So a little ways back Lightspeed Venture Partners put out a new report on 154+ venture-backed cloud start-ups. Full report here.
One data point that stuck out to me is that 100% of them reported $250k+ deals take over 6 months to close on average:
This isn’t a surprise per se.
- $250k+ deals are almost always budgeted as part of an annual budget review process.
- $250k+ deals almost always start off with a pilot and evaluation process.
- $250k+ deals generally are part of business process change planned over an annual (or longer) process
Still sometimes you do close them quicker. I have, especially when you’ve already in essence been pre-selected as the winning vendor before the first call.
But it’s a reminder to get patient with sales cycles on longer deals. You can bring them in for sure. But only so much.
It was also helpful to see that respondents said 53% of $100k deals close in less than 3 months.
A related post here:
