Most B2B SaaS companies start off selling to their local market and target a specific vertical or segment where they have the most low hanging fruit. It’s common to try to secure a beachhead and position of strength before going broader. We did this at data.ai (formerly App Annie). 8-9 years ago, the majority of our customers were in the gaming vertical. Since then, we expanded into new:

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Part of our strategy also included adopting new tools. Years ago, we relied heavily on Google Docs. While Google Docs was and still is a good horizontal tool, we needed more robust capabilities and brought in a Content Management System ( Seismic ), that gave us granular control into exactly what content should be consumed by role, region and vertical. In addition, we implemented a new LMS (Learning Management System) allowing new hires to watch training videos and self learn on their own schedule. Lastly, we implemented Gong and began recording our customer meetings over Zoom . This was game changing for us, especially after we created a Gong library giving new hires the ability to navigate to exactly the type of customer interaction they wanted to learn from: vertical, country, use case, positive/negative encounters and more. Throughout our journey, we did not always pick the right tool out of the gate; however, once we figured out the right tool, we significantly improved and accelerated our ramp process.

Ramping is often overlooked and gets lost in the mix of important priorities. My hope is that you avoid this trap and invest in it because it is a strategic differentiator for some of the most important metrics for any B2B SaaS company: revenue growth and NDR performance.

At the end of the day, we improved our ramping process and reduced our time-to-productivity from 6 months down to 3-4 months, depending on the role. This was a big win for us. Every month alone represented another 8% revenue gain per sales rep in their first year. Multiplying this monthly gain by the total number of new employees we hired to support new countries, verticals and segments gave us a significant revenue boost over the years. Additionally, the hidden benefit of our NDR performance improvement made the entire investment in our ramping framework more than worthwhile for us as a company.

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One awesome tradition we had at data.ai was having all new hires, regardless of location around the globe, come to our San Francisco HQ for 1 week of bootcamp (we unfortunately had to pause this practice when COVID started). This was an excellent experience for new hires to develop camaraderie with other new hires, managers and execs while going through an intense week of product, sales and internal process training. The problem we faced, however, was that 1 fantastic week was not enough to make any of our customer facing employees productive. So, we created an 8-week program including the following detailed instructions and daily action items:

Proven GTM Enablement Vision-Strategy-Performance ⎮ Award-Winning Sales & Field Enablement Leader⎮ 4 Disciplines of Execution Evangelist

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One very important insight we discovered while improving our Ramping framework was the correlation between how quickly a Sales rep became productive and the amount of time spent together with their manager. What was interesting was that the total time spent together was not primary; it was the time spent together in customer meetings that mattered most. So, we naturally changed our shadowing strategy to increase manager involvement as a way to help accelerate the ramp process helping new hires become more productive, more quickly.

We were pleasantly surprised at how many new hires voluntarily took the time to review this content before their start date. This increased engagement, especially for those who were ambitious to get ahead, and was one of several strategies helping us to reduce the average ramp time.

Increasing prices and improving deal velocity can definitely help drive growth; however, the impact is typically incremental, not exponential. There are limits to how much you can raise prices with better sales negotiation or better brand recognition. There are also limits to how quickly you can close a sales deal depending on the complexity of your product. But for most companies, increasing the # of new customers can help achieve exponential growth.

Right away, I noticed some anomalies, such as the 40-49% Growth cohort having a lower multiple than 30-39%. Also, the Negative Growth cohort had a higher multiple than the 1-9% Growth cohort. Even with these anomalies, however, the data shows the market generally places a higher premium on higher growth companies. Given this reality, it’s not a surprise that one of the top priorities for every company is growth.

If you take a moment to consider how Sales drives growth, there are 3 primary levers (I am intentionally oversimplifying here):

The first thing we did was to start the ramping process as early as possible. We created a pre-boarding checklist that new hires had access to before their start date. In this checklist we provided the following key resources:

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Key blog articles Relevant webinars  Product Announcements Important publications/articles Customer stories Use Case & Persona based playbooks

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Ramp meaning in Hindi

This new robust framework significantly augmented our 1 week bootcamp experience. The additional ramping structure helped our new hires not only ramp faster but also come out of the 8-week program with more product knowledge, competitive insights and ability to manage customers.

