I attended a webinar a couple of weeks ago and Eloqua (www.eloqua.com)was the sponsor. Eloqua is a reputable sales and marketing CRM company that helps organizations integrate both Marketing and Sales leads to make sales departments more productive.
One of the speakers - Rick Page - is the author of several books but most notably "Hope is not a Strategy". The title tells all - I have read it and being a sales guy I thought it was quite insightful.
Anyway - Rick said something that really hit home for me. He said that in his 30 years in the sales training business - he has seen huge changes - just in the last 2 years. Partly due to recession and Web 2.0. What was really interesting to me is that Rick indicated that sales cycles are very long - compared to 5 years ago. The other point that stood out was that "nowadays the approval cycle - is now longer than the evaluation cycle". This blew me away. Some experts refer to this as "funnel bulge" - where sales people have a great pipeline but the opportunities aren't moving down the funnel like they use to.
I thought it was just me. Nice to know this is a new reality. I don't like it - but it is what it is.
My advice is to continue to fill the funnel and try your best with face to face meetings with the key decision makers to move the opportunity to close.
