What do we do when quantity fails?
It’s hard not to feel it, right? The treadmill of lead generation just keeps spinning, and everyone is getting tired.
There has never been a noisier time to be a seller, a marketer, or (God forbid) a software buyer. Email cadences are 10 steps and sent to thousands of people a day. Autodialers mean sellers are making hundreds of calls at a time without knowing who they’re talking to. LinkedIn messages are mostly just bots who are programmed to hope their message is finding us well.
The law of diminishing returns has given way to the law of long-diminished returns. Reply rates on most sequences are under 2%.
Still, growth rates are unapologetic. We need more deals, and that means we need more pipeline. Want to double sales? Need 3x pipeline coverage to do that? You need 6x your current new business in the next 9 months do get there within the FY. Since we haven’t been sitting on a perfect email sequence in the “break glass in case of quota increase” box, the answer is A LOT more quantity. That’s already a lot of noise. Now, keep in mind that the number of SaaS companies has doubled (to 30,000) in the last three years. In the last 3 years, 15,000 new companies have come to compete for your buyer’s attention… and they all need to grow. Critical masses tend to be a good thing in start-up lingo: this is a really bad critical mass.
What’s the answer? Maximize the funnel with customer success and pipeline efficiency.
Customer success: Statistically, SaaS companies raise their prices 12%/yr. At the end of a 3-year contract, you are justifying a 50% price increase. Most SaaS products provide enough value to justify the spend, but only if they’re being used fully and making customers radically successful.
If you don’t have successful customers, add it to the quantity pile.
Pipeline efficiency: Welcome to the age of bottom-of-the-funnel. Close rates have to increase. Time-to-close has to decrease. This isn’t just about lead quality (remember, we need all those leads): this is about flawless execution at scale. Increasing close rates by 5% decreases pipeline demand by 15%. Decreasing time-to-close by one week reduces pipeline demand by 7.5%. And those numbers don’t even account for renewal.
The only way forward is to maximize what we have. To quote Steve Prefontaine: “to give anything less than our best is to sacrifice the gift.”
Make a plan that wins. Execute the plan.
You have 18 months. The average tenure for a CRO is less than 18 months. If you’re going to double revenue, it has to start now. Top-of-the-funnel quantity is no longer the lever to make your mark.
Build something great by executing in every single deal. The market is only getting noisier, which means the burden for execution is greater than ever before. Market leaders zig when others zag. This is the moment to invest in bottom-of-the-funnel execution. Quantity is dead. Vive la révolution and long live sales efficiency.