Expanding into these new areas was definitely exciting for us as a company but it also did come with many challenges. The biggest challenge, however, was scaling the Sales team. We not only had to recruit good people in different countries with the right experiences, we also had to ramp them on our product and train them to become productive sellers of a complex value proposition. When we reviewed our internal data, we could not believe it took 6 months to fully ramp a new Sales employee at data.ai. This deficiency was directly impacting our ability to grow. After spending 1-2 quarters to recruit, it would take another 6 months to ramp. This meant we were losing up to a year of productivity for any given sales territory. So, we had to make changes to ensure that our ramping process was not the bottleneck for accelerating growth.

Product training videos Internal tools training videos Pricing & Packaging training Pitch competition recordings Peer shadowing Etc.

But there are challenges to accelerating growth. And for a B2B SaaS company, none is bigger than not having enough productive people in Sales. In reality, all business units cause pain for the company when lacking the right people, but the difference is in the timing. For Product and Engineering, the pain is in future quarters. For Marketing, it’s typically the next quarter. For Sales, the pain is immediate; which means, the current quarter is at risk.

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Monday 12.30 p.m. – 5.00 p.m. Tuesday to Thursday 08.30 a.m. – 5.00 p.m.  Friday 08:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Saturday 09.00 a.m. – 12.00 p.m.

In my last article, “The Number One Reason Why Managers Fail ”, I shared how Recruiting (the 1st R) is consistently the #1 reason why managers succeed or fail. In this article, I will discuss how Ramping (the 2nd R) can strategically help to accelerate growth. In one of my next articles, I will go over Retention (the 3rd R) to round out the 3 pillars of talent management helping to set a solid foundation for any company.

As a side note, for the purposes of this article, when I say “ramping”, I am referring to “employee ramping”, which is simply the process of helping a new hire become a productive employee. While this concept of employee ramping is very easy to understand at face value, what most overlook is how strategic it can be.

Stay tuned as one of my next articles will discuss how both Ramping and Recruiting directly impact one of the primary goals of great talent management: Retention.

There were also other benefits we enjoyed as a result of improving our ramping process. NDR (Net Dollar Retention) is a very important industry KPI that measures whether a company’s existing customer base is growing or shrinking. It also directly impacts a company’s valuation. For most B2B SaaS companies, driving more active users increases the renewal rate, meaning less churn. In our experience, we found the best time to drive active users was in the first 30 days (definitely NOT the last 30 days). So, the customer onboarding process, in the first month of the relationship, became a critical part of our strategy to maximize active users, minimize churn and improve our NDR performance. And we found that the investments made in our ramping framework directly helped provide an excellent customer onboarding experience. The assets (training materials, self-service tools, use case playbooks, etc.) were instrumental in helping new customers ramp quickly, justify their investment in our product and buy more.

Rampingup meaning

Every company tries to fulfill their vision and create a unique value proposition for customers. But in the process, the one thing all companies hold in common is their goal of maximizing revenue growth. This should not be a surprise as the public markets reward growth. Take a look at the most recent publication of the SaaS Capital Index , which includes 93 publicly traded B2B SaaS companies. As of 9/30/2022, the median growth was 25% with a 6.9x valuation multiple (market cap / ARR). I found this analysis to be fascinating so I downloaded the data (it’s free on their website) and grouped the companies by % growth to see the average valuation multiple by growth cohort:

International markets (Southeast Asia, LATAM and India). Verticals (M&E, Finance, Retail, E-Commerce, QSR, Automotive, Healthcare). Segments (Strategic and SMB). Personas (VP of Product, Director of Monetization, VP of Sales Ops).   Business Units (Product, Sales, Corporate Development).