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This is a guest post written by Katherine Boyarsky, Lead Generation Specialist at Hubspot.
Growing SaaS companies from startups to success stories takes work and collaboration from all over the organization. Especially during lean times or massive economic shifts, business leaders look to sales and marketing to see how they can promote their product to the right audiences, with less spend.
And Revenue Operations (RevOps) teams, who don’t always get the attention and support that they deserve, are the backbone of scalable marketing, sales, customer retention, and upselling and cross-selling efforts.
Without an accurate sales and revenue forecast, companies can’t find out what’s working, what isn’t, and where to invest resources to continue growing the company at a steady, healthy rate. They help executives and leaders understand what should be the company’s biggest priorities and how that shakes down to headcount and investment across all areas.
That’s where Kluster and HubSpot come in.
Kluster is an industry-leading analytics and forecasting platform for scaling B2B SaaS companies. It helps companies plan and execute their entire revenue strategies all in one place.
HubSpot is an easy-to-use, all-in-one CRM system that powers sales, marketing, and customer care efforts across companies of all sizes and across all industries.
Kluster and HubSpot work in tandem to improve reporting, forecasting, revenue planning, and pipeline management, and help B2B companies scale and grow.
RevOps is a challenging field, and without the right tools and processes, the efforts of RevOps teams can end up being wasted.
Every morning (or evening, depending on work preferences), sales leaders can open their Kluster dashboard and see which areas of the business are thriving and which ones are cause for concern. One week, one particular product package may be flying off the shelves, but the following week could be slower and cause teams to worry about hitting their targets.
But with Kluster’s pipeline change analysis, deal insights, and predictive pipeline projections, leaders can identify areas for improvement before they spiral out of control, and before the target becomes completely out of reach. They can keep a close eye on all their most important sales metrics, from pipeline growth to win rate to length of sales cycle to average deal size and lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio. That way, teams can pivot their strategies and do more of what’s working in order to help the business keep going and growing.
For example, imagine you’re managing a sales team for a SaaS company that sells project management software. You log into Kluster and see that win rate is up, and number of deals is up, but your average deal size has gone down. You’ll be able to quickly identify that this can likely be attributed to the promotional deal you and your team offered on your Basic software tier and that since it’s a limited-time offer, deal size should go back up going forward. But just in case, you can adjust your team’s pipelines to include mostly enterprise-level prospects to try and increase average deal rate next month.
Kluster’s market-leading platform takes historical and current sales data from tools like HubSpot and turns it into accurate forecasts that help business leaders know which areas to invest in going forward. On the dashboard, you can create, view, and adjust various scenarios that reflect different numbers of demos, deals, and more needed to hit targets. You can also drill down and view progress by team.
Add commentary to various forecasts so that teammates viewing these dashboards have all the context they need.
Imagine you’re in RevOps and working with an executive team to plan the company’s goals for the next quarter. You can pull up the Kluster scenarios that you’ve built, which take into consideration a wide range of factors, including sale cycle length, goals per ramped sales rep, overall economic conditions, and market saturation in certain areas (and many more.)
By presenting a minimum of three different scenarios, and adjusting each one to show how teams need to perform to hit various targets, executives can have a clear understanding of how much Net Recurring Revenue is already coming in, and how much will be available depending on various factors, that they can use to invest in hiring, R&D, and GTM plans.
When the sales cycle is too long, and when unlucrative leads get dragged from month to month and quarter to quarter, businesses can start to see a lag in their most important revenue metrics. Sales teams can grow frustrated trying to target too small a list because not every prospect in their pipeline will be ready to buy. That’s why it’s so important to invest in creating new pipelines, and growing the top of the funnel, with great marketing and sales processes — as well as clearing out leads that aren’t working out to maintain a high-quality database of leads.
A tool like Kluster can help teams keep their pipelines fresh and guide exactly how much coverage they need to grow. And HubSpot’s powerful marketing and sales tools can bring in those new prospects, then score them based on dozens of contact properties.
For example, when running a SaaS company that sells accounting software for small businesses, the top of the funnel is regularly populated by ongoing marketing and demand generation initiatives.
But not every lead that enters the funnel is interested in your product: maybe a new graphic design college graduate downloaded your guide to personal finance for small businesses — but they really don’t need full-scale software yet. Kluster and HubSpot can help you identify and categorize irrelevant leads like this and make space for new prospects with the highest likelihood to convert to add to a sales rep’s contact list.
In order to execute your company’s vision, you need a strong, data-backed GTM plan for each month, quarter, and year.
It’s important to know the overall business goals you hope to achieve, and then it’s time to drill down and plan how every corner of the business will contribute to these goals.
With Kluster and HubSpot, all sales data is available in just a few clicks, and anyone on the team can access powerful insights at any time.
Answer questions like: Which was the best sales week of last year? What promotional tools worked and which ones should be adjusted or shelved? Which product line brought in the most revenue? Which sales region is exceeding target and which ones might need more resources or a change in the pipeline? How much more coverage is needed to hit goals?
