In our recent LinkedIn Live ‘How do you scale a pipeline to achieve $1bn revenue?’, we were privileged to host Helen Trim and James Sweeney from Coupa, a leading cloud-based platform for procurement, sourcing, and spend management and a trailblazer in the SaaS industry. The wisdom and experience they shared brought clarity to the challenges and opportunities that come with scaling up.You can watch the webinar on demand here.As a taster, here are the key lessons we learned:
Single Source of Truth
Both Helen and James emphasised the importance of having a single source of truth in the form of a centralised data repository. This approach helps to align sales and marketing teams and to facilitate data-driven decision-making.
Performance Measurement and Accountability
Helen spoke about having a set of pipe creation dashboards that are reviewed with sales leaders every week. This practice ensures accountability and clarity about targets. It also shifts the focus of discussions from data reliability to problem-solving.
The Role of Marketing in Sales
Helen advised startups to make sales core to their businesses and celebrate their sales successes. She emphasised the need to keep customers engaged and inspired by bringing them into internal meetings.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Both speakers discussed the misconceptions surrounding ABM and suggested it should be rebranded ABE (Account Based Engagement). For Coupa, ABE is about involving all stakeholders, including sales, customer success, and partner marketing teams, not just the marketing department.
Investing in Marketing Tactics
If given a limited budget, they would likely invest it in customer advocacy and creating customer stories. James suggested using data to identify gaps in customer references and investing in filling these gaps.
Building a Scalable Tech Stack
James spoke about the benefits of involving key stakeholders in building the tech stack, so as to understand their pain points and how data and insights could address them. Learning from hindsight, he recommended using a cloud-based data warehouse from the start to support scalability.
Customer insight
James advocates for a synergistic methodology to idenfying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Model that combines both data and human insights. This balance not only prevents potential prospects from being overlooked but also supports the creation of a more complete and precise prospect list, thereby unlocking a company’s full sales potential.
Helen and James from Coupa offered critical insights into how to scale a business efficiently. The conversation underlines the importance of data centralisation, accountability, customer engagement, an expansive view of ABM, intelligent marketing investments, and a strategic tech stack. These takeaways present invaluable guidance for any SaaS business embarking on a similar scale-up journey.
#SaaS #ScalingBusiness #B2BMarketing #DataDrivenDecisionMaking #SalesAndMarketingAlignment #ABM #CustomerAdvocacy #TechStack #ICPModel #CustomerEngagement