When we asked sales leaders about the impending fourth quarter, some of them gave us an insight into their own situation....

Bob Apollo.

Bob Apollo – Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners (IT)

‘According to the clients I am working with and the messages I hear from the market, it remains tough out there, but some of the projects that have been in limbo since Q4 last year are starting to come back to life.

‘Even in live projects, there remains a big gap between being chosen and getting the order. Many internal champions haven’t yet fully understood how to navigate their pet projects through a financial approvals process that has become much stricter and highly risk-averse. “Deciding to do nothing” remains a common outcome.

‘The vendors that are breaking through have mastered the art of both eliminating the perceived risk of their solution and elevating the negative consequences of doing nothing. Simply exhorting your salespeople to “selling hard” is absolutely, definitively, a losing strategy. They have to eliminate risk and facilitate the prospect’s buying process.

‘The early adopter market has shrivelled to almost nothing – not because their aren’t still some early adopter individuals out there, but because the companies they work within have become more conservative in approving new projects and new expenditure. So innovative technologies are having to work out how to “cross the chasm” (and talk business, not technology) far earlier in their company’s evolution than was necessary in the past.

‘Start-ups who haven’t mastered this are particularly hard hit, without an installed base or an established service revenue stream to fall back on. But failure is not inevitable – companies that have the discipline to focus on creating genuine customer value (rather than product marketing puffery) are winning business.’

Eduardo Launa – CEO, GTM (IT)

‘We where talking about this today, our main provider has closed fiscal year today and it was time to look back and see how we where going. I have to say that this year is going very well for our very small Spanish company.

‘The fact is that we are going to close our best year and we want to make fourth quarter even better than other years and prepare for 2010 the year in which our company will be ten years old!

‘The points we are focusing are adding new low-entry products: the market demands them and the ones in our portfolio don´t perform well at the moment and we are looking for a real partnership in the SaaS (software as a service) model. We’re also considering the mixture of our portfolio.

‘We are going to use this quarter to hire, train and evolve towards more consulting services to grow inside the customers more than we are doing at the moment.’

Kathleen Steffey – president, Naviga (US sales & marketing recruitment)

‘I'm going to have the best quarter of the year, 4th quarter 2009. Customers are starting to execute and make decisions.‘