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Could these mistakes be undermining your SaaS prospecting efforts?Successful software sales rep are hardwired to close opportunity – from identifying customer pain points to deftly managing price negotiations, the art of converting potential into revenue is the bread and butter of top-achieving sales professionals in all areas of the tech market.Building that pipeline of opportunity, however, is a different ball game.To close deals, you need deals to close – and creating the initial traction needed to get dialogue open can be a sticking point for reps trying to load up their sales funnels – especially those on the front lines of new customer acquisition.  Whether via email, social media, in-person networking or route one cold-calling – here are 5 prospecting blunders that keep valuable conversations from getting off the ground.Clickbait subject linesGetting busy prospects to engage with cold emails is a tough challenge, and innovative reps are often willing to try anything which generates the all-important open.However, there can be a price to pay on an emotional level if a prospect opens an email and immediately feels that they’ve been tricked or misled by what it contains.The below are just a handful of examples of common cold email titles that immediately arouse suspicion in the recipient:“Just for you…”[An offer for all email blast recipients – not just for me, at all…]“Re:”[Regarding… a conversation we’ve never had?]“The real reason you’re stressed out at work” [What if I’m not…?]As the sales rep, a bait-and-switch email subject line can be counter productive.You may have found right person, have a product of real value and have persuaded your recipient to open your email… but if your prospect’s immediate reaction is one of frustration then the opportunity dies right there.While it’s tempting to ‘get creative’ to drive open rates, integrity has long-term value – if your prospect loses trust upon opening your email, why would they believe the rest of its contents or your wider value proposition?Telling your prospect what their problems are“As marketing director, you’re well aware of the time drains X and Y can cause. You’re running from meeting to meeting, scrambling to keep pace with ABC…”Effective sales is about learning to understand your prospect’s pain points and working with them to find a solution.Here’s the thing – you don’t get to choose those pain points.You might have a very strong suspicion of what they are - and guide the conversation in that direction - but if you’re attempting to build a reciprocal dialogue with a customer then it’s important not to make sweeping assumptions.Why?Prospecting engagement is about encouraging someone to come and talk to you – the quality of your conversation and your ability to offer a solution will determine whether that discussion evolves into a sale.If you present yourself as a mind-reader who has it all figured out, you create the opposite dynamic.How can your prospect expect you to listen and learn in follow-up conversations if you start the relationship telling them about their life without even speaking to them?Information overloadWhether via email or in a call, blasting someone with every possible feature of your solution is typically more overwhelming than it is helpful.When unsure of exactly what a customer’s problem may be, it can be tempting for sales reps to load their email and demo pitches with every major product benefit to make sure they cover all angles, backed up with links to case studies and online resources.Instead of impressing the customer, this can cause them to lose focus in a mire of information.To better balance your initial approach, hint at what your product can do (a tight elevator pitch is key here!), then open the conversation up with some questions to probe for pain points and opportunity. There’s a reason terms like “lead nurturing” exist – prospecting involves the gradual cultivation of initial interest into targeted and detailed discussions around solutions to certified customer issues. Being too laid backSales reps with high emotional intelligence are permanently aware of the risk of pressuring a prospect too hard – excessive zeal to move the process along can drive potentially interested customers away.However, the reverse is also true. Some reps are so cautious to avoid hustling their prospects that their easy-going attitude can come across as indifference.While not pestering a prospect is crucial, it’s also important to establish a clear dynamic – customers need to feel that you truly believe that your solution will help them.If you don’t care whether or not they buy your product, why should they?Without that core belief as a foundation for the dialogue, there will be no pace and no energy in the process, and it may well die out.Not making the case for ROIThere’s often a perception that early prospecting engagements are no place to be talking about ROI – that’s a level of detail for when you’re further down the discussion path, right?Wrong.People need to understand from day one how your solution will help the bottom line – at least at a high level. Sure, they don’t need a complex mathematical breakdown, but entirely ignoring how your solution will pay for itself in productivity, revenue-generation or cost-saving benefits immediately positions it as a nice-to-have add-on.That’s a tough category to be in – you’ll need a prospect with surplus budget to even consider checking out your product.Keep in mind, when prospecting within large corporations you’re very rarely talking to the ultimate decision-maker straight away, so helping your initial contact feel confident that they can ultimately make a sound business case to get sign-off for your solution gives them the confidence that it’s worth exploring the offering in full.***Looking for your next SaaS sales opportunity? Check out Adaptive Tech's full list of sales jobs across the US and Europe here.We recruit for AEs, CSMs, SDRs, VPs and Sales Engineers across fast-growing and established SaaS vendors at all levels.

Many ambitious sales reps have a career goal of one day moving into a top leadership role – what does it take to get there?For many software sales professionals, achieving the coveted title of VP of Sales marks the pinnacle of career development.Arriving as VP means reaching the top of the ladder - no longer a mere member of the sales team but positioned firmly in the driving seat, taking make-or-break decisions and helming the entire organization’s top-line fortunes. Adaptive Tech’s global team has recruited VP roles with startups, scale-ups and established software vendors across a range of SaaS market sectors.Through conversations with CEOs, first-time sales managers and career sales leaders, our recruiters have a privileged angle from which to observe how successful VPs developed the right mix of abilities and experience to move into top-tier roles.For all aspiring future sales leaders - how do you build the skill set needed to land, retain and excel in the role of VP of Sales? It’s not about being number oneOne of the most surprising things for up-and-coming reps to process is that the path to one day becoming a VP doesn’t necessarily involve being a superstar individual producer.Of course, you need credibility.A respectable track record of making and exceeding quota is a key requirement, but focusing on personal production at the expense of developing other important skills can hold back your rise through the ranks.Just as the fastest or strongest girl or guy doesn’t always captain a sports team, solo performance isn’t enough to build a sales leadership career on.  A rockstar account executive who can’t teach, can’t analyze their own performance and hasn’t built rapport with the rest of the team isn’t an attractive prospect for senior management looking to appoint a leader.Your current manager can teach you more than you thinkOne of the simplest ways to start building a feel for sales leadership and the skills required is to actively observe your current manager’s goals and struggles.While it’s natural to think of a sales manager’s only real concern as hitting their revenue number, detailed assessment will show a more complex picture.See what else your manager is grappling with – maybe it’s raising team morale, integrating new hires into the group, re-engineering reporting structures or getting the best out of technology…Once you understand how your manager works, you can actively start to support them in their role. This places you naturally as a leader within your team - someone in tune with the key issues and aligned with leadership goals.A natural player-coach role can often evolve from this, leaving you well positioned for promotion opportunities as a key team member who understands the nuances beyond revenue production.Learn the leversWhile mid-tier sales managers may be able to run short-term sales promotions or experiment with new meeting structures, VPs have the full range of switches and levers at their disposal to drive activity and behaviors within the organization.To excel in the role, VPs need to:Know what their options areCommissions structures, bonuses, SPIFFs, contests, sales enablement resources, recruitment, training and onboarding, CRMs, territory divisions, team structures and hierarchies… VPs have the ability to adjust and configure multiple aspects of the sales organization and processes to increase results. Learning the full breadth of possibilities is key to the development of future sales leaders.Understand how they workIt’s not enough to know what can be tweaked, it’s crucial to have fully appreciate the possible consequences of each change. Sales organizations are delicate things, made up of a complex blend of people, emotions, ambition, technology and processes.Promoting team members may cause satisfaction for some, but resentment for others. Weighting incentive towards new account acquisition could leave renewals and upsells lagging. Lower quotas may make OTEs more attainable, but limit ambition…VPs need to be prudent strategists, aware of the impact any decisions may have both positively and negatively on their teams.Know when to use themTo run a sales organization effectively, VPs also need great awareness of how long each lever takes to ‘pull’, and how long it takes to impact.Faced with a looming quarter-end deadline, for instance, there’s little sense in cranking up outbound call KPIs which won’t be able to affect the short-term need. The goal is to focus on closing pipeline and bringing viable deals over the line – levers need to be pulled which switch focus to the right activity at the right time.Similarly, better content might be a vital solution to converting prospects, but it takes time to develop.Reps and mid-level managers with an eye on one day rising to VP should analyze their own environment on an ongoing basis – study the ‘levers’ being pulled, and watch what the consequences are.It’s surprising how much you can pick up even if you’re a few hierarchy rungs removed from your current sales leadership – the changes and impacts are there for anyone who’s paying attention to observe and learn from. Embrace the importance of dataWhile early sales management roles are often all about coaching a team to success, when it comes to moving the needle for an entire organization, data is the key.Mentoring, directing. training and incentivizing are the ways a VP will seek to drive behavior in a certain direction, but it all starts with understanding the stories in the data - this means how a sales group is currently operating, where the issues are and what types of activities need to be increased or reduced in order to raise the volume and conversion rates of prospects through the sales funnel.Even with powerful analytics tools, data isn’t always a neat picture or even drawn from the same source, so VPs need to build their own visualizations by understanding what they need to know, not just poring over out-of-the-box reports and hoping a solution will appear in front of their eyes.Reps without much exposure to working with data can pro-actively ask to get more of an understanding from their managers, and start to build an awareness of the key data points, ratios and relationships that allow for big-picture thinking and strategic decision-making.Take one step at a timeA true VP role is a unique position involving a wealth of decisions and responsibilities at a strategic level which are seldom within the purview of mid-tier sales managers.Although it’s important to develop an understanding of the challenges ahead, it takes time to build the bank of experience necessary to step up and lead the organization – so don’t worry about reading up on complex incentive structures of the theories of territory management if you haven’t got a solid track record of helping junior colleagues close deals or build pipelines.Those who rise quickly to VP focus on shining at every phase of their sales career, but play the game with their heads up - aware of what their managers and corporate leadership are doing, observing the impacts, and readying their skills for their next step forwards.***Looking for your next SaaS sales opportunity? Check out Adaptive Tech's full list of sales jobs across the US and Europe here.We recruit for AEs, CSMs, SDRs, VPs and Sales Engineers across fast-growing and established SaaS vendors at all levels.

