SaaS Sales Manager Role: Responsibilities and Contributions
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SaaS Sales Manager Role: Responsibilities and Contributions
A SaaS (software-as-a-service) sales manager plays a critical role in the success of a SaaS company. They are responsible for building, leading, and managing a team of sales representatives to achieve revenue goals through acquiring new customers.
The Core Responsibilities of a SaaS Sales Manager
- Recruiting, hiring, training, and coaching a team of sales reps. This involves sourcing strong talent, onboarding new hires, conducting ongoing training on sales processes/tools, and regularly coaching reps on areas of improvement.
- Setting quotas and sales targets. A sales manager will leverage data and forecasts to establish realistic quotas for individual reps and the overall team. Common SaaS metrics used are annual contract value (ACV) and monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
- Managing opportunity pipeline. This means overseeing all prospective deals in the pipeline and ensuring healthy pipeline coverage to meet revenue goals. Sales managers use Pipedrive and Salesforce to track pipeline.
- Motivating and incentivizing the sales team. Sales managers promote healthy competition through leaderboards, contests, and SPIFFs (short-term incentives) to drive performance. LevelEleven is a popular motivation tool.
- Producing analytics and reports on sales performance. Leveraging data from the CRM, sales managers will analyze metrics and KPIs and report key insights to executives on a regular cadence. ChartMogul provides subscription analytics.
- Providing feedback and conducting performance reviews. Sales managers give constructive, actionable feedback to reps on an ongoing and structured basis to improve individual and team results.
- Representing sales at the executive level. Sales managers communicate sales targets, forecasts, and results to company leadership. They also convey feedback from the sales floor on market conditions, competitive landscape, and product enhancements.
A highly effective SaaS sales manager can have an enormous positive impact on an organization. Their leadership directly influences customer acquisition, recurring revenue growth, and overall company success. Specific contributions of a strong SaaS sales manager include:
Driving Revenue Growth
By recruiting, training, and coaching a high-performing sales team, managers maximize revenue generation from new customer acquisition. Top managers consistently build pipeline, accelerate deal cycles, and boost contract values.
Enabling Accurate Forecasting
With firm command of their reps’ pipeline and execution, sales managers provide insightful forecasting to guide executive decisions around cash flow, hiring, budgets, and more. Their projections anchor the financial planning process.
Delivering Product Feedback
Interacting closely with customers during the sales process gives managers valuable input on market needs, product gaps, competitive dynamics, and areas for innovation. Sharing this intel with Product and Marketing helps prioritize roadmap investments.
Identifying Upsell Opportunities
Sales managers have visibility into customer usage, pain points, and changing requirements over time. By relaying this info to Customer Success peers, additional expansion revenue can be realized across the existing client base.
Recommended Saas Products:
- Pipedrive – Pipedrive is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform designed to streamline sales processes.
- Salesforce – Salesforce is a leading CRM platform that offers a wide range of solutions for sales, service, and marketing.
- LevelEleven – LevelEleven is a sales performance management platform that helps organizations drive revenue through gamification and analytics.
- ChartMogul – ChartMogul is a subscription analytics and revenue recognition platform, providing insights for subscription-based businesses.
Championing Company Goals
As sales leaders, managers connect the executive vision to frontline team execution. They ensure alignment across the org around top priorities like platform enhancement, TAM expansion, new market entry, etc.
In summary, SaaS sales managers have their hand on the pulse of customer needs while also balancingly sharply focused on hitting growth targets. The role calls for outstanding leadership abilities and a metrics-driven approach to manage a sales team for maximum productivity. When executed well, companies are rewarded with predictable, growing revenue streams and a scalable customer acquisition engine.
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