Enterprise SaaS growth: Manage your relationships 1by1 not your pipeline

Last of the winter snow on Ben Wyvis

Business tools provide handy shortcuts and improve efficiency. Used for their intended purpose good business tools can lead to massive productivity improvements. Apply them the way they were designed and you will get results.
 
Enterprise SaaS companies are both builders and users of such tools. And one of the clear benefits of the SaaS model is making better, more innovative tools available to every business.
 
But SaaS does not overcome the biggest danger with any tool. Start using business tools for the wrong purpose and they can become an instrument of torture not a source of value.
 
CRM and its reporting arm sales pipelines are one of the most misused tools around today. 

Your SaaS pipeline is for asking questions not making decisions

​They provide an excellent snapshot of the future health of your business. Your SaaS can get a clear indicator of future revenue and with a bit of effort some good data on which sales processes or sales teams are driving growth.
 
However, many people take this one step too far. CRM and pipeline data becomes a tool to manage. A mechanism to make decisions. And therein lies the danger.
 
Good pipeline data is a great way to ask the right questions. Don’t let the data get polluted by a bias towards preset goals and targets. Good decisions flow from answering good questions not just from abstract, summarised data. 

Enterprise SaaS sales - Dynamics not statics

This is most obvious for enterprise SaaS sales.
 
Each sale is the culmination of a long cycle with many twists and turns. Its not out of whack to spend six months building an enterprise relationship and another nine months to achieve the first sale. 
 
And in enterprise SaaS you are also looking for upsell. Each sales opportunity is only part of a wider relationship picture.Ongoing revenue, new ideas, expansion sales, service challenges and the rest.
 
Your pipeline is just a snapshot at a point in time. Every stage is like an individual window that captures only those opportunities that are in a specific position at a given moment.
 
It doesn’t matter whether you use the categories I outlined a few weeks ago in Simple SaaS 
Or adopt a more conventional structure. Your pipeline is a valuable yet static view.
 
An enterprise relationship is like a dynamic living organism.
Think of it like comparing your turnover to your growth rate. Turnover tells you how well you have done but its a static figure. In the past. Growth is dynamic. A much better indicator of where you are going. 

Manage enterprise SaaS customer one by one

Relationships are dynamic and unique. Each relationship needs to be treated as a special case and managed as such. More accurately, for enterprise SaaS we are talking about the group of relationships that forms you customer contacts for each enterprise organisation.
 
Customer A and Customer Y may be in the same “pot” from a pipeline reporting point of view. But they will have arrived there by very different routes. The account team will be planning their own specific next steps. And value of the relationship will depend on how those plans are executed.
 
“Strategic” sales choices like: “lets push all of these to the next stage this quarter” or let’s make sure every customer is offered this special new feature” are counter productive. They distract from a focus on customer need and they risk upsetting the delicate balance of the relationship. 

The Chairman's View

​Sitting on Boards, pipeline is one of the first things I look at each month. It gives me a great pulse check on the business. And it help find the right questions to ask the management team.
 
But I also like to listen to the CEO or the Sales Director talk about the market. This gives me a much better feel for the dynamics than the report.
 
When I ask my questions, I am not looking for simple answers. I want to hear specifics. Plans to convert important relationships. Actions to address customer problems or concerns. Change to strategy in response to the customer’s business dynamic.
 
All about a unique approach for each enterprise SaaS customer. Designed to maximise the company’s chance of developing a strong relationship that generates value for both sides.