BC Startup Sales Podcast – Shortening SaaS Sales Cycles with Don Otvos (DataHug)

This week, we welcomed Don Otvos into the Bowery Capital studio to discuss “Shortening SaaS Sales Cycles.” Whether it’s your average cycle across all opportunities or that one yet-to-close whale eating up resources, time-to-close is a universal concern. As you probably know if you’re an early-stage founder or salesperson, there’s also no easy solution to shrinking SaaS sales cycles; but as we’ll learn from Don, there are a few ways you can best position your team for success. Don has deep experience in and an excellent background for dealing with this problem. Currently, he is the VP of Sales Ops at DataHug, a sales optimization platform that helps reduce the blind spot for sales managers so they can forecast more accurately and better coach their reps. Prior to that, Don series as a Senior Manager of Global Sales Ops at Yammer, and beforehand spent time an Account Management roles at Mulesoft. So he brings to this week’s podcast both his first-hand insight as a long-time sales ops guru and a second-hand perspective having worked with a range of DataHug customers seeking greater sales efficiency.

Reducing SaaS sales cycles is somewhat of a tricky topic because the solution is inevitably variable based on your company’s product, ACV, industry, etc. But in our episode, Don describes a great framework for how to go about solving the problem in your own environment. The framework covers three main steps, each of which we explore in depth: (1) focus getting a foot in the door; (2) discover the “compelling events” that occur in your SaaS sales cycles; and (3) institutionalize learnings into your sales process to affect change. Encircling the entire framework is a theme we frequently encounter in the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast: step 0 is rigor around data collection and hygiene, a pre-requisite to nearly any sales ops or efficiency initiative. Until next week, happy listening!

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