Captain Data’s CEO shares some ideas on areas where SaaS companies can invest to improve efficiency and boost sales productivity in 2024

While there is still uncertainty as to how the global economy will adjust to inflation and central bank interventions, there’s no doubt that businesses everywhere have had to change gears recently when compared to the long decade of close-to-zero interest rates. 

Those changes come in various forms: reduced hiring, layoffs, slashed budgets, no more free laundry 🥺🥺(ok, that last one might have been overdue). They all point to the fact that business leaders around the world have become laser-focused on reducing costs, increasing revenues, and boosting productivity. 

Captain Data CEO Guillaume Odier has a privileged view on these moves, as data automation is one huge area where productivity is being found. He shared some ideas on improving sales productivity, thanks to experiences from both Captain Data’s clients and Captain Data itself.

Reduce lead generation time

A sales team that’s spending time on lead generation is one that’s not spending time on their most useful activity: talking to potential customers. And yet so many salespeople are still expected to track down leads and update the CRM.

That was one of the problems that Captain Data first targeted: how to automate lead generation and get all that time back. 

Importantly, this is a data operation that only becomes more important as the company grows. For more information on how to put it in place, check out Agicap’s story, where they’re automatically generating 40,000+ leads per month thanks to a simple Slack command and Captain Data’s API capabilities.

Focus on targets who are ready to buy

Great lead generation isn’t just automated, it’s also targeted. You can do this thanks to discovering buying intents, those little signals that show a potential customer has your problem and is ready to pay for a solution.

For example, your ICP could be defined by a certain job title at a certain size company; furthermore, your sales team could tell you that they’ve found a sweet spot with people who have taken over those positions within the last 90 days. Captain Data has a template that can be adjusted to search for exactly those profiles, giving your sales team a level of precision that they’ve never had before.

And remember that good buying intents are directly linked to purchasing ability. If you have deal sizes that are, say, $50K/year or more, you can’t aim at lower-level managers – you’ll likely need to be dealing directly with CFOs. Spending rules within companies have drastically changed over the past 12 months; make sure your salespeople aren’t wasting time trying to convince someone who will never be able to sign the deal.

Break down the silos between sales and marketing

This might seem like more of a psychological issue than an automation one, and that’s true… to some extent.

But in fact, traditional business silos are based on a lack of information flow, and that means there are data automations that can help break those down. Lately, the responsibility for designing and executing that kind of automation has been given to revenue operations.

Rev Ops is tasked with collecting and managing data from all of your company’s various departments, and analyzing how the parts fit together. Once they have a clear picture and information is flowing, they can search for both optimizations and growth, always keeping an eye on how revenue is being impacted.

(And even if your company isn’t quite to the point where having a full-time Rev Ops position is possible, you can get a jump start on understanding how operations could help with our e-book, The Rise of Operations, available here).

Automate as much as possible

SaaS companies are always aimed at exponential growth, which means that linear personnel growth can never keep up. That’s why it’s so important, once you’ve found product-market fit, to automate as many processes as possible.

In the right hands, your data processes are great areas for creating these automations. 

Just remember that your automated processes aren’t going to be static. You’ll still need to learn and adjust them, which means you don’t want them to be 1) forgotten or 2) reliant on other teams. That’s why we work so hard to ensure that the Captain Data platform is no-code/low-code, so that each individual team can keep the fate of their data automations entirely within their hands.

The bottom line

Success in these efforts will likely first show up in one KPI: your customer acquisition cost. Given the sea change in sales that has occurred over the past 10 years, every business leader should now be evaluating how to use a host of new tools to lower their CAC, such as AI-driven LLMs. 

In that light, please do see these tips as just the starting point to driving your CAC as far towards zero as it can possibly go. As sales expert (and friend of Captain Data) Guillaume Cabane has said, we’re now in an environment where low-CAC growth isn’t just possible, it’s necessary if you want to beat the competition.

Interested in finding out more about how Captain Data’s platform can help your company boost its sales productivity and find low-CAC growth? Book a call with us here.

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