SaaStr Workshop Wednesday: Align and execute enterprise B2B team selling motions for repeatable growth with Bo Borland CEO at Playbuilt
1. Align and execute enterprise B2B team
selling motions for repeatable growth
Bo Borland, Founder & CEO @
2. Repeatable success at every stage of growth
Finding Product
Market Fit
Move from SMB
to Enterprise
Strategic
Expansion
Enterprise
Repeatability
Finding Product
Market Fit
1
Move from SMB
to Enterprise
2
Enterprise
Repeatability
3
Strategic
Expansion
4
3. Teaming is the new selling
Integrated GTM to deliver repeatable
customer value that generates growth.
4. Today enterprise sales is multi-threaded
Acquisition Retention
Expansion
Enterprise
Sell to the
enterprise
Methods
New sales
methodologies
ABX
Account
based sales
Industries
New vertical
strategies
Up-sell
and Cross-
Sell
Channel
Partner-led
sales
Products
New products
or lines
PLG/S
Product-led
growth & sales
Pricing
Subscription to
consumption
5. Demand Generation
Pipe Conversion
� Larger buyer committees
� Higher expectations
� Multi-threading/value-mining
� Tailored positioning
� Complex, lengthy pilots
� Multiple integrations
� Sizing & performance
� Advanced security
� Consensus building
� Crafted buying vision
Full-funnel revenue plays to acquire new customers
Pipe Generation
74% of executive buyers
pick the company that
helps them create the
buying vision.
26% say they choose a
winner from a fair bake-
off.
Forrester Research
7. Enterprise buying committee journey
Define
Requirements
Research &
Discover
Vendors
Attend Demo
Presentations
Attend L2
Demos &
Workshops
Trial Pilots,
PoCs, and
Sizing
Proposals &
Selection
Negotiate
Contracts
Provision
Licenses
Discovery Decision
Evaluation
� Aha Moments
Sales Cycle (6 to 9 months)
Time
and
Complexity
8. Map 9-box to roles and buyer journey
Discovery Decision
Evaluation
Team Roles
Solutioning
Role
Prospecting
Role
Commercials
Role
Pp
Pain
Points
Tl
Thought
Leadership
Cs
Customer
Stories
WHY CHANGE
Vp
Tailored
Value Props
Rd
Relevant
Data
So
Special
Offers
7
8
9
WHY NOW
WHY YOU
Kd
Key
Differentiators
Td
Tailored
Demos
Pp
Pilot
Program
4
5
6
1
2
3
What roles, actions,
narratives, assets &
enablement are needed?
Demand Gen
Role
9. Create and prescribe revenue play building blocks
Solutioning Role
Commercials Role
Prospecting Role
Discovery Decision
Evaluation
Outcomes/Metrics
Role
10. Continuous revenue play iteration and improvement
Growth
Stage ICP
Playbook
Creator
# of Plays
# of
Iterations
Seller
Type
Finding
PMF Validating ICP Founder-led Few plays Many iterations Entrepreneurial
1
Repeatability
at Scale Targeting ICP Function-led Multiple plays Fewer iterations Solution
2
Strategic
Expansion Expanding ICP Distributed Many plays Multiple iterations Specialists
3
12. Key Takeaways
Goal: Give you an approach
to create success at any
company growth stage.
Today’s Focus: Pipeline
conversion revenue play for
net new B2B customer
acquisition motion
● Start with teaming mindset around
a common goal
● Use 9-box to create aha-moments
and buying vision
● Map 9-box to buyer journey and
team roles
● Translate 9-box to inventory of
revenue play building blocks
● Create and prescribe building
blocks to assemble plays
● Manage and iterate revenue plays
like agile software
Approach
Notas do Editor
Hi everyone, my name is Bo Borland, and I’m the CEO of Playbuilt, a platform to help B2B companies launch, run and measure revenue plays for growth. I’m the former global leader of technical sales, sales enablement and operations at Pentaho, MuleSoft, and Salesforce.
My goal in this session is to give you an approach for repeatable success at every stage of growth.
Your company is in one these 4 stages 1) finding product market fit 2) moving from SMB to the enterprise or vice versa 3) Achieving enterprise repeatability, or 4) Strategic expansion. Over the last decade leading global technical sales teams, I’ve been fortunate to experience all 4 of these stages at 3 different companies.
(CLICK) For anyone on the call that has experienced Stage 1 finding product market fit, what does the team typically look like - what functions are involved? (CLICK). Yes, you might have a marketing lead, a sales leader, typically the founder doing founder-led sales, and of course product engineering.
