In the business world, there are varieties of teams and it differs from industry to industry.
In the advertising industry, you need a strategist, paid marketer, lead generation executive, accounts manager along other teammates responsible for the execution of their marketing function whether it’s influencer marketing or search engine optimization.
The whole team structure would change if we talk about the cloud computing industry.
But particularly it’s the SaaS Go-to-Market Strategy that comes off as an odd man out.
It’s a team that reeks of execution, expertise, growth among other attributes.
A SaaS, in particular, would not necessarily look for an MBA graduate with high percentile scores or having ‘X’ number of years of experience.
Things like these matter in the very least.
A SaaS team is all about growth productivity, even if there is a gifted graphic designer who didn’t do college and has few years of experience but if his design has its own identity then it makes sense for a SaaS to have him on board as a team member.
In many ways, a SaaS is a place for misfits & introverts who are naturally gifted and has a particular skill set of finishing the task with utmost precision and results.
A SaaS Team hiring can also differ from industry to industry but in general, these are the roles that every SaaS has.
Customer Success Specialist
A customer success specialist plays a very important role in a SaaS.
SaaS product generally costs high as they are in a subscription model for which users have to pay every month.
Losing a customer for a high-ticket product would turn out disastrous in the long run.
In a SaaS, there are ways you can lose a customer whether it’s while onboarding or whether it is the fact that you didn’t manage to retain customers after 3 months of being onboarding or it can be a customer whose problems were not addressed which made him bitter towards your SaaS.
The customer success specialist would be involved every step of the way with the customer making sure that he has a pleasant experience with the SaaS company and its product this role also involves tasks like carrying out feedbacks every once in a while to keep things and processes in check.
A customer specialist’s job is in many ways like a hotel manager who has to ensure that the customers enjoy the food and have a fulfilling experience at the restaurant, so good that they wanna come back with new people.
That’s what a customer success specialist is for you in a SaaS.
Chief Technology Officer
In a lot of SaaS, the founder himself is a CTO who built a cloud-based technology and transformed it into a SaaS product.
The technology or the cloud-based product is the bread and butter of a SaaS without it out of place the whole organization would crumble down.
The CTO is responsible to make sure that the infrastructure that holds the digital product functions properly without any hiccups or unexpected halts.
Your customer’s businesses depend on it. If the ClickFunnels landing page malfunctions in an ad campaign then that would cost the user a lot of dollars gone for nothing.
The CTO knows well who he has to hire to manage the software, hardware, data centers.
Growth Hacker
A SaaS’s growth to a major extent can be attributed to a growth hacker and right now this shouldn’t even come off as a surprise.
“Growth Hacker” is a buzzword right now. In fact, if you are a marketer reading this then chances are that you have even read some crazy growth hack studies like examples of how Spotify and PayPal rose to immediate success due to growth hacks.
A growth hacker will work closely with teams responsible for developing the product and the sales team of course.
He will collect the data from within the team, this will armor him to devise strategies for the growth hack.
Usually, it’s the GTM (Go To Market) strategies that determine the success of the product. If you have dominated with your GTM strategy then half the battle is already won now you have to refrain from disappointing the expectations.
Search Engine Optimizer
When you think of a SaaS, I bet 9/10 SaaS that you managed to recall, 9 of them you first discovered on search. Search is where a SaaS thrives.
- HubSpot & Salesforce dominates all CRM based search queries
- SEMrush & Ahrefs dominates SEO related search queries
There are dozens of other examples of how SaaS businesses are dominating niche-specific topics entirely with proper search engine optimization strategies.
It’s about building a long-term sustainable monopoly on the search. Get customers to arrive at your product from search without you ever having to pay a dime for that. I mean except for what you pay your SEO Team.
Content Team
Content plays a very critical role in your SaaS. The content comprises web-based content that you put out on your platform and digital assets.
After the advent of the Bert & Smith algorithm, the significance of content has only risen than what it used to be before that.
The content team is largely responsible for what kind of content goes on the website, whether it is blogs, product landing page copy, or any other page for that matter.
The content team is also responsible for text-based content that does on social media, and other blogging platforms and contributor sites.
The content team gives an identity, context, and voice to the SaaS brand.
