So sales is often your biggest department, and one of your most vital. But it’s often fairly short-term focused. It has to be, in part. Sales has to hit the month, the quarter, the year. It’s tough to put much effort beyond that.
As you get more enterprise, with longer sales cycles, you get better here. Both because you get used to longer sales cycles, and also, you get better at the pace expansion takes. Here’s an example of a typical bigger deal at $1B+ ARR Procore, where it can take 3-7 years to fully expands accounts for its SaaS for Construction:
But what many sales execs and start-ups with smaller deal sizes often miss is often the answer isn’t no. It’s just not today. Not now. I’m really not ready today. And you 3-4 break-up emails and AI cadences aren’t going to change that.
Many marketers think about, at best, 10% of your prospects and potential customers actually being “in market” and ready to buy at any given time:
Let me give one specific example of SaaStr itself. We had a small software stack for our big events (Annual, Europa, etc) but it’s an important one. Roughty:
- Ticket and web-based agenda software
- On-site registration and lead scanning
- Networking software
- Sponsor software
It’s about 6 vendors total. And there is a lot of risk to changing, and we have a tiny team. This year, we added 1 new vendor. One. And it was during a brief window between the two SaaStr Annuals.
Now it’s too late. Everything in our software stack is locked down from now until the end of the year. It doesn’t matter how interested we are in theory — there is no time.
We did want to switch out our vendor to manage tickets and agenda this year — after 4 years of talking about it. And the other day, a next-gen vendor did reach out. But it was just too late for now. Too late for this year, really.
Will they reach out again when we have another window, in August or so? Or will they just send us 3 emails in an AI cadence and fade away?
We’ll see.
If only they’d reached back out 2 months ago, we might be customers today though. That much I know.
