Modern SaaS Sales Teams

From my experience modern SaaS sales teams usually follow the same organizational patterns with slight variations on titles and responsibilities. Following are the usual roles and responsibilities that you will find in the average modern SaaS sales team:

Account executives (AEs)– Hunters and closers. Their responsibilities include: building pipe independently from other resources, working a sales process to move prospects along the pipeline, renewals in their territory, expansion in existing accounts, net new business. Having the AE’s work the renewals in the territory serves two purposes- eliminates the need to have CSMs as the AEs will be taking care of the accounts to make sure they renew, and they will also have a more “secure” part of their variable compensation that will boost their morale and encourage them to work hard on recutting and expansion of existing accounts. The AE’s should pass service/support request to support team. The AE’s will also be responsible for a Net New goal for which they should be “hunting” prospecting on their own and not relying on BDRs/SDRs at all.

Business development representatives (BDRs/SDRs)- Hunters. One to many AEs (up to 6-8). Their responsibilities are to create and execute outreach campaigns (call, email, text). Always look for innovative and new ways of reaching target prospect (existing DB, LI sales navigator, getprospect, discover.org, outreach.io, etc.). 

Account development representatives (ADMs)- Inbound leads. They should be hunters in training. Their responsibilities are to make sure any and all leads coming in through intercom and marketing efforts are connected with a corresponding AE. They will make sure they are followed up with appropriately and relentlessly in order to set up appointments for the AE.

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