Dear SaaStr: How You Deal With Long Sales Cycles, E.g. 7-8+ Months?
A few things:
First, you have to get Zen. You cannot force 9 month sales cycles into 9 days. You can bring them in a bit — but not that much.
You cannot force Fortune 500 companies to buy six and seven figure deals in the same way SMBs buy a $10/month product. In the first 2 years, this will create a lot of stress. But later, you won’t care as much. You’ll have enough deals in the pipeline, that they “hatch” in various orders, and you’ll get predictability around it. This is why “pipeline” doesn’t make any sense to start-ups, not really, but makes total sense for BigCo sales executives.
Second, embrace the parts of long sales cycles that take extra work:
- Embrace getting good at RFP. Instead of running from them.
- Embrace doing all the compliance requirements (SOC-2, HIPPA, Two-factor authentication, etc)
- Embrace selling to multiple stakeholders. Force yourself to sell to 3-4 folks per deal.
Third, go visit them in person.
Then you’ll actually learn how to get it done faster.
Fourth, just ask upfront what the timing is for the project — and if it’s budgeted or not.
They’ll tell you how they are planning to evaluate and deploy. Just ask.
Finally, and importantly — get help that has closed similar-sized deals. Great enterprise sales executives and VPs know how to shorten sales cycles to as short as practical.
You can’t bring a 9 months deal in, in just 9 weeks or 9 hours. But you probably can shorten it to 6 months, or even 4 months. A great VP of Sales knows that one of the best ways to hit her number is to short sales cycles to the maximum practical. Any more than that, and you take a revenue hit. Crazy discounting and high pressure sales tactics don’t work on long sales cycle deals. They just lead to a smaller deal, no faster.
Junior and inexperienced sales reps can often do OK with small deals, with good guidance and training. But they can’t bring a $750k deal with Aetna in faster.
But a great, experienced VP of Sales can.
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
