A decline in business productivity can be chalked up to a number of factors.
However, one of the main culprits is unaligned, siloed-off internal teams.
According to a survey conducted by Planview, knowledge workers on average lose 20 hours per month due to poor communication and collaboration.
That’s equal to 6 work weeks of unproductivity, per year.
If people aren’t on the same page, somewhere along the line, bottlenecks will form, discrepancies will arise, and performance will take a hit.
This is especially true for SaaS businesses, where speed and agility are of the essence to scaling.
For any SaaS business to succeed and boost productivity, internal teams need to be on the same wavelength. Specifically, they need to get aligned on the following core areas:
In this guide, we’ll dive into the technicalities of what that entails, along with actionable advice that you can implement to get there.
Let’s check it all out.
If you want to experience true alignment across your sales, marketing, and CX teams, you should consider implementing Revenue Operations (or “RevOps”) in your company.
RevOps is a business function, responsible for optimizing the internal processes, workflows, data, and tech stacks of your main revenue-generating and go-to-market teams i.e. marketing, sales, and CX.
You can think of RevOps as the central nervous system of your business that’s responsible for aggregating and reporting revenue-based data to the brain of your business. It connects all of your customer-facing teams and ensures that they’re aligned, running efficiently, and “enabled” to accelerate revenue growth.
According to the Boston Consulting Group, with RevOps, B2B SaaS companies can experience a 10% to 20% increase in sales productivity.
Furthermore, it can result in a 10% increase in lead acceptance and a whopping 100% to 200% increase in digital marketing ROI.
The point is – RevOps works, and the sooner you implement it across your organization, the better.
Here’s what it means:
Thanks to the advancement of cloud technology, companies are able to manage and run their entire operations with a centralized SaaS platform.
This especially became a trend because of COVID-19’s devastating impact that forced many companies to shift to remote work.
The benefit of moving your operations framework to a cloud platform is that it’ll help centralize all the processes, data, workflows, and other tasks and information in one place.
A reliable platform that can help align all four teams is HubSpot. Specifically, their Operations Hub software is a highly recommended solution that can help you automate certain business operations and sync the data of your customers.
While RevOps mainly deals with the internal customer-facing departments, the primary focus is actually your customer – an external variable.
For that reason, it’s important to map out your entire customer journey and have a system in place to aggregate all of that data in one central location.
The goal here is to understand how your customers behave and engage with your SaaS business at every stage of their journeys – starting from awareness to the point where they renew their contracts and start advocating for your brand.
That way, you can identify potential weaknesses in your processes, capitalize on your strengths, and create an overall better customer experience.
However, that’s only possible with a streamlined framework for collecting and analyzing customer journey data (done through dashboards and detailed reporting).
An all-in-one dashboard and reporting platform like HubSpot can help aggregate your customer experience data in one, centralized location.
Last but not least, it’s important for RevOps to have a framework in place to receive consistent data on performance from other teams.
That data can be used in three ways:
That, in turn, will equip your teams to further optimize your operations, skyrocket your productivity, and better serve your customers.
Marketing is easily one of the most vital components of any organization.
It’s the reason why you’re able to put your SaaS business in front of the world and attract a clearly-defined audience.
But in order for it to succeed, this department needs to be closely synced with every other team.
Here are some internal initiatives you can take to do that:
Your marketing strategy details the business goals, roadmap, and the tactics you’ll take to discover gaps in the market, launch your software products, and promote them to an audience.
Considering the magnitude of this plan, it makes sense to share it with the rest of the teams and stakeholders in your company.
Here are some reasons why that can help:
In turn, all of the above can help avoid inconsistencies.
For instance, if marketing is working with engineering on a new feature, sales and CX teams should be kept in the loop, since they’re the ones that communicate with customers directly and can use that information to their advantage.
To do that, you should first create an effective process for internally communicating your strategy.
Here are some ideas:
Internal marketing refers to promoting your products/services, vision, and the values that drive you as a company to your employees.
In internal marketing, your employees are seen as internal customers.
By focusing on internal marketing, you can:
Here’s a general, step-by-step process to help you create and execute an internal marketing strategy:
Your marketing team may have to collaborate with the company’s founders, upper management or HR to create an internal marketing game plan.
Collecting and analyzing fresh market data is an important responsibility of your marketing department.
It’s what helps decide the trajectory of your SaaS product, i.e. what features to focus on, which feedback to implement, and the markets to prioritize.
Naturally, you’re going to want to share that data and findings with other teams.
Here’s why:
Apart from sharing that research data with everyone else, there should also be a process to collect that information from sales and CS. That, in turn, can help marketing improve their strategy.
While all teams should be on the same page, it’s especially important to intertwine marketing and sales.
These two departments should sync up because they’re both focused on generating revenue – the very essence that keeps your business up and running.
According to one survey, companies with well-aligned marketing and sales teams, on average, experience a 209% higher ROI for marketing efforts.
Apart from sharing research data and the marketing strategy, one way to do that is to share marketing performance reports with sales (and also receive performance data from sales – like a closed-loop feedback system), and work together to figure out how they can improve their processes collectively.
Sales enablement refers to equipping your sales team with the content, tools, and other vital information they and customers need to help reps sell right and sell more.
Since marketing is mainly responsible for conducting research and developing a deep understanding of the customers, they should help develop the content for sales enablement.
Sales development representatives (SDRs) can use that content as ammo to create a case for themselves, answer queries of sales qualified leads (SQLs) regarding your product, and ultimately close more business.
