62 hours of lost market intelligence for every new customer. Let me explain…

For all you Winning by Design Revenue Architects out there, you’ll know that at roughly £15K ACV, your SQL to new customer ratio is about 28:1.

Let’s break it down.

🤔 Qualifying a lead:

2 meetings say, initial discovery call and then perhaps a second disco demo / discovery call prior to hand-off (if two-stage selling). Let’s call that 30 minutes a piece.

🤓 Developing an SAO:

7 meetings minimum across five different stakeholders at 60 mins each. With the common economic climate and budgetary pressure, I think buyers are involving more internal stakeholders to ensure they make the right decision first-time (have others seen this?).

· Initial discovery meeting with Initiator and Champion · Detailed demo with Champion and initiator · Meet with Decider · Meet with Gatekeeper · Another meeting with Champion · Meet with Exec Buyer and Procurement · Final meeting with group

Assuming you agree to mutually commit, that’s 💬 8 hours of conversation 💬 per closed won customer just from the sales cycle. (I checked with Four/Four and that would give you about 240 codified insights per deal).

But don’t forget:

😜 We have to engage 28 SQLs for 60 minutes each to convert to an SAO = 1680 minutes of conversation. 😎 We then have to engage 6 SAOs for 8 hours each to convert to one customer = 2520 minutes of conversation.

So, for every customer won it’s fair to say that there have probably been over 70 hours of prospect conversations. Assume that someone is only reviewing the 8 hours of closed won conversations (trawling through recordings!), that’s 62 hours of market intelligence sitting there not researched!

Or 1,860 insights in Four/Four money!

Of course every good sales manager should know the meeting patterns for successful commits to ensure deals are headed on the right path. Right? 😉

With better demand gen activity / content and front-loading buyer education, we hope to improve the deal cycle length as we've already built trust and credibility.

Please comment on my assumptions here, appreciating of course that for illustrative purposes this is not a one size fits all!

I haven't even got started on continued customer conversations!