The Biggest Driver of Longer Buying Cycles

After many months of build-up and teases, we finally revealed some important facts about large scale technology purchases this past July at our virtual conference (#GartnerTGI).?There have been press releases and articles and lots of tweets from me that you can go find, but let me reiterate the most important facts:

• The majority of large scale tech purchase decisions were made with high regret (High regret is when expectations are not being met and customers settled for something less ambitious than they were looking for when they started).
• In high regret purchases,?89%?of respondents felt team members had very different and conflicting objectives for the purchase.
• The high regret purchases took, on average,?7 to 10 months longer?than purchases with no regret.
• For these longer duration buying cycles, the most common funding model was shared--funding came from multiple business units and IT. This adds to the complication (if you have to pay for part of it, you want a big say in the decision and want your specific needs and wants addressed). We've written about this for clients already.

We’ve been talking about democratization of technology, the new chasm, and consensus buying (starting with “The Challenger Customer”) for a while.??Now we know the real impact of these consensus issues–when we encourage and support—or don’t try to address–appealing to individuals unique goals,?we are delaying decisions.

I decided to look a bit deeper at the conflicting objectives story.?The chart below shows all of the responses (over 1000) to the question that was built using a 7 point likert scale.??As the chart shows, folks that feel strongly that there is no conflicting goals buy much faster than everyone else.??As soon as I get to neutral or agreement that there are conflicting objectives, the time takes a big leap (after a small bump with a choice of “3”).

The overriding advice given this data:

• You have to search for, or work to create, common ground across the buying team as a higher priority than working to find out what uniquely appeals to individuals. Pay attention to power and politics, as that could shift things, but the evidence above highlights the importance of gaining agreement
• The reasons for conflicting objectives may be as simple as the buying team never confronting the issue. With the diversity of teams, and a tendency to look at things from our own personal perspective, there may be assumptions that everyone has bought into the goal and objective of the purchase.
• Any sales process should have a step around driving agreement on the objective of the purchase. If you are fortunate, this might be an easier step than you might expect.
• If I use our Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles, the organizations that are more likely to buy faster, agree on objectives, and have less regret come from the three profiles that fall on the left side of the New Chasm: Agile Leaders (FID), Fast Followers (SCD), and Disciplined Followers (SIR).

Worried about longer sales cycles??Then you should be worried about the impact of conflicting objectives. We have lots more on this topic for clients.