and check out what the rest of the L-SPARK team is doing at #SaaStrAnnual!