Market survey

We’ve been hearing and seeing sales cycles getting longer and longer. And win rates taking a hit.

To dive into this, we conducted a survey with 109 SaaS revenue leaders to understand the impact various levers have on the sales process in the current environment - both from the perspective of selling and buying.

The majority of respondents bought/sold software at annual deal values >$25K and company sizes ranged 100-1000+ employees. More details are in the full report.

tl;dr - trusted peers matter.

A few more detailed takeaways:

• Buyers reported Talking to Existing Customers & Product Demos were the most influential parts of their decisions to purchase a software. I'll leave it to the report where everything else fell in :)
• Over 85% said having the right customer to speak with helped deals close faster, or at a higher rate.
• On that, the more familiar a reference, the better: best is someone the buyer already knows. Industry, role/title, stage, etc then all come into play.
• Communities (like Pavilion) and direct introductions from the vendor were the top two preferred sources for software purchases.

In brief

People naturally want to validate risky decisions with trusted peers, and buyers are actively seeking it out for validation.

There is also commonly a disconnect between how we like to buy software, and how we like to sell it, that needs to close in favor of the buyer.

Check out below for the full report.

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