Do you have a very long sales cycle? Is there any need for you to Shorten up your Sales Cycle? That could be the best decision if you are looking for ways to shorten your sales cycle. The less time you spend on a particular lead, the more will be the Return on Investment.
It’s all about timing. Even if you have a proven product/service with a longer sales cycle, you may experience lesser sales. This is why many sales companies focus on improving their sales cycle stages so as to speed up the sales cycle.
They look at easy and every sales cycle steps to check for the problem and finds the solution to optimize the sales cycle. The survival of the company depends on its ability to reduce the sales cycle length.
There are many ways to shorten the sales cycle length. But getting directly on to the ways to shorten the length of the sales cycle, we first need to understand the Sales Cycle definition.
What is Sales Cycle?
A sales cycle is a sequence of events or stages occurring while selling a product/service of your company. There are typically five phases in a sales cycle.
Prospecting
This is the stage to attract leads. Listen to the requirements of your leads and offer them what best suits their requirements.
Connect
This is the phase where you start connecting with your leads after prospecting. There are many ways of connecting with the leads which include email, phone call, or a face-to-face meeting.
Qualify
While the initial contact tries to learn about the pain points of the company. You can do this by asking certain questions to clarify the pain points. After learning about the company, you can further determine whether you can serve the requirements that best match the prospect’s needs.
Present
Since, till the previous step, you have determined the needs of the prospect, provide the solution that is the best fit for the solution of their pain point.
Close
Now that all the objections are cleared, make a step towards giving the prospect the best proposal, negotiate accordingly, and finally sign the deal.
The sales cycle is an important part of the sales growth. These sales cycle stages will help you sell your product/service to a valuable client that makes a long-term relationship with your company.
Now that if you know the meaning and the sales cycle stages, it would be easy to understand the ways that will help you speed up the sales cycle.
Simple Ways to Speed up the Sales Cycle
Hire better Sales Representatives
It is very obvious that everyone needs to build a strong sales team. A bad sales representative can devastate your sales team. When you are hiring sales representatives, look beyond whether or not the person has a track record of hitting the target. If you have a good product and a great team you can make the representative work well. Look for the representatives who are always ready to learn and adapt to new technologies easily.
Sell only to the qualified leads
When a lead shows great interest in your product/service, it is the right time to start selling to them. But how can you tell whether the lead is interested or not? If a lead has an interest, an urgent need for your product/service, and also the authority to make a decision and budget allocation, the lead is well qualified and high-scoring. However, don’t spend time on every lead that you get, rather spending time with the right leads is really important for the sales cycle length.
Well-Defined Sales Process
The sales process should be well-defined so that it shows a certain amount of incremental commitment in every step you proceed. Companies with a well-defined sales process have 18% more revenue than companies without a sales process. To define a good sales process, it is important to commit some time to discuss the process with the senior managers.
Train the Sales Representatives
The good Sales Training program isn’t about just asking the participants about their pain points, it’s about giving them enthusiasm and drilling out their abilities, and working on their pain points to make them stronger sales representatives. Yatharth Marketing Solutions Sales Training works on every pain point of the participants and works extremely hard to bring out the best in the participants.
Automating Where Necessary
Look at all the stages of the sales process and decide which tasks should be automated. Automating the sales process helps in both lead scoring and in improving the sales cycle length, ensuring that leads aren’t forgotten. Speeding the sales process is about defining the sales process, training the representatives, and managing the sales process. Having more face-to-face meetings with the clients can help to clear all the doubts at once and shorten the sales cycle.
Shortening your sales cycle can have a great impact on the company’s revenue, sales representatives’ morale, and efficiency of the operations. Sales Cycle Length should be the top priority of the company when it comes to scaling the ROI of the company. Following these tips will definitely help you shorten the sales cycle length and get higher revenues.