The Quest for Better, Faster Deals

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network. All comments or opinions expressed hereunder are my own and do not represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management.

Every vendor wants to win good business faster.??Between the economic uncertainty and the fervor around Generative AI, it seems like more opportunities are getting stuck.??In my opinion, there are typically 3 key things to do to help keep deals moving:

• Drive Consensus on Objectives and Goals ?– Without this, the buying team will go in circles and people are unlikely to push the purchase through.
• Continuously Qualify – When things are challenging, we may fill our pipelines with less qualified deals, hoping volume gives us more swings at deals that won’t stall.?This could make things worse.??Understanding your customer (including psychographics like ETAs) and interpreting their actions to demonstrate commitment is key.?This may not help you get deals unstuck, but it might keep you from wasting times on the ones that are unlikely to go anywhere anytime fast.
• Build a Better Business Case ?– When purchases face additional scrutiny, a strong and complete business case becomes more important.?You need to help your prospects build a business case that is best positioned for a fair review.

All that being said, I also wanted to see if there were any characteristics of purchases that could move faster, have more focus and attention, and generally be high quality.??For this, I looked at our study of high impact software purchases by departments.??We asked our respondents what drove or triggered the purchase.?They had a number of choices but a few stood out.

In terms of deal quality, when a purchase was driven by strategic planning or the leadership vision for the department, high-quality deals were more likely to occur than for any other reason, with statistical significance.??A bit behind them were decisions driven by a board directive or customer feedback.?These did not hit that high-quality deal threshold, but they did tend to have cycle times that were shorter than other categories (the two high-quality categories also had generally shorter cycle times).

At the other end, with the lowest HQD % and generally slower cycle times were purchases driven by a need to respond to regulatory requirements or triggered as an outcome of an external consulting project.?The regulatory issue is a bit of a surprise, in a situation where a hard deadline exists, deals will likely be faster.?I’d interpret the consulting project result as driven by buying team members not being bought into the recommendations or not taking ownership based on the work of others.

But the top end is where we need to focus.?It’s obvious, but we often don’t put enough energy into it.??The more we can connect what we offer to its role in helping a company achieve strategic objectives and goals, the less likely we are to get stuck, deprioritized, or ignored all together (with the dreaded no-decision).

Working to learn the strategic goals of companies is a critical part of ABM and sales efforts.?GenAI tools can probably help.

But if you want to reduce your stalled situations, consider trying some of the ideas outlined here.