In our last newsletter we mentioned going high early and often to adjust to today’s challenging economy and sales environment. Let’s dive more into that interview with a SaaS rep for more on that strategy and others.
Q: How have sales changed this year?
A: The biggest trend we’ve seen is sales cycles lengthening. Contract size is still strong but it takes more approvals, which can add a month or two. In the past we only needed one executives approval but now we need more. Buyers are more conservative now so we need to work the business case more for each department to make each decision more bulletproof.
Q: What’s your process for navigating longer sales cycles and extra approvals?
A: Two calls in, if it seems real then I have my CEO (her assistant) send an email to an executive at the prospect’s company, offering to align priorities.
Next we offer to collaborate on a business case. Execs often look at our product and say “oh that’s a good idea” but it needs to be more defined- increased efficiency for him, increased loyalty for her, ROI calculations, etc.- for all execs to sign off one by one.
We basically try to go high and then wide. Before we went wide then high.
Q: Tell me more about the email from your executive to theirs.
I type up an email then send it to my CEO’s assistant. She uses our targeting tool to find the email address of the department head of the teams I’ve been speaking with, then sends the email from my CEO’s account.
It’s the same email format every time but I customize the bullet points to match their priorities I learned from speaking with their team.