How to Create a High-Performance SaaS Marketing Team

Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Automation

Kyle Hamer • December 17, 2020

Are you wondering how to create a high-performance SaaS marketing team? It’s possible to strengthen and improve every marketing team by following some basic concepts. Knowing your employees, their way of doing things, and the tools you give them can help you breakdown how to improve performance.

When it comes to creating high-performance teams for SaaS companies, like all other companies, it’s about the basics. It comes down to the strengths of your people, processes, and platform.

Constantly assess and optimize these three factors. Then you can turn your marketing team into one of those desirable high-performance teams.

What You Must Know About the 3 P’s of High-Performance Marketing

We cover everything you need to know about the 3 P’s of High-Performance Marketing on our podcast, the Summit Podcast by Kyle Hamer.

Speaking with digital transformation expert Douglas Karr on the episode “3 P’s of High-Performance Marketing,” Hamer addresses digital marketing. He asks Karr’s perspective on the essentials of marketing as the digital venue continues to advance.

Karr cites years of experience in pointing out the importance of basics. People, process, and platform still reign supreme as the most essential ingredients for a successful SaaS marketing team.

Jumping in to consult with companies before they make big moves on people, processes, and platforms, Karr sees a lot. He wants companies to see their strengths and weaknesses before they make any big moves.

Calculate each move for a precise improvement or profit, while respecting structures that are already working internally. This is how to create a high-performance marketing team.

Setting up Your 3 P’s for Success

One main point that Karr wants to make sure companies understand is that each “P” evolves from the next. The right people create the processes supported by the right platform.

It is important when speaking to vendors to not permit yourself to be “sold” on a process or platform that will not work with your unique people. Implementation of “out-of-the-box” solutions always require some time for the company to get used to it. However, Karr is not married to any one vendor – it’s all about the right fit for your 3 P’s.

Some vendors present tempered expectations about the processes and platforms they can offer. These tend to be offering companies a better perspective.

Conversely, those vendors with extreme performance results to show off may be overcompensating. SaaS marketing teams should feel prepared to recognize over-selling. When it comes to big promises regarding CRM and marketing automation, it’s a bad sign.

People: Selecting the Right People

Members of high-performance marketing teams must be ready to innovate and change with the market as needed. Assessing your marketing team can help you make it as high-level as possible.

Auditing

Auditing – checking in with your employees about their day-to-day activities – is enlightening. This can help you understand what each person does as well as the customer experience. Auditing these processes can show you the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals in your workers.

Frame these audits as a way to spot where there may be breakdowns in the overarching structure. These will likely illuminate mismatched communication or antiquated processes that are making work harder for your people. When this is properly framed as a way to make the job work better for them, you can get great information from these audits.

Create more room for innovation, creativity, and improved customer experiences. You should see the positive results arise in the profits.

Human Strengths and Weaknesses

Results with processes and platforms – for better or worse – are dictated by the people on your team. When an old process is automated, it will suddenly fall on the shoulders of the same person who has developed the process in the real world to now run it digitally.

Whether or not they have the skills to rise to this challenge is wholly dependent on that worker. These are the types of “people” matters that should be taken into consideration when it comes to the changing of processes or platforms.

Think of your people as a toolbox. You don’t use a wrench as a hammer or a hammer as a wrench. Position your employers in roles where their unique skills will best serve the company.

Process: Building the Right Processes

Processes are developed by the right people. When you empower employees to pursue roles that work best with their experience, they inherently develop processes that work.

Remember, if processes are changed too rapidly or to a system that does not work intuitively with the routine your employees already have – in other words, it makes their job harder than easier – you run the risk of losing experienced employees who will take their previously honed skills elsewhere.

Optimize Processes for Maximum Revenue

When evaluating processes, your people should take time to assess what they do every day. Have them write down each step they take throughout the day and see what parts of their work correspond to revenue operations.

Having your employees assess their own processes creates a sense of ownership. When they can identify what works and what doesn’t, goal-setting for results should flourish. Breaking down processes into the basic, day-to-day components can be exactly what employees need to look at their work objectively.

This is also where bringing in a consultant can be of great help in identifying work and time that is simply not bringing in results.

When It’s Time to Automate

Automation is about efficiency. It should make employees’ jobs more streamlined and leave them time for work that requires specialized attention.

What can you automate? What is a big time-waster in your office? If your employees are spending a lot of time on small, procedural details it is definitely time to consider automating the systems.

An example of one process that should be automated for high-performance marketing teams is data analysis. Marketing team members are creatives, but the nature of the industry often makes them spend a lot of time moving data between spreadsheets.

Optimize your SaaS marketing team by employing marketing automation to seamlessly transfer this data on their behalf.

Platform: Deploying the Right Software

Matching your platform to your output is essential. Too small of a platform and you may miss out on the flexibility that could increase your ROI. Too large of a platform and you could incur costs higher than what you earn.

Functionality must be appropriately matched to affordability. Purchase enough tools to get the job done right. Don’t buy things you don’t need.

Choosing “out-of-the-box” platforms can be a great thing to implement early on, but if there are already processes in place amongst your sales and marketing employees, implement new platforms intelligently. Finding a platform that will work with the internal processes underway must be a goal.

Implement New Platforms

Implementing new CRM platforms inevitably comes with challenges. When a new platform starts, it is necessary to temper expectations. There are going to be growing pains, and you may need to rethink who should get the process up and running.

The team that will use the new platform may not be the best team to work out its kinks. If you have the opportunity of choosing between different employee teams, find those energized by a challenge to run through a new platform in its early months.

Risk-averse employees will eventually have no trouble working with the new platform, but they may not be the right ones to get it up and running. Therefore, it is important to consider how your people will impact your platform and vice versa.

Marketing Team Assessment

Once you identify the correct people, processes, and platform to reach your marketing team for SaaS goals, it’s important to stay on top of assessments to ensure the correct skills are available for the job. Use a marketing skill assessment to gather objective data about how your SaaS marketing team is performing.

Assessments can help you figure out how best to motivate a SaaS team. Furthermore, assessments can show how each team member can work together.

Apply the Marketing Team Assessment to your team to get a better idea of what skills and gaps you are working with.

Innovating High-Performance Marketing Teams for SaaS Companies

It is possible for you to create high-performance teams in SaaS marketing by making sure to monitor your 3 P’s of high-performance marketing: people, process, and platform.

Think about each of these P’s as parts of your whole. The right people will develop the processes you need. Good platforms will support your people and processes like a framework.

When looking to improve performance, turn to experts who can help audit your people and processes. Once you have an assessment of what is going on in your business already, choosing a platform will be simpler. Keep a beat on overall performance by administering a marketing skill assessment.

Get in touch with Hamer Marketing Group to see what we can bring to your marketing team.