So Vendr has their latest SaaS Buyer Report out here. There’s plenty of good data in there and it’s worth a read.
One metric I wanted to highlight. And look, average sales cycles are almost meaningless. Bigger deals take longer. Small deals can close in one call. Some leads are warmer than others. More here.
But still … across all the SaaS vendors that Vendr tracks, how long do deals take to close?
41 days overall for new deals. And renewals take 53 days.
As we can see below, the averages also vary substantially by category. Zendesk and Datadog take the longest, and ZoomInfo and 1Password deals close the fastest:
So what’s actionable here?
Just one thing, to keep everyone honest: consider deals stale around Day 45 unless there is a true, documented set of steps toward an actual close.
To me, that’s the best use of this data. At some point, you gotta close out opportunities. At some point, your pipeline isn’t real. And that doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help the company figure out how they’ll do. And it doesn’t help reps to hang onto deals that aren’t really going anyway.
Review every deal for real that’s been in process for 45 days. If there isn’t real, true process, yes it may still close. But it’s likely not live at the moment. Treat is as such, and move it out of the current pipeline.
A related post here:
