Now is the Time for Change
Slow buying cycles aren’t just a market problem—they’re a sales opportunity, if you approach them right.
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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:
Recently, Forrester published the “State of Buying” report and they showed that 75% of businesses are taking longer to make buying decisions than they have in previous years. And there's a lot going into that. It could be about uncertainty in the market. It could be about lack of staff on their teams. It could be about global uncertainty, economic uncertainty, a whole host of things...
The fact is that it doesn't really matter. It is what it is. And we have to use that data to our advantage.
So now is not the time, as a smart seller, for you to be going after a single market. Let's make sure that you're broadening your scope of customers to find some that maybe are negatively influenced by what's going on and some who are positively influenced. It's also not the time to be working with a single point of contact, because that's going to slow down your sales cycle, because it creates more risk. So using this data from Forrester let's reach out wide and deep inside the account to make sure that we're building consensus and trust inside the organization.
It's also not a time to be using metrics that maybe served you well last year or in years previous. Maybe we need to be looking more closely at what's happening in our pipeline and realizing that maybe our closing ratios need to be expanded. Maybe our sales cycle time needs to be expanded. Maybe we need more opportunities in the pipeline to make up for some of that difference. I know when clients of mine have experienced this in the past, they've taken a look at their pipeline very wisely and realized that they need a five times pipeline, not a three times pipeline. Because as they're working through this indecision and this slowdown in decision making, they needed to find more deals to backfill those holes so not to create a sales slump.