SaaSGrowth conference is London’s no 1 B2B sales leadership conference, organised by Sales Confidence. As their sponsors, we got an excellent opportunity to take part in this event with over 300 attendees, including SaaS Founders, Executives, VCs, Sales Leaders and Sales professionals in the UK. 

The conference focused on growing your revenue by acquiring the best sales talent for your company, aligning your sales and marketing and how to support your sales team’s productivity by investing in the right tools.

We got a chance to connect with some of UK’s top sales talent as well as have our CEO, Alex, up on the stage, sharing some findings from our research on what matters to salespeople.

Want to thank the organisers of the event for organising so well put together a conference and to have an opportunity to meet some outstanding people. Special thanks to James Ski for your help!

Growing the right sales team

The opening notes evolved around growing your sales team and scaling up your SaaS business. A lot of the speakers made it clear that attracting the right talent, looking after your team and making sure the company culture is the right fit is what it takes to build a strong basis for making your clients happy and growing your revenue. Happy employees make happy clients. Happy clients reduce your churn and spread the word. Win, win, win!

There are a lot of aspects to take into consideration here, and they were all brought up to the stage. The right tools that allow your sales team to spend time on actual selling, managing stress and let’s not forget the right salary.

Sales tech

The stat that came up a few in the speeches was the fact that by 2020, 75% of the workforce is going to be millennials. And what do all the millennials enjoy? New technologies that help us make life and job easier and more efficient. At the moment 73% of sales professionals use sales techniques to close more deals, and that includes 89% of top sales professionals using networking platforms, 94% collaboration tools, 98% sales intelligence solutions and 92% email tracking tools. The most significant discrepancy with top-performing professionals and other professionals was the networking platforms in the second group were used 10% less. And as we know, networking is crucial in sales. So start connecting more.

Reducing the stress

A great talk by Ollie Sharpie about stress in sales painted not such a great picture about stress, anxiety and depression in the UK. 15.4 million work days in 2017/2018 were lost to these factors. The sales professionals admitted that work-related stress hurt their performance, and 11% of them thinks of changing their career because of that. This is driven by targets (40%), too much work (39%), leadership type (32%), long hours (32%) and too many meetings (26%) and as a solution 23% of them said that improvements in leadership and management would reduce their stress at the workplace.

Sales salary

Kandidate’s CEO, Alex, spoke about the research findings from our 100% confidential and anonymous survey about sales salary, OTE and stage of the company. (We want to keep this data fresh so take the 2-minutes survey and answer a few basic questions, this way we will be able to share with you full findings: https://www.kandidate.com/otesurvey/)

From the research, we found the following:

Where it gets interesting is what OTE people achieved in the last 12 months. We took this from 700 candidates from our platform and follow-up questions to the SaaS salary, 47% made 50% or less of their OTE. The average tenure at a VC backed startup is one year in 3 months, you put all three things together, and you have a potential nightmare.

Why does it matter?  

Obviously for retention and attraction. If you are paying £5k or £10k base salary higher than the market you will attract better talent. 

Alex’s point was that the 50/50 model doesn’t work when it doesn’t fit what motivates the individual.  Why don’t we ask the candidate the question when we are discussing their package? Most candidates would give up the possibility of high commission in return for things that matter to them such as who is the sales leader company culture, career progression, location of the office, learning and development in the role and possibly equity.  Equity is nice, but it doesn’t get you a better apartment.

Another point was that the commission works as a motivator but for short term gains.  Commissions can lead to some unnecessary evils when it comes to long-term business outcomes. Incentives like commission can be distortionary – because you tend to pay commission on revenue, rather than things like long term profitability of an account.

Finding the perfect match

So we don’t have a simple solution for you to reduce stress at work, start managing differently or getting up to speed with the newest technologies. But we can help you grow your sales team by hiring the right talent to scale up your startup, or if you are a sales professional looking for a new challenge, especially in a London startup or to grow your career, we can help you with that.

The benefits to your company:

• Scale your team at a lower cost and faster and better
• 65% of candidates respond in under three days
• Decreased time to hire
• Defined your company’s hiring approach: sourcing approach, attraction strategy and employer brand to attract passive talent
• Built best practice talent practice: screening, candidate experience, interview process structure and closing techniques
• Average cost saving per hire is £3000

To get in touch with us visit: https://www.kandidate.com/digitaltalent/hiring/

And if you are a candidate we can offer you:

• Transparency on salary and job details
• Ability to accept or decline interview invites in one-click
• Full support of a dedicated Talent Partner throughout the process

To sign up with us visit https://www.kandidate.com/