Crossbeam, the Ecosystem-Led Growth platform, today released a new report showing that a majority of sales leaders expect to miss their revenue targets for the year and are rethinking the traditional sales-led growth model. According to The Future of Revenue report, business leaders are struggling to attract new leads, close deals in their current pipeline, and overcome constrained budgets on the buyer side.
To understand the sentiment across different stakeholders in Go-to-Market (GTM) teams, Crossbeam partnered with Pavilion, a private membership organization for GTM leaders, CEOs and their teams, to survey more than 425 business leaders across sales, partnerships, marketing and customer success from August to September 2023. The majority (77%) of respondents work at B2B SaaS companies and 70% are director-level and above.
Of the leaders surveyed, 56% say they don’t expect to reach their revenue targets this year, while only 17% report that they expect to exceed annual revenue targets. Compounding the pressure on sales quotas, 54% say the sales cycle has gotten longer over the past two years and only 12% report that it has accelerated.
When asked about the reasons for the revenue shortfall, 46% of sales leaders said it was a lack of high-quality leads, and 43% pointed to a lack of alignment with the marketing team. As a result of these challenges, 89% of all respondents say their companies are looking to change their sales strategy and looking for alternatives to the traditional top-down sales approach.
Embracing Change, Bringing Trust Back to Sales
More than two-thirds (68%) of GTM leaders said that buyers have more control over the sales process, acknowledging that buyers are focusing more on insights and opinions from sources within their own trusted ecosystem.
As GTM leaders embrace change to increase revenue, they are leaning more on relationships and social selling within a broader ecosystem. This ecosystem consists primarily of customer referrals…
Read the full article here