(CLICK) How about stage 2 when a company moves from SMB to selling enterprise deals? What functions or roles typically get added to the mix? (CLICK) Here you see some combination of presales (aka known as solution or sales engineering), Customer Success and services, and a more robust or expanded RevOps function.
(CLICK) How about stage 3 when a company has has codified success in the enterprise and is investing in repeatable growth (CLICK) Here a revenue enablement team is a absolutely critical component for codifying success using teaching methods to onboard and scale teams across revenue functions.
(CLICK) Lastly, stage 4, strategic expansion is when companies expand globally, launch new products and acquire other companies. At this stage your typically see every functional leader replicated across others theaters such as AMER, EMEA and JAPAC.
Irregardless of the stage your in, success is about aligning GTM teams around a common goal of delivering repeatable customer value in a way that generates growth.
I like to say, “teaming is the new selling” as companies continue moving towards integrated GTM focused on revenue - and with the shared goal of delivering repeatable customer value that generates growth.
Why is teaming the new selling? Because enterprise sales is complex, multi-threaded beast. The days of the lone sales rep doing it all - creating demand, creating pipe and converting that pipe are long gone. Today, as you know, SaaS companies employ specialist roles working together to run revenue plays across customer acquisition, expansion and retention motions.
(CLICK) Some examples of revenue plays are enterprise sales, launching new sales methodologies, account based marketing and sales, (CLICK) upsell and cross-sell, industry vertical strategies, partner-led sales (CLICK) shifts to consumption based pricing, launching new product lines, or adding new motions like product-led growth.
When I present this in person, I like poll the audience to see who is executing these plays? I won’t be able to see all the hands, but lets give it a try using the chat window, give a thumbs up in the chat if you are running at least one of these revenue plays?
Give another thumbs up if you are running 3 of these plays?
Another thumbs up if you are running 5?
More than 5?
As you can see just among our group, B2B SaaS sales is multi-threaded, and as your company grows it becomes MORE multi-threaded. Lets drill down into the acquisition motion.
Here is a simplified 3 stage view of acquiring new customers:
Demand generation is about educating your target market on a problem to build trust and interest in your brand and solution
Pipeline generation focuses on attracting your target market with active buying intent into your pipeline
Pipeline conversion is all of the solutioning and commercials involved to convert your pipeline into wins.
Here is one problem. When it comes to revenue plays, GTM teams over-rotate on demand and pipe gen, and not enough GTM innovation is focused on pipeline conversion strategies. They simply fail to consider full-cycle revenue plays.
(CLICK) This is especially true for GTM with complex solutions where the actions required to win enterprise deals include these actions. Question for the audience - are you seeing these types of actions in your deal cycles? What I see account teams that lack intentionality, as a result, they are led by the customer, and reactively invest 1000s hours into these actions within a single account without ever distilling all of that work into a coherent and compelling buying vision.
(CLICK) According to Forrester Research, 74% of executive buyers pick the company that helps them create the buying vision. In other words, they choose a company that helps them see the need to do something different. And only 26% say they choose a winner from a fair bake-off.
The buying vision a framework of tailored value messages that emerge over the course of the sales cycle. They are designed to go viral inside the customer’s organization and drive uniqueness and urgency into the conversation.
I believe this form of buyer enablement is table stakes in the competitive world of SaaS when the vast majority of deals are lost to “No Decision”. Research from the book, The Jolt Effect, found a surprising statistic from a large dataset. They found that 56% of those deals are not lost to status quo, but instead they are lost due to customer indecision. Buyer are not enabled and confident enough to pull the trigger. The decision risk is too high. So what can you do to change this?
Start with this “9-Box Periodic Table”, I created to take into account the full-cycle of elements needed to craft a tailored buying vision. It starts with recognizing you have three levers for persuasion - your position, your perspective and your proof. And you’ll need to persuade a buying committee on Why Change, Why you, and why buy now.
The top left box is the most basic positioning around why Change. (CLICK) You position starts from a place of empathy and deep understanding of your buyers’ pains or needs. Next, your perspective on why change (CLICK) are your insights and expertise in the form of thought leadership about how you can help them accomplish something, and your proof can be delivered thru (CLICK) customer stories.
So if a buyer is engaging, sharing information, and leaning in, we move to the 2nd column (CLICK) your position is to directly address Key Differentiators, and why your solution is the best.
For #5, at this point, you’ve learned enough about your prospect to deliver an informed perspective (CLICK) with tailored demos of how you are uniquely able to deliver their use cases.
