What We're Seeing Across Our Customers: Price Pressure and Indecision in H1 2026

ORM sees forecast and pipeline data across a lot of B2B SaaS teams. That vantage point has a specific advantage. We notice patterns forming across the market before any single company can see them in its own numbers, because one team's bad quarter looks like variance and fifty teams' bad quarter looks like a trend.

Two patterns defined the first half of 2026: price pressure and indecision.

Price pressure

Deals are closing for less than the pipeline said they were worth.

This is the quieter of the two, because it does not reduce your deal count. It reduces your deal size. The opportunity that carried a healthy number in the CRM closes at a discount, or lands on a smaller package, or trades scope for signature. Your win rate can hold while your average contract value slips underneath it.

The structural problem is that pipeline value and closed-won value are already different numbers in normal conditions. It is common to see an average deal size in the pipeline sit well above the average deal size of what actually closes. Price pressure widens that gap. If your forecast leans on the pipeline figure, it runs high, and it keeps running high until the smaller deals show up in the results and force a correction nobody planned for.

Indecision

The second pattern is timing. Buyers are taking longer to decide.

Uncertainty does not usually kill deals outright. It slows them. Decisions that took a quarter now take longer, and every opportunity that stretches past its expected close date ages into a later period. On day one of a quarter, only a portion of the pipeline dated to close that quarter actually will. Most of the value dated for the quarter does not land inside it. Indecision makes that spread worse, so commits that felt safe in January quietly became Q2 problems.

The earliest sign of this is not a lost deal. It is silence. A buyer who stops replying, a deal with no activity, a record that has not changed in weeks. That absence of signal shows up before any close date officially moves, which is exactly why it is easy to miss.

What is driving it

Our read is that both patterns come from the same place: broad uncertainty. Questions about where AI lands and what it does to buying, alongside the wider macro environment, make buyers cautious. Caution shows up as smaller commitments and slower ones, which is precisely what price pressure and indecision are.

You do not need to pin the exact cause to respond to it. You need a forecast that reflects the market you are selling into now, not the one you sold into last year.

What to do about it

Three moves, none of them exotic.

Watch average deal size against plan, not deal count alone. Count can look healthy while value erodes. Watch cycle length, because a lengthening cycle is the forecast moving against you before the number does. And stop reading a full pipeline as a safe one. A 3x to 5x coverage ratio can hold while both of these trends eat the quarter from the inside.

The deeper fix is the same one that applies whenever conditions move: assumptions set in a calmer period do not survive a nervous one. A forecast that updates as the quarter progresses catches this. A static one built once and trusted for ninety days does not. For the full mechanism, see the market shifts that break a forecast.

We will keep sharing what we see across the base as the year develops. A cross-customer view is one of the few ways to tell the difference between your quarter being hard and the market being hard, and that difference changes what you should do about it.