Mike Lander & Brooke Pinkney

Sales directors and chief revenue officers everywhere are seeing the same patterns: pipeline volatility, declining win rates, longer cycles, heavier competition in formal tenders, and relentless downward price pressure. Board conversations are harder. Forecasts feel less predictable.

On the surface it looks like “market conditions” — economic uncertainty, budget scrutiny, more stakeholders, procurement tightening controls. All of that is real.

In this report we share a strategic conversation with Mike Lander, whose career spans more than thirty years in procurement leadership, advisory, and supplier-side roles, alongside Brooke Pinkney, Managing Director of Broadley Speaking. Together they surface something more structural: many sales organisations are not simply facing a difficult market. They are misaligned with how buying actually works.

What the report covers

Why visibility beats hope — Modern buying cycles start long before an RFP appears. They are shaped by governance, risk, cultural fit, supplier familiarity, and internal politics. When sales teams treat the tender as the starting gun, they are often joining a race that began months earlier.

Procurement is not “at the end” — A central reframe: procurement does not only arrive to negotiate price. In sophisticated businesses it influences requirement design, defines guardrails, assesses switching risk, and shapes how stakeholders evaluate proposals — often well upstream of anything visible in your CRM.

From symptoms to causes — Declining win rates can look like stronger competition when rivals simply engaged earlier. Price pressure can look like commoditisation when value was never shaped before cost dominated. Long cycles can look like indecision when buying groups are navigating governance that was set long before you arrived.

What to do about it — The discussion connects these ideas to how sales leaders can build foresight — renewal cycles, governance triggers, transformation programmes, strategic reviews — instead of depending on announcements alone.

The full conversation is available as a PDF. Download it for the complete narrative, examples, and takeaways.