If you thought the market was cooling off a bit, you weren't entirely right. It's cooling off a lot.
Or at least we think so? Probably?
Jason Lemkin recently posted that for the first time ever, Salesforce, who David Sacks called the "bellweather of SaaS", decided not to provide any guidance to investors for 2023 because the market is too unpredictable.
So unpredictable one of the biggest software companies won't even try? Whew.
In this post, Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta shared eight take-aways from Salesforce's latest earnings call. The bottom line: belt-tightening is the new normal.
So far, all of the knowns and provable pains are things that can be dealt with. It's not so much what has happened so far, it's what might happen, and even moreso, the incredibly low levels of clarity on the range of possible happenings.
When the market is this hard to predict, the best thing is to increase optionality and enhance resilience and redundancy.
You know what does all of those things? You guessed it. A robust partner ecosystem.
Get some allies. Get tighter with those you already have. Fight the unknowns together. Surround your products with complimentary parties who all benefit from your success.
Lemkin added about this rapid turnabout from Salesforce,
Benioff, who just 2 quarters ago said they were seeing no slowdown, said they weren’t assuming things get better anytime soon. That’s a huge change.
Expect more huge changes. Winter is here.
