Dear SaaStr: What Can I Do To Grow Faster, Right Now?
My 7 top tips to increase sales quickly.
- Hire a great VP of Sales. Yes, I am a broken record here. But I’ve seen it 100+ times. Hire a great VP of Sales, and even if nothing else changes … she’ll increase the revenue per lead by 20–100%+. In one sales cycle or less. More here: How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t…
- Raise prices 20% — but ideally only on new customers. Pricing is not a science, even in B2C companies. Not really. Raise prices 20%. You can always also discount 20%-25% the next day. Discounting back to your old list price even is far better than discounting from your old list price. But be careful not to raise prices on existing customers without really thinking that through. More on why that rarely helps here.
- Make sure you have monthly quotas, not quarterly ones. Quarterly ones take all the pressure off for the first 2 months of the quarter. Later, when you are huge, move to quarterly quotas. Not today. More here.
- Ask your customers. Ask your larger customers what other services you could provide them. Your happiest, best customers will tell you. As will your grouchiest, but best customers. If they are paying, say, $50k a year, just go ask them what else you could build them that would be worth another $50k. There likely is something. You have to do this in person. So go get on a lot more Zooms, and as often as you can, on jets. A related post here.
- Fire your worst sales rep tomorrow (if they’re much worse than the rest). This doesn’t always work, but it usually does. Leads are precious. Imagine you have 100 leads per month, and you are splitting them among 3 reps. 1 of these reps has less than half the close rate of the other two. If you just fire the worst rep, and split the 100 leads 50/50 among the other two reps then voila … you revenue goes up 20%. In one month. Note be careful here, only do this if you have the data over several months to support it. It can take time to scale. But usually, most start-ups have a rep or two that close at a far lower rate than the others. Route those precious leads to she who can close them. A bit more here.
- Align your website and product marketing on the higher end of the market. Fix your website today. Stop acting “cheaper,” “cuter,” “hipper.” Act more enterprise. Write the collateral. Anchor toward the high end of the market. Prospects will pay more for the more “enterprise” solution. At a minimum, they won’t beat you up for being too low-end.
- Decrease churn. Less churn = more revenue … and many other benefits. So invest more here, in general — and especially if you don’t have any better ideas. Reach out to your customers more. NPS them. Have customer meet-ups. Get on a jet and go visit them. Hire more CSMs. Whatever it takes. Measure churn. And then drive it down. In the end, decreasing churn by $X a year is the same as selling $X a year more product. Maybe even better. And you don’t really need a single new lead, or single additional sales rep, to do better here.
And a few more great tactical ideas in sales you can implement now here:
(note: an updated SaaStr Classic post)