What Do Investors Look for in a Sales Organization?

The sales team can be the lifeblood of a rapidly growing SaaS business. We love to work closely with companies to help them gain more value from their sales teams through a deeper use of analytics or by offering resources to recruit the staff they need as efficiently as possible. Along the way, we've learned a great deal about what makes a strong sales organization, and that's informed what we look for when choosing companies to invest in.

In a general sense, an investor is going to look at a sales organization and want to know:
●    About the number of salespeople on staff and their path to full productivity.
●    How the business looks at unit productivity for each sales rep.
●    How efficiently the company is turning sales and marketing spend into revenue.

This last point bellies an avoidable misconception that we often see businesses fall into. It's easy to think that if you multiply your investment into sales and marketing by four times its current value, that you'll end up getting four times the revenue from those efforts. The world doesn't work that neatly, in our experience, and that misconception becomes dangerous. Sometimes, pushing harder into sales leads to diminishing returns more quickly than it leads to efficiency.

So as an investor, we focus on how efficiently a sales organization does its work and how close the business is to capping out its total addressable market. Learn more about how investors assess sales organizations form one of our managing partners, Ryan Hinkle, in the video, "What Do Investors Look for in a Sales Organization?"

Ryan Hinkle Managing Director More By The Author