Examples of sales enablement content include:
Chances are that your marketing team has already made most of those content assets as part of your content marketing efforts. What they should do next is organize that information on a common platform and ensure your SDRs can easily access it.
With a modern CRM like HubSpot, you can create a centralized knowledge base to share that content with everyone.
Marketing brings potential customers to your doorsteps.
Engaging them is the responsibility of your sales department.
This specific area is majorly responsible for keeping your business afloat. It’s the lifeline of your business.
This is especially true for SaaS companies, where customers largely need assistance to proceed with large transactions.
Since it’s such an important area, it’s crucial to align it with other internal teams.
Here are some tips to help you do that:
Your sales strategy is a robust documented plan that specifies the goals, KPIs, roadmap, methodologies, and tactics for your sales team.
Just like the marketing strategy, your sales strategy should also be shared and made accessible to marketing, customer experience, and RevOps teams.
Here’s why this is important:
And to keep everyone in the loop regarding any updates, you can do company-wide meetings.
In fact, from time to time, all of your internal teams should ideally get together to talk about their goals, developments, challenges they’re facing, and build camaraderie across the business. Make it a central part of your process to keep everyone on the same page.
One of the main reasons why you’d want to align your teams is to avoid discrepancies.
You don’t want your marketing team to say one thing, your sales team to say another, and your CX team to drop completely different lingo.
For that reason – and while this may sound like a trivial thing – it’s extremely crucial that your sales team should sit down with RevOps, marketing, and CX to decide on the terminology for internal and external communication.
That terminology can be categorized into:
“Lead scoring” refers to a system of assigning numerical values to your leads and ranking them in terms of sales-readiness. The higher the lead score, the more likely it is that the lead will convert into a paying customer.
It allows sales and marketing to allocate their resources and efforts on leads that matter the most.
You can “score” your leads based on different, meaningful attributes and engagement that relate to the likelihood of them converting.
Sales should work closely with marketing to determine scoring criteria and reach a consensus on how much weight they want to give to each.
That would help validate the handoffs between the teams. In fact, companies with proper lead scoring and qualifying processes can enjoy a 70% ROI on lead generation.
Lead scoring can be done by looking at historical data to see the common variables in past leads that converted to customers.
Alternatively, if you’re just starting out and don’t have much historical data to work with, you can make educated guesses by going through your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas.
You can categorize these attributes on the basis of:
You may also score leads on the basis of certain demographic variables if you’re a B2C company.
Software like HubSpot can help automate your lead scoring process by collecting, organizing, and processing lead data.
Here’s a lead scoring template that your sales and marketing teams can use and adjust according to their requirements:
S.No. |
Leads |
Company Size Score |
Industry Score |
Web Engagement Score |
Social Engagement Score |
Total Score |
|
1 |
Lead #1 |
25 |
20 |
25 |
25 |
95 |
You can decide on how you want to score your attributes. Usually, teams use a scale of 0 to 100. You can also add as many columns/attributes as you want.
Since you’re a SaaS company, it’s only fitting that your sales team should run on an agile framework.
To recap, agile is a methodology of breaking down a large project into small tasks or phases (called “sprints”). It entails close collaboration, consistent testing and validation, and a focus on achieving tangible progress.
With agile, you can make your sales team significantly more flexible and adaptable to the changes brought along by marketing and RevOps teams.
Here are some tips on how your sales team can become more agile:
A discussion with the product manager(s) in your company can help discover new ways to help run your sales team in an agile framework.
An effective customer success (CS) team is vital to increasing customer retention, generating customer referrals, and cultivating brand loyalty.
But to do that, this area needs to be properly integrated with every other team.
Challenge your CS teams to think more holistically and broaden their responsibility to oversee the entire customer experience (CX).
To give you some perspective, 47% of customer success executives think that data silos are the biggest obstacles that prevent them from doing their job well. And as we discussed earlier, silos are the result of disconnected technology stacks and data, not necessarily poor communication.
To get your CS, or rather your CX team on the same page with the rest of your company, do this:
In order to provide the best post-sales experience/support, every person on your customer experience team needs to be aware of your software products like the back of their hand.
To that end, you need an effective training program – made in collaboration with your engineering/RevOps teams or through a SaaS training solution – that onboards new people and teaches them the technicalities of your SaaS product and company operations.
The goal here isn’t to build a foundational training program from the ground up.
Instead, it’s to create a separate module that helps them develop a deep understanding of:
That, in turn, will equip your CX executives with the information and the capability to really help your customers and create positive experiences.
No one knows your customers better than your CX team.
They’re the ones who regularly interact with them and collect vital data.
For that reason, sales, marketing, engineering, and RevOps teams need to be able to access metrics and feedback your CX team has from your customers.
Here’s how each team can benefit from it:
It’s important to create feedback loops between CX and all of those teams to ensure teams consistently learn about your customers to make their processes better.
It also prevents marketing and sales from making promises that they can’t follow through on, which makes the job of your CX team significantly easier.
In today’s agile environment, team alignment isn’t a nice-to-have, but a necessity.
It can decide how productive you are as a business, which, in turn, can determine how much revenue you earn.
As a final piece of advice, to effectively align operations, marketing, sales, and CX teams, remember to focus on RevOps.
With RevOps, you can get things done fast, scale your efforts, and ultimately, grow your SaaS business.
At Revvy, we consult businesses on how to implement RevOps across their tech stacks Let us know if you have any questions!