Legacy Customer Conversion
The Challenge - Grow SaaS Revenue
How do you take a human mentality of, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”, and turn those thinkers into engaged buyers that grow saas revenue?
This is a story about keeping a plane in flight to the planned destination while rebuilding the wings of the airplane. The plane is the company, the flight is the product market fit, the destination are the revenue targets, and the airplane wings are literally engineering swapping out the product being sold.
How can business leadership accomplish this without…
- Seeing massive customer / revenue churn
- Burning out sales / team attrition
- Plummeting customer satisfaction scores
- Missing revenue & customer acquisition goals
If you’re someone who likes to read the ending first, scroll down to “The Outcome” portion of this page.
Obsessive understanding of the market, laser awareness around attaching solution benefits that clearly solve prospect pain points, rigorous sales enablement training, reinforcement, and coaching, combined with frequent metric review promoting course correction are the foundation to how these audacious goals are accomplished.
Lesson 1
Get comfortable with the fact that failure is where most businesses land when attempting this companywide conversion. Understand that this is recreating the company from the inside out. While the business mission remains the same, 99% of the steps to achieve revenue conversion need to be rethought and centered around how a prospect will process and respond to the new sales motions. The sales motions, discovery, demo practices and compensation plans have to be reconstructed, mapped out and tested in the environment before releasing new plans that scale.
Keep in mind, it is infinitely less effort to modify approaches and find new sales motions that are easy to follow before releasing anything to the sales team.
Select three types of personalities from the sales organization and ask for input on your plan to grow SaaS revenue:
These personality types are:
- An analytical supporter from the sales team. This is someone trusted to give constructive feedback.
- A middle of the road, average contributor. This is someone that is happy in their current role, hits quota frequently, and represents the career sales reps on your team.
- The common team detractor. Yep. As you read this, you know who they are on your team. This is someone that will always skew the playing field to their advantage, no matter what the outcome is for the company, and someone you can rely on for criticism.
Why pick all three? Easy. Introducing change management early to these three personalities Will help management reinforce the positive, confirm or disprove any sales rep can follow the new processes, and arm the team with the first pass of criticisms to solve before rolling out new structure to the entire sales organization. There are many more benefits but these are the ones this story will focus on for now. For executive leadership, this change will require unrelenting stamina from the managers and executives tasked with this undertaking.
Lesson 2
Secure support from the entire management team. This task is crucial. The executive tasked with leading this change needs unwavering support from their management colleagues. That is easy to say, but what does this really mean, and what does this look like in day-to-day practice?
The General Profile:
- Attach the new sales initiative to the company metrics. Explain why this path is required to achieve the common goals placed on management by ownership or the board. List off the high-level structural changes occurring in sales. Don’t go into detail. Keep answers to questions short and concise. At the end, reinforce how these necessary changes will result in the executive team achieving goals and subsequent bonuses that are typically attached to company growth.
- Provide each management team member with a clear, simple, and concise connection to how they contribute, and what their role is in supporting success. Seek individuals out afterwards, and provide a private, safe space for them to give feedback outside of the wider group. Also request management forwards any questions or concerns they are unable to address to the program leader.
This is what management alignment looks like when everyone is rowing together.
Lesson 3
This section goes deep into sales ops, sales enablement and roll-out practices in order to effectively grow saas revenue. In order to accomplish this company shift from the inside out, two different quota buckets had to be created, incentivized, and built in such a way that a minimum threshold of achievement was required in the legacy revenue bucket before the high-paying, behavior-shifting new revenue bucket would pay high commissions. This drove the sales behavior to still sell and nurture the company revenue required to operate the business while building the future sales behavior needed to grow MRR on the SaaS platform.
This compensation model was the strategy that allowed the company to rebuild the plane while in flight. Sales enablement came next to take the existing discovery playbook questions and reframe the sales return on investment discussion centered around the new product line. From there, the entire demo flow to build product value had to be restructured. After the teams were trained and provided documentation on these new approaches, they were told to practice and given a buddy system as support for the first product demonstrations.
The SaaS Revenue Outcome
This company saw success in the form of saas revenue conversion activities where 80% of similar businesses fail.
New product line adoption rates came in at 2.3x compared to the previous revenue line being sunsetted.
Mid year management raised quotas by 8% to account for other sales groups missing numbers, and all new quota targets were achieved.
All saas revenue targets were exceeded in both quota buckets.
SaaS revenue metrics were achieved, securing the targeted business valuation.
This was accomplished through careful educational campaigns highlighting the pain points a business experiences with on-prem software packages. We then clearly connected the pain points to the solution available in our SaaS product and educated the user base on the benefits of moving to the cloud. This was not done overnight, and required omni-channel messaging via email, social and phone. After running these initial campaigns for about a month, we saw a shift in the sales calls. The sales calls were no longer spending large amounts of time educating the prospect, but in fact spent on discussing the benefits of moving to cloud. Buyer education + quick follow up was key. We then took marketing engagement in these campaigns and ran an AI outreach approach to serve up even more interested buyers for our sales team.
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