Maybe it was that first date where you showed up pitting out after running six blocks to be on time and then tripped over the tablecloth at the restaurant falling flat on your face. Just me? Or maybe that one time you showed up to that important business meeting after a bad lunch and couldn’t help, but pass gas almost continuously. Just me again? 

Yea, life throws you some curveballs that will leave you wondering—what if I had a second chance?  But there are rarely second chances in B2B SaaS. Sure, sometimes the bad first impression doesn’t ruin the next date or the chance of getting the next meeting, but those first impressions are definitely burned into the psyche and make it that much harder to climb whichever hill you’re climbing, so it’s probably just easier to nail it the first time. 

Someone who thinks intensely about those first impressions in B2B SaaS is Waseem Daher, the Founder and CEO of Pilot. Waseem’s an incredibly deep thinker and serial founder. In our talk, we went over a myriad of tactics and strategies that go into scaling a successful B2B business including nailing that first impression with sales and onboarding. Keep reading for all his wisdom and expertise.

Listen now 🎧

Here we summarize the main takeaways for you to implement or hand off to your team for implementation.

Key term

What is a process?

A process is defined as “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.”

Why is it important?

Processes, more specifically, business processes, are important because they help you actually achieve results. In business, they’re extremely vital to how efficient and effective your company’s organization and structure runs. And when it comes to scaling, that’s key.

Action plan:

What to do today: 

• Follow Waseem Daher.
• Schedule a time to meet with your executive team to discuss and review current processes across your business.

What to do next quarter:

Ensure your processes across the board are working to achieve the desired goals. This includes everything from your hiring to your sales, onboarding, and customer service processes, and everything in between.

Running a successful business is not easy. In fact, it’s pretty difficult. An estimated 90% of new startups fail and 34% of startups close shop within the first two years. Ensuring the processes that essentially run your business are efficient and effective, is absolutely critical and can be the difference between scaling or closing your doors. 

So, how do you know when a process is failing? Well, typically there will be recurring problems. And in order to prevent a problem from happening again, Waseem suggests asking a couple of questions:

• How did we get here? 
• What adjustments do we need to make to reduce the probability of it happening again? 

Waseem says that what you’ll generally find by asking these simple questions is “that something was wrong or missing with the process—something about the way the system works made it easy for an error to slip through, or made it too hard to do the right thing.”

And if you disagree with this and strongly feel the issue is related to a person’s performance, it still indicates that you have a process problem. Your hiring process may not be selecting the right people for the role, or maybe “your performance management process isn’t properly managing underperformers.”

Either way, “it’s always a process problem.”

Read Waseem’s full post: It’s always a process problem.

What to do within the next year:

Once you’ve identified the issues or holes in your process, decide what the best course of action is to fix the problem/s. This may mean you completely revamp your process/es. Implement the changes and continuously evaluate the outcome. Processes benefit greatly from iteration.

Who should own this? 

Depending on which process is presenting recurring problems, will determine which team should own responsibility.

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