Building Tingono: How to Sell Software in Markets Where Committees Meet Quarterly

Building Tingono: How to Sell Software in Markets Where Committees Meet Quarterly

You’ve found the perfect prospect. They love your product. The ROI is obvious. Budget is available. And then they say: “Our compliance committee meets next quarter. We’ll need to present this to them first.”

Your deal just got pushed by three months. Minimum.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, shared how he built an entire go-to-market strategy around this reality. “Our sales cycles are twelve months plus,” he explains. But the challenge isn’t convincing prospects to buy—it’s navigating the organizational machinery that governs how large, regulated companies make purchasing decisions.

The Committee Reality

Enterprise software sales are rarely blocked by the product. They’re blocked by process. In regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and compliance, purchasing decisions don’t happen in individual conversations. They happen in committee meetings.

“These types of companies, they have a compliance committee. They only meet once a quarter,” Parry explains. “So just getting in front of the committee could be three months, and then they debate it for another quarter.”

Think about what this means for sales execution. You have an initial conversation with a prospect in January. They’re interested, but they need to present it to their compliance committee. That committee’s next meeting is in March. You present in March, but they need time to evaluate and discuss internally. The committee reconvenes in June and decides they want to move forward, but now it needs to go to procurement and legal. You’re now in Q3, six months after your first conversation, and you still haven’t closed.

This isn’t a bug in your sales process. It’s how these organizations are designed to work. Compliance decisions affect regulatory risk, which means they require oversight from multiple stakeholders. The committee structure exists to ensure that no single person can make a decision that exposes the company to regulatory liability.

The Pipeline Math That Changes Everything

When your sales cycles stretch beyond a year, pipeline management becomes a completely different discipline. The deals closing in Q4 aren’t the ones you started working in Q3—they’re the conversations you initiated in Q3 of the previous year.

This creates a forecasting challenge that trips up most founders. You can’t look at your current pipeline and project it forward one quarter. You need to look at your pipeline from 12-15 months ago and understand what percentage converted. That historical conversion rate, combined with your current early-stage pipeline, tells you what revenue you can expect a year from now.

For Tingono, this meant building a pipeline that’s constantly 10-12 months deep. They couldn’t afford to have a gap in pipeline generation because that gap wouldn’t show up in revenue for a year—and by then, it would be too late to fix.

The implication for founders is stark: if you’re in a long-cycle business and you take your foot off the gas on pipeline generation for even one quarter, you’ll feel the impact three or four quarters later. By the time your revenue starts declining, the damage was done a year ago.

The Champion Strategy

In committee-driven sales processes, your actual customer isn’t the committee—it’s the champion who will present your solution to the committee. The entire sale hinges on finding someone internal who believes in your product enough to advocate for it through multiple organizational layers.

Tingono’s consulting background gave them an advantage here. Before they were selling software, they were working directly with compliance teams, building relationships, and establishing credibility. When they launched their platform, they already had potential champions who understood what they were building and why it mattered.

But even without that consulting foundation, the principle holds: in long-cycle enterprise sales, you’re not selling to the organization. You’re selling to an individual who will sell to the organization on your behalf. Your job is to arm that champion with everything they need to make a compelling case.

This means documentation that addresses every question the committee might ask. It means case studies that demonstrate ROI in similar organizations. It means security certifications and compliance documentation that pre-emptively answer objections. It means understanding the committee’s decision criteria and making sure your champion can speak to each one.

Timing the Organizational Calendar

One tactical lesson from Tingono’s experience is learning to work with, not against, organizational calendars. If compliance committees meet quarterly, you need to know when those meetings are scheduled and work backwards.

If a committee meets in March, June, September, and December, and you want to close a deal in Q4, you need your champion presenting to the committee in September at the latest. Which means you need to have completed initial discovery, demos, and internal alignment by late August. Which means your first conversation needs to happen no later than June or July.

This calendar-driven sales process requires a different kind of discipline than typical enterprise sales. You’re not just moving deals through stages—you’re coordinating with a fixed schedule of decision points that you can’t control or accelerate.

The companies that succeed in these environments are the ones that track not just deal stages, but organizational calendars. They know when their prospects’ committees meet, when budget cycles open, when procurement processes need to be initiated. They’re playing chess with the organizational calendar, not just optimizing their own sales process.

When Deals Die (And Why Price Usually Isn’t the Reason)

With such long sales cycles, Tingono has had plenty of time to understand why deals succeed or fail. The insight is counterintuitive: “We haven’t really had too many deals die because of price,” Parry reveals. “Usually if the deal dies, it’s for other reasons.”

In committee-driven organizations, deals die because of timing, competing priorities, or changes in personnel. The compliance committee might decide they need to focus on a different regulatory requirement first. The champion might leave the company. Budget that was available in Q1 might get reallocated in Q2 before the committee can approve the purchase.

This changes how you think about objection handling. In fast-cycle sales, price objections are common and need to be addressed directly. In long-cycle, committee-driven sales, the objections are organizational, not economic. Your champion believes in the value. The committee might agree on the value. But the purchase still doesn’t happen because the organizational machinery doesn’t align.

The strategic implication is that you need to build relationships at multiple levels. If your champion leaves, you need other contacts who can pick up the torch. If priorities shift, you need enough organizational awareness to pivot your positioning. If budget gets reallocated, you need to understand the budget cycle well enough to know when to re-engage.

The Patience That Separates Winners From Losers

The companies that fail in long-cycle, committee-driven markets are usually the ones that try to fight the timeline. They push for faster decisions. They try to circumvent the committee process. They get frustrated when deals don’t close on their desired timeline.

Tingono succeeded by accepting the reality and building around it. Year-long sales cycles aren’t a problem to solve—they’re a constraint to design for. “We’ve been pretty capital efficient,” Parry notes. That efficiency wasn’t just about staying lean—it was about ensuring they could sustain operations through the natural rhythm of committee-driven decision making.

The principle extends beyond just having enough runway. It’s about maintaining consistent pipeline generation even when deals are taking forever to close. It’s about not panicking when Q2 looks light because you know the Q1 pipeline will eventually convert. It’s about understanding that in these markets, patience and process discipline beat speed and aggression.

For founders evaluating whether to pursue enterprise sales in regulated industries, Tingono’s experience offers a clear lesson: these markets can be incredibly lucrative, but only for companies willing to match their operating rhythm to institutional speed. If you need fast revenue validation, these aren’t your markets. If you can build with patient capital and design for long cycles, the organizational complexity that scares away other founders becomes your competitive moat.