“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.” ~ Edward Deming.
Are you looking for ways to speed up your sales cycle? Do you want to make your customers buy sooner? Are you constantly on the quest to perfect your sales cycle? While it’s difficult to perfect the system amid plenty of variables and blockers in each sale, it’s possible to make a sales cycle more predictable.
In this article, we have talked about 6 smart strategies to accelerate your sales cycle and make money sooner.
Smart Strategies to Speed Up Your Sales Cycle
1. Prioritize Qualified Leads
Most successful B2B lead generation companies follow this approach – sell to leads that show higher interest. But, how to know the difference between a prospective lead and one who isn’t?
Your website can help here! A visitor who arrives at your website/blog through a keyword search visits your payment page but doesn’t stay for longer, they aren’t super interested. Whereas, a visitor who lands at your site through a branded search (searched your company specifically), explores a few products, checks testimonials and reviews, reads a few blogs, visits the pricing page, and subscribes to a newsletter is considered a qualified lead.
However, this does not at all mean you shouldn’t pay attention to other leads. Of course, you should! Try to pull them back in through an exit-intent pop-up and welcome them if they come back.
2. Leverage Automation
Stats reveal that the average SDR spends only 17% of their time finding leads, while 17% of their time finding leads, while 21% of their time is spent writing emails. This shows that most top sales reps spend more hours organizing rather than actually selling.
A great way to put an end to this is by incorporating automation in the sales process. Sales automation tools can eliminate these tasks or make them easier and faster to complete. By automating repetitive tasks, sales reps can invest more of their time working on high-value tasks such as building relationships with prospects.
3. Be Transparent About Pricing
Sales reps tend to hide the pricing information to sell high-ticket products. Instead of revealing the price, they show the value of their product to the leads. However, this is an approach that often backfires.
Remember, your goal is not to attract old leads but also to attract high-quality leads that can afford your product. Hence, you must ensure your pricing details are shared everywhere so that you attract only the leads that are able to buy your product.
4. Focus On High Performing Channels
Have you ever wondered why companies don’t advertise in print media like newspapers anymore? Because these channels are not modern-day winners for promoting services or products. This means if you focus on poorly-performing channels, you might slow your roll.
So, where to focus for the highest returns? To figure this out, track which channels perform the best for your sales team and build systems that enable additional focus on those areas.
Further, you must check your channels regularly. A channel that has been a winner this year will not necessarily be the winner forever. Be curious about the performance of your channel, and don’t be afraid to experiment by trying new techniques for prospecting.
5. Deal With Objections Early
Did you try to find out why customers don’t buy your products or services? Why might they be considering your competitors over you?
It’s important that you face these objections instead of shying away from them and hoping they resolve on their own. A good way is to address the fears, doubts, and uncertainties of your potential customers immediately to put their minds at ease. One simple way is to use an FAQ page to answer the most common queries you’ve got from your prospects.
6. Collaborate With your Marketing Team Over Sales Goals
Marketing and sales teams often operate independently, and work on the opposite ends of the funnel. A recent survey revealed that sales organizations received only 7% of high-quality leads from their marketing teams.
So, when marketing and sales teams are not aligned around sales goals, the entire business process suