Indecision is killing your business
Indecision is killing your business
Because there’s nothing worse than “it’s not the right time”
👋 Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter! Every week, I share cases, personal stories and frameworks for GTM leaders and RevOps.
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Think about your prospects in today’s world.
They very likely are going through just as tough of a time as you are.
They probably have seen lots of churn and lots of layoffs.
And C-level is yelling for “efficient growth” without a clear plan to actually get there.
The result is simple: locked budgets.
What fueled most of our growth in 2019-2022 was FOMO (fear of missing out).
But today’s prospects live in another world. They see it more like FOMU: Fear of messing up.
Meaning, no one will get fired for NOT buying something.
Everything is just so tight, and not doing something feels like the much more comfortable decision.
To see this play out in the numbers, we don't need a PhD.
Sales cycles are up: people take longer with more people involved to purchase
Win-rates are down: ghosting, flaking, and saying no happen a lot more often
Booking per SDR & inbounds down: people don’t even want to waste time exploring
Sure, the result is shitty CAC-Payback. But that’s just the outcome 3 degrees away from the real root-cause.
So if this is really the root-casue. Then, let’s talk today about how you can attack that problem.
Try to start small
Instead of trying to deploy 50 or 100 seats in one go, it’s time we start off small (I’m talking 1-10 seats or whatever your equivalent is).
First, it takes a lot of pressure off the prospect.
Instead of introducing and onboarding the product to their entire team or region, they can test the product on a smaller team right away. Once they see value, then it’s time to expand.
Second, on the sales side, it makes proof points much easier to control. It’s easier to make a smaller group happy and successful with your product than a larger one.
A bonus? There are still buyers out there with some level of discretionary budget that they can use without approval.
If fewer seats get you under that threshold? Suddenly, you have one less CFO who otherwise would pull the plug in the background.
The problem here is that you actually need a good product and delivery. If that sucks, you might be better off to try and hope for the big initial installment.
Try before you buy: The Power of POCs
Full disclosure: we’ve been doing this at Growblocks, and we’ve seen solid results (Maybe that’s because our product is just fucking great?).
But if you tell anyone in the scale-up community that you’re pitching a free trial POC or a generous opt-out period in mid-market and up?
“Are you crazy?”
“You can’t do that!”
“It’ll ruin your metrics!”
The reason why POCs have a bad reputation is that a lot of times, they’re seen as a hail mary.
“This deal fell apart twice already… but do you want a POC?”
If you’re doing that, the deal will never work in the first place.
But the thing is, especially if you're selling something completely new that’s completely untested, it can remove a lot of uncertainty from your prospects.
And yes, this tactic means your rep's behavior has to change.
Suddenly, your AE isn’t just signing the deal, throwing it over the wall, and saying bye forever.
Now, the sales process is extended until the POC or opt-out is over.
In some cases, this means it extends by a few weeks. In other cases, it might mean three months.
If you do this at scale and proactively (not as a last ditch effort to save a deal) then you will need to rethink how your AEs engage. This change will be painful but it might create a better product and a better AE team as a result.
Build trust with flexible contracts
A lot of what buyers are looking for is what they experience in PLG setups. This can absolutely hurt the folks that run a medium-touch or high-tough motion (Mid-market or Enterprise).
But if this is what they want, you need to ask yourself how you could possibly deliver that.
This means not only some opt-outs as discussed above.
But easy up- and downgrades to jump between packages and scale up and down the amount of seats that they need.
This will definitely put a lot of pressure on billing operations and might require you to add some of those contract management options directly into your product.
And yes, as a result, your commission plans will need a re-do. And again, your AE work will need a rethink too.
But if I learned anything in this new world of FOMU, it's that it’s not about what you think is best for you anymore. You need to change—and fast.
And this change is not a small one either. It's a massive change. That is exactly the “SaaS has lost GTM-Fit” problem that Jacco talked about.
But if you don’t execute, the new hesitant and indecisive buyer behavior will kill you.