My thoughts from many years running product for a very successful financial SaaS. - Roughly 80% of value comes from 20% of the salesforce. Value function is of

My thoughts from many years running product for a very successful financial SaaS. - Roughly 80% of value comes from 20% of the salesforce. Value function is of course heavily weighted to $ revenue but not (from product perspective) 100%. For example, I got huge amount of value from some salespeople who were not the rainmakers but could create connections with my clients to help in product development or they could articulate clearly how the product needed to be improved, unsurprisingly a number of these folk ended up in Product. - Focus 10% of your best (the 20% above) on the 'whale' prospects. Each industry has these, once you know who they are you want your best people on them. Take the others 10% who are more inclined to lead and get them to run the the 80% to try to raise the overall average quality and find the next generation of superstars. Keep repeating this process every few years. - Always be looking to automate sales interactions with non-whale prospects, if you have a huge long-tail of prospects then get creative on how to work the pipeline using low-touch sales techniques. - Some of your best prospects will be people who loved using your product and moved to other firms. Make sure you target and nurture this group. - Get your salesforce to log all their interactions with clients. No exceptions. Make it easy for this to happen. Valuable as sales churn but also to Product.