If that goes well, you move to #6. Does anyone on the call want to comment on what can be used as your proof for box #6? (CLICK) Yes, it’s the pilot program (POC, trial).
Now we get to the last column, (CLICK) and your position is informed enough to craft highly tailored value propositions which are unique to each prospect and ideally backed by metrics to support your benefit claims.
(CLICK) You perspective includes relevant data. What do I mean by relevant data? For example, you might have data can come from an ROI exercise OR the successful results of their pilot can be read out to decision-makers.
And to close our the 9-box, any form of special offer can be used to drive urgency on why buy now.
In summary, these 9 elements come together to form a buying vision which will help you box out the competition and close more deals that previously would have been lost to customer indecision.
These elements are placed within the context of the full-funnel buyer’s journey.
The journey covers the 3 phases of discovery, evaluation and selection. You see buyer actions plotted against sales cycle duration on X axis, and time investment and complexity on the Y axis. Buyers refine requirements, research and discover vendors, attend demo presentations, attend level 2 demos and workshops, execute pilots, evaluate performance, obtain proposals, negotiate contracts and provisions licenses.
(CLICK) As we overlay the 9-box on the buyers journey, it is important to recognize that the most intense and focused customer engagement occurs during the evaluation stage. This is actually where the real magic happens. It's through these critical selling actions that multiple AHA moments are created. Think of Aha moments as inflection points that determine whether the deal is won or lost. Aha moments are when buyer emotions are triggered and eyes dilate because they start to envision a better future with your solution.
Aha moments serve as turning points when the prospect morphs from a skeptical buyer to a vendor co-conspirator helping to win over the buying committee for you.
Yet, it is all too common for GTM teams to launch new products into market without considering the full cycle revenue play for engineering these critical aha moments.
Let's take at how you can start to construct full-cycle revenue plays.
Start by mapping the 9box to the buyer’s journey and any relevant team roles. You’ll need to define the business objectives for this revenue play. You’ll need to collaborate with SMEs from the field that can help define the gold standard you are all striving to achieve with this play. How can we not only create a great customer experience, but also a great employee experience.
The key questions to ask the team are: What roles, action, narratives, assets, and enablement are needed to put this together. These are the essential building blocks for revenue plays.
Now the job is to create your inventory of revenue play building blocks. Aligning on the outcomes your team is striving to achieve at each stage? For example, in the discovery phase, one of the shared outcomes could be to identify and qualify the buyer’s use case and tech stack.
Also defining both input and output metrics needed to measure health and performance at each stage?
(CLICK) Within each swimlane it comes down to defining a set of actions to prescribe as best practices? These are well-defined, discrete actions that serve as a common language to ensure everyone is speaking from the same play page. Examples of actions include, Position Solution Value, Demo Solution, Perform Pilot, etc.
And then assets are attached to those actions that enable teams on how to perform prescribed actions? For example, a first call deck, demo script, workshop in a box, etc.
At this point, we covered the main elements of this approach. This is a rinse and repeat approach for aligning GTM functions, instilling intentionality, and gaining agreement on the gold standard your teams are striving to achieve for winning more deals while also creating a great customer and employee experience.
You might be wondering how your company fits into the equation of building and executing revenue plays. The great thing is - this can be applied to SaaS companies at any stage of growth.
As you can see once you have the approach down, it doesn’t stop there. Just like any form of positioning, your revenue plays require constant improvement and iteration. Think of it like agile software development, the effectiveness of your revenue plays are proportional to the number of meaningful iterations. Meaning new product features, customer objections and corner use cases will emerge each QTR from the field, and should be incorporated back into the next iteration of your revenue plays.
Let me do a quick recap of the key takeaways on what we covered, then I’ll open it up for questions.
Goal: Give you an approach to create success at any company growth stage.
Today’s Focus: Pipeline conversion revenue play for net new B2B customer acquisition motion
Start with teaming mindset around a common goal
Use 9-box to create aha-moments and buying vision
Map 9-box to buyer journey and team roles
Translate 9-box to inventory of revenue play building blocks
Use building blocks to assemble your revenue plays
Build and manage revenue plays like agile software
Sales Velocity = # of opps * avg deal value * win rate / length of sales cycle
Your CLV/CAC ratio would then be 3:1. This would mean that for every dollar you spend on customer acquisition, you're generating $3 in revenue. For SaaS businesses, the benchmark for the CLV/CAC Ratio is around 3:1 to 5:1.
CAC SMB - $500, Mid-Market $2500, Enterprise $5000