Strong sales enablement resources can close the gap between potential and closed deals. How does your support measure up?Think about the last sales job you interviewed for – what kinds of questions did you ask?You probably asked about salary. Almost definitely asked about commission. Maybe requested some data or insight around product traction, or asked to learn more about close market competitors.Sales enablement?Probably not.It’s not top of many people’s lists when vetting a new opportunity to ask for details on a company’s sales enablement processes and resources - but the support you’ll receive in articulating the value proposition of a product to prospective customers can have a major impact on your ability to turn interest into revenue.In a career built around incentive compensation and ability to convert prospects to paying customers, sales enablement has a key role to play in equipping reps to be successful and meet (or beat) their numbers. A world-class sales enablement program works to continually optimize the processes, content and resources available to sales employees at all phases of the customer buying journey, ensuring that raw product functionality or salesmanship aren’t the only components driving the sale. This can give reps a critical advantage in the market, while under-equipped or poorly-structured enablement processes leave sales teams fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.So what does ‘good’ look like in sales enablement, and how does your current environment compare?Here’s how to spot the foundational pillars of an elite sales enablement program. - It’s comprehensiveA key function of sales enablement is to create content which educates, guides, inspires or reassures customers throughout their purchase journey. Anything from traditional product overviews, white papers, video tutorials or customer testimonials can fall under this heading.But effective enablement goes far beyond these marketing basics, and looks at the entire sales cycle from multiple angles for both new and existing customers.This means everything from optimizing CRM configuration and prospect data to ensuring sales reps are trained and informed on the resources available to them, and how and when they should be deployed. Leading sales enablement experts obsess over aligning an organization’s sales processes and tools to align perfectly with the journeys of both prospects and repeat clients.- It’s data-drivenThe key to building sales processes which deliver scalable and repeatable results is letting data do the talking.Sales enablement programs which fail to gather, analyze and learn from the data generated throughout the sales cycle miss invaluable information which should be used to shape the development of future resources and workflows in an ongoing feedback loop.In the fast-paced environment of many high-growth SaaS companies, it takes a cool head from leadership to override emotion and gut instinct and find the story contained within the data – but tracking and learning from this provides vital clues as to where and why prospects are failing to convert, and monitoring how effectively new resources resolve those issues.- It’s high-priorityHow high the sales enablement function ranks within organizational hierarchy gives some insight into how its importance is seen by executive leadership. In some companies ‘sales enablement’ is bundled in with corporate marketing (if it even has a name).In others, sales enablement leaders are key members of senior teams, highly-paid experts with substantial budgets and a high-pressure mandate to deliver tangible improvements to a company’s top line and per-rep revenue production.- It adapts quicklyGreat sales enablement needs to move fast.If a sales team detects a gap or obstacle in their workflow, a swift response to offer a solution can mean the difference between righting the ship or missed quotas all round.For most SaaS companies, prospecting is a high-volume activity engaging thousands of customer contacts per week, and an enablement team that takes eons to produce much-needed resources allows painful missed revenue opportunity to slip by unconverted while they deliver.- It’s innovativeThe sales support industry is a vast universe of technology and service-based solutions designed to help sales teams and individuals perform better.Top enablement teams are continually scouring this universe in search of tools and resources that will give their reps a leading edge.Whether it’s collaboration platforms, lead generation tools, prospect data sources, training, marketing or other areas, the sales enablement function should be under continual review and evaluation to see how it might be improved.This doesn’t mean frequent and wholesale change – most sales processes are finely balanced and don’t react well to constant tinkering.What it does mean is a high level of curiosity around exploring and evaluating new opportunities to give reps an advantage or better meet prospect and customer needs.How does your sales enablement environment stack up – world class, or bare-bones basic?Looking for your next SaaS sales opportunity? Check out Adaptive Tech's full list of sales jobs across the US and Europe here.We recruit for AEs, CSMs, SDRs, VPs and Sales Engineers across fast-growing and established SaaS vendors at all levels.