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hey everybody i wanted to chat for just a minute about dealing with long sale cycles um if you're selling to tiny businesses or have a freemium service you're probably not dealing with this maybe customers convert to paid and in a day a week an hour um but if you're selling bigger deals 50k 100k later million dollar deals you're gonna have you're gonna have long sales cycles um and it's going to be frustrating at first you will come in and you'll get an amazing lead from a fortune 500 company from a tech leader and they're going to want to use your product even in the early days you're going to get so excited and you're going to find out once you start talking it might not be until the end of the year and it might take a couple months to evaluate all the vendors and then a pilot and then an internal review and finally a deployment and you're in the early days the first months the first years the first few years even that could seem like forever you've got to put points on the board now and as exciting as some of these logos are you know that long sales cycle can just seem brutal but let me give you sort of four thoughts on how to deal with it and these are not um jaw-dropping thoughts these are not but i think ultimately if you change your mindset your approach to long sale cycles um they'll become instead of a liability they'll become a superpower for you something you get very good at dealing with so the first one is get zen get zen about long sale cycles here's the thing you can shorten sales cycles um but you cannot take a big company's nine-month process and compress it into nine days it cannot happen i was briefly a vp in a fortune 500 tech company and you sort of get it when you're a vendor but you don't really see it until you're on the other side bigger things get budgeted um and they get budgeted in one of two ways either they get budgeted annually so it's almost if you depending on when you're watching this video it may almost be too late to get into a budgeting cycle i'm i'm making this in february and for bigger investments bigger software investments it's too late for this year like you've got to get into next year so that's profoundly frustrating as a startup that you you have to wait another year to get into a budgeting cycle although that's mostly for really big checks for somewhat smaller checks there's a discretionary budget when i was a vp in the fortune 500 i had about a 500 000 discretionary budget for my team that i could divide up into 10 chips five chips a few pieces of software adding up to a half million that would help my team be more efficient so not all things have to be literally budgeted for a given year but they do they do take time and they do compete for that 500k budget and it takes time and there's multiple stakeholders it's not just one person that makes the decision like a small business to maybe multiple multiple functional areas that want to chime in on this decision and they may want to evaluate two or three vendors even if they've already picked you as you know this a lot of times they still need to go through evaluation to make sure to make sure they're making the right decision especially if you don't have the number one brand right it's always true in the enterprise that if you're an emerging vendor someone probably has to prove you're a better you're better than buying salesforce or whatever other leader is out there so you can't you can't shorten timelines magically but you can get better at them and the second point so first get zen about it realize it's going to take time and don't over stress the fact that you can't close a big deal in weeks that it's going to take months to get help get help because the ceos were too busy as founders we don't have time to do nothing but work on that big deal i've done that from time to time dropped everything and worked on a big deal but what you'll find is when you hire a vp of sales a sales leader and even a few aes that have done deals at bigger deal sizes they know if they're experienced they know they know how to identify all the stakeholders in a deal they know how to outline a process with them they know how to talk about when the initial vendor decisions will be made whether an rfp is involved um who needs to get a demo when we can get a pilot going if one's necessary when we can get into production and they'll know they'll outline it all with all the stakeholders and by doing that and then talking every week about a process they'll pull your sales cycle in at least 20 to 30 and sometimes cut it in half just by marshaling all the correct troops to an end goal together as a team because their goal is to go live too no one wastes their time no customers or prospects waste their time so when they're investing the time with your team with your sales team and the rest they want to go live too if if it meets their needs if it meets their needs and a great sales team will not just be about getting the biggest check and getting money yes that's their end goal but they know if they don't outline a process to meet the customer's needs the deal won't happen so they get very good at it more enterprise heads of sales and aes and so that means when you hire a good one it's got to be good but when you hire a real head of sales and maybe a few aes that have done this before you will watch your sales cycles shorten so get as soon as you've closed a few yourself go out and get some help but make sure it's folks that are experienced at your deal size not folks that know how to do just smaller deals or even much much larger deals but folks that have a few years of experience at least closing real deals at your core acv um so that's point two get the help point three is that ultimately ultimately long sale cycles are not all pad so what do i mean by that of course you want them to shorten you you want to shorten sales cycles for no other reason that um the shorter the shorter a sales cycle is all things vehicle the higher the higher the chance the deal has to close time time is the enemy of all deals um but ultimately once you've taken what used to be say nine months and shrunken into six months with your great head of sales um once you have ten of these deals in flight instead of just one you'll get a little zen about it in fact it will give you predictable pipeline and predictable revenue so one big enterprise deal at a time is super stressful um it's just one and the sales cycle's on even two or three is stressful once you start getting five six seven of these going um long cycles sales cycles aren't all bad because again they're predictable you can get a sense of the odds of them closing um you'll get better and better at that and you'll start having these arrows land each quarter it won't be all bad as you start to go long and fourth i mean this is another potential forced error or unforced error rather that i see so many startups make if you really want to shorten sales cycles for real and you want to close more deals stop being scared of the pilot of the paid pilot um enterprises want they're willing to take risk um if they weren't they wouldn't be talking to you folks writing larger checks but they don't want to take all the risk up front so a lot of founders and a lot of first-time heads of sales especially coming from smaller deals that aren't used to it they don't want to do paid pilots why do they not want to do pilots because they have to sell the deal twice first they have to go to all the work and do to the discovery and do the zooms and do the webinars and do the demos for say 100k deal or but all they get is a 10k pilot to start it sounds like a terrible deal for a sales rep and a and i guess it is a terrible deal viewed in the short term but you got to get good at it because if you get really good at if you're okay with a pilot if you can okay it in a week um get clear goals for that pilot close that pilot in 60 days and make everyone a success you're going to close the bigger deal and so if your customers are asking a lot for pilots and proof of concepts i know i know it'll bum some folks out on the sales team in other words but pick up the team and tell them this is part of what we're going to get good at and set a kpi and say look i know they're stressful but we're going to close 90 of our paid pilots and proof of concept we're going to close 90 and when we do that you're going to get your commission it's going to happen this is just part of our cadence the way we're going to do business and make paid pilots paid trials paid proof of concepts a superpower because then you will beat out all your competitors and other folks that don't want to do them that aren't good at them um and lastly related to that do free trials do free pilots help i'm not so sure i have not seen a lot of b2b companies be successful giving away pilots um free stuff isn't valued um and just as importantly because it's not valued a lot of times the bigger company won't put the resources on it they won't really do find a business group to try it they won't uh toy around with the business process change often required with the vendor so i rarely i frankly never see free truly free work um a real enterprise can at least get 10 grand for a pilot if it's important to them so um i know they're stressful megan and i no long sales cycles or drive you nuts but if you embrace them if you shorten them if you get help and you get really good at what it takes to close these deals and then you have a bunch in flight you're going to get really good at it and they're going to turn out to be an asset