William Bishop’s Post

For those in sales - data to back up the reality of what you will be experiencing: Buyers needing more Intel Long deal cycles More complex decision processes More Exec and budgetary scrutiny As an already effective #seller - what does that mean? Literally just one change, better, more pragmatic forecasting - review your pipeline and be more critical about the unknown, unknowns in your sales process and push deals out to a sensible close length and an appropriate weighting. For those developing, it's upskill or fail: On any large deal (and now the same process applies to increasingly smaller deals): Widen your lens and know your audience, 6/7 years ago, on Corp/Enterprise deals, the average number of client side people involved in the decision making process was 7.2. and while I don't have current data, it's only going up and the stats below confirm that... Know their business better, understand, connect and engage with the interconnected departments (not rocket science but don't multithread at your peril) Pre-mortem deals more deeply and earlier, surface where the "unknown unknowns" lie. Plan how to address these and have the confidence to ask the questions you need to answer: Process Stakeholders Supplier status and compliance Legal And especially a much deeper internal use case beyond the surface level understanding that you have been initially given... Collateral is even more key, "one size does not fit all" and bigger is not best. Covering all needs states is one thing, writing a 40 page opus and expecting that deck to land with senior stakeholders is most definitely another. Think Exec summaries of an Exec summary - if you are sending a "beast" of a deck and to a single champion, you are increasing their time to internally "sell for you" and reducing your chances to guide the narrative and simply making your and their job harder. The time to create a "redacted summary deck" is minimal, the value of having that concise content is much more valuable than that. So, actually, business as normal - but with one silver lining for SaaS - in these current times of "capital efficient growth" (so smaller budgets and layoffs instead of VC backed hiring splurges) look at software spend... The CFO that scrutinises so many more deals has the potential to be your new friend. Show value and an ROI concisely (with the right PMF, use case and solution) and the money is still very much there...