For years, SaaS had a tailwind.
Building software was hard, so if you had a good solution and a market for it, you could grow fast, even with a nice-to-have product. Sales was often relatively easy (sorry, sales...).
That’s changing.
Buyers have become much more critical, on price but above all on adoption. Their question is no longer “does this software do what we need?” but “will this actually get implemented, and will my team use it?”
Sales cycles get longer.
The reflex is to fix that in sales: more SDRs, AI outbound, a new methodology.
But AI makes a good seller maybe two to three times more productive. It doesn’t fix a buyer who doubts the implementation. Koen Stam (Personio) put it sharply on the Summit stage: pipeline isn’t a top-of-funnel problem, it sits in the entire customer journey.
Is it all bad news?
No, luckily not.
Here’s what I see the best teams doing:
They treat it as a delivery problem, not a sales problem. They stop selling software and start selling the outcome, and they take responsibility for getting the customer there.
They bring services back.
Really? 🤨
Yep, really.
Onboarding packages, professional services, sometimes even forward-deployed engineers who sit with the customer until it works.
One highly successful founder told me the technology is only half the job; understanding the customer’s process is the other half. They use implementation as the way in. Once the first use case runs, the next ones follow. Services shorten time to value, and time to value drives expansion.
They know where the line is. Services only pay off if the deal size carries them. One founder’s rule of thumb: below roughly € 20K ACV, invest in onboarding and documentation, not in people.
Self-serve isn’t dead. But in mid-market and up, buyers are asking for a complete solution again. Software alone isn’t enough.