Gartner & Sales
It was a matter of time. Not months or years. Nanosecond time. We see it when big boulders start to roll downhill. They move gradually, slowly, and then it happens. Momentum builds. It becomes unstoppable. Witness Gartner this week.
Two weeks ago it was Bloomberg, last week it was McKinsey. The business models have targets on their back and major brands who represent them do too. Gartner can talk about IT advisory and clients leaning into advice about AI. It can rebrand as an “insights company.” No matter how you cut it, companies that do analysis and advisory, are staring down a barrel of prompt-happy users. Just ask Forrester whose growth continues to decline. Just as SurveyMonkey and Google democratized surveys and search making everyone a primary and secondary researcher, now too everyone is an analyst or a consultant. Knowledge and expertise are at our fingertips. We all have answers.
Is Gartner going to disappear? McKinsey? Bloomberg? They could. We all could. Business models are changing like that lumbering boulder moving fast. So, while we are retooling business models, building scaffolding for a new era, deploying solutions to customers; we have to keep the sales engine stoked.
To be clear Gartner has one of the best, if not the best, sales engines in our industry. Gene Hall is an operational genius, and we have long admired his relentless operating focus and way the company has scaled. I knew Gideon Gartner and remember when the company and its genre began — with a need to take on IBM and provide customer insights about doing business with Big Blue. It’s an amazing case study. Its slowing growth is emblematic of companies not built into workflows and who are in the crosshairs of AI.
Still, sales must keep coming in while we are all re-writing the playbook. In that spirit we repeated our quarterly sales benchmark and here’s our top advice.
Our Q2 benchmark showed market friction remains real. Decision inertia and soft renewals continue to drag. Q3 will continue to test resolve.
The dominance of buyer hesitation and renewal softness underscores what we’re hearing anecdotally: deals aren’t falling apart — they’re just stuck.
The Q3 outlook:
- 71% say customer indecision remains the top challenge.
- 50% flag forecast accuracy as slipping — too many “maybes.”
- 63% are ramping outbound; 54% are launching new products; 54% are leaning into cross-sell/up-sell.
- 30% are adding to sales teams; 0% report layoffs or freezes.
Anecdotally, we continue to hear concern that despite hard work, market energy feels off. The risk isn’t collapse — it’s stagnation. Maybes are the sales cycle’s kill button. Train the team to get to fast yeses or fast noes. Maybes are torture.
Leaders are staying on offense. Outbound is back in focus, with many doubling efforts to reach qualified buyers. New product launches and account expansion strategies are gaining traction, and teams are investing in growth — not retreating. It’s not a wave of reinvention — it’s a disciplined push to move the needle.
In our partner’s wise words:
- Target better and ramp outbound with intent.
- Make it easy to buy — de-risk proposals, tighten messaging, and lead with ROI.
- Inspect the funnel for urgency and focus on high-fit, high-probability deals. (Remember those fast yeses and noes)
- Protect renewals through early, value-led outreach.
- Pilot new revenue streams quickly, guided by real customer feedback. (See this Outsell piece on experimentation.)
And my personal favorite — lean into F2F selling. Differentiate on visits, lunches, breakfasts, and taking time to GO SEE people. Sales is a relationship function. It is not an order taking function. It is there to build partnerships, be a solution provider, not simply a vendor.
Too much of the sales function devolved during COVID, the SaaS era of sales-as-a-disservice and the volume at any cost mentality of the SDR and the drive-by mess sales turned into. And let’s not forget the mismatch of poor TRMan, his tortuous hamster wheel.
So, it’s time to get out more. Fund more travel, start small, build quota into trips.
We’re evolving the sales benchmark and it’s open to you. It only takes 5 minutes, and you’ll have a beat on growth in the data, information, content-enabled b2b tech world and how you stack up. Just reach out to Michael Dziekan to participate.
If your sales engine needs a tune-up, Christine and her team are just a call away — she’s an Outsell preferred partner for a reason. And if you need anything at any time, contact us.
Happy Selling!