How to accelerate your sales cycle
Accelerate your sales cycle by giving customers a helping hand
When I started my career, we were sent on sales training to teach us to ask questions to uncover a prospect’s business issues and the impact they had on their business.
If we felt we could help, we were taught to demonstrate that our approach would work for them. If the customer didn’t make a buying decision within a relatively short period of time following this process, the implication was that we’d lost. While losing can happen for many reasons, I’ve since discovered that it’s often because of an issue during the evaluation process.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss strategies to help you avoid losing opportunities during the buying journey and turn the reasons for this happening to your advantage. By understanding how to minimize their ‘Time to Value’, you can prevent prospects from leaking out of the funnel and address common issues during the buyers’ journey while reducing the length of your sales cycle.
Removing barriers
A few years ago, a customer told me they had installed our software as part of a trial and had attempted to build a prototype of the software application they were building but couldn’t get our software to work the way they wanted to. They then moved on to another product and were currently in limbo as they had hit the same issue again. Talking to other prospects showed this was a common problem.
The reason for this was that our product delivered the benefits they were looking for because it did things differently. In fact, every product of our type did what they were trying to do in a different way than the products they were used to using.
The solution was to create a tailored workshop showing how to approach the problem from a different angle. The workshop took three days, yet it saved our prospects months. Doing this gave us several months' head-start over our competitors, as it got our customers to the point where they were seeing value much more quickly.
Charging for the workshop also helped with the qualification process. The workshop was charged at a price that was sufficiently high to qualify serious customers, yet low enough that it was a no-brainer to solve the business issue.
That year, we grew revenue 10-fold.
Why sales cycles stall
Deals stall primarily because the customer got stuck at some point in the buying process. The issues that can block a buying decision include:
Technological issues – Can we prove this solution works in our environment? Will IT endorse this approach?
Bias – Does a project sponsor have a positive or negative experience with another vendor?
Risk – Is there a risk the project might not progress as planned?
Financial – Does the ROI justify the investment?
Preventing sales opportunities from going sideways means learning about your customers' buying process and understanding which elements go well and which can prevent them from moving forward. While this is a team effort, marketing should typically take ownership of driving this (after all, they are responsible for supporting sales and helping move prospects forward). The key is finding these barriers and devising creative ways to eliminate them.
The approaches you can take are only limited by your imagination. They can go beyond training and include quick start programs, guides on how to maximize the value customers can achieve, customer success solutions such as Gainsight, and independently written ROI examples backed with case studies.
The bottom line is that you will generally win if you make it possible for customers to see the business value from your product before any of your competitors.
Conclusions
It’s all about making the customer successful. The faster customers see real value in your offering, the shorter your sales cycle and the further ahead of your competitors you’ll be.
If you can demonstrate a faster time-to-value than your competitors, overcome the common pitfalls, and de-risk the exercise, you will get ahead of your competition and win. Don’t let obstacles hinder customers from seeing the value in your product; help eliminate them to accelerate their journey.
Don’t assume there is just one problem, and don’t assume one problem is common to all customers. Find common customer sticking points and create programs to overcome them. Give them what they need to help them get where they are trying to go. The faster they see a return on their investment that beats all other options, the quicker they will make a buying decision.
If you would like advice on winning more frequently while accelerating your sales cycles, feel free to reach out to book a free advisory discussion.