Abel: Time-box lightweight enterprise software pilots to 48–72 hours
“Time box it to two or three days. Don't make it two weeks. Okay. I've done this enough times to say people will go in usually for half a day and get what they need out of it. Okay. Shorten your sales cycle by two weeks by doing two to 48 or 72 hours.”
Abel: Enterprise software pricing should scale with sales cycle length
“Your price should be predicated on your sales cycle, right? Like if you can get a deal done in 90 days for a hundred K, do that all the time. Right. If it takes nine months to get a deal done, you've got, you probably should be charging two 5300.”
Broshi: Joining Enterprise POCs Mid-Flight Disadvantages Startups Despite Shorter Sales Cycles
“We got through the back door at the middle of a POC that has been already running, which is pretty good in terms of shortening the sales cycle, but it's usually very bad and puts you at a disadvantage because you don't really know where you're working on. You …”
Donzé: Enterprise SaaS cannot have both fast sales cycles and high stickiness
“There's two things that you can't have at the same time. You can have a fast decision time, or you can have very high stickiness. You can't have both, because enterprises are very aware of the risk of the vendor looking, and so the more critical you are to an …”
Owner's average sales cycle is under one week
“A lot of one call closes, but average sales cycles under a week.”
Norton: Time to lose drags on sales cycles more than time to win
“And the thing That drags on your total sales cycles is actually time to lose more often than it is time to win.”
Manus: Education and healthcare have the longest, most problematic sales cycles
“Education is one of the hardest education, healthcare. Those are the longer sales cycles. Those are the most problematic.”
Nadel: Founders shouldn't pick markets with long sales cycles based on background
“That's a bad reason. You don't pick the market with a long sales cycle.”
Biscardi: Institutional LP fundraising has one of the economy's longest sales cycles
“This is a super long sales cycle, possibly the longest sales cycle of anything in the economy.”
Blond: Assessing early sales hires should take 30 days at most
“I, the number that was coming to mind for me, it almost doesn't matter how long the cycle is with these early hires in particular, I think, 30 days. And in here, you're probably closer to right with your week. Most, you know, many folks say a quarter, many fol…”
Lemkin: VPs of Sales Can Only Cut Cycles by 20% to 30%
“There's a million things a VP of sales will do to bring, to cut your sales cycles on the order of 20 to 30%, but not half. It's not possible. You can't accelerate procurement. You can't accelerate discovery past a certain point. If you need to do five discover…”
Rubin: B2B win rates fell 15% and deal sizes dropped one-third
“So less than 15% of or win rates dropped by 15%. Average deal values went down by a third, and sales cycles were continued to increase to buy an extra 30%.”
Walling: Finance and banking SaaS requires high pricing due to long sales cycles
“Anytime you're in the investment banking, the financial areas, there's just, there's liability, there are long sales cycles, and there's things, there are things like that that make it a requirement that you charge that much in order to make the deals worthwhi…”
Lemkin: Long sales cycles stop hurting SaaS startups at $20M-$30M ARR
“Long sales cycles don't matter at scale north of 20, thirty million in revenue. You're lining up so many deals at the same time that long sales cycles don't matter because if you have a hundred deals in flight, it actually starts to happen very predictably, ri…”
Lemkin: SaaS sales cycles and churn rates are highly correlated
“Sales cycles and churn rates are highly correlated.”
Patel: Marketplace enterprise SaaS deals close much faster than typical nine-month cycles
“So whether you're spending 20,000 dollars ARR or 250,000 dollars ARR, it doesn't follow the usual tax economics of, well, a 300,000 dollar deal should take nine months to close. Not true. Nobody has nine months in this market. If you're trying to like keep Ube…”
Klarer: BridgeCrest enterprise sales cycle averages about six months
“It's like a typical enterprise sales cycle. So like six months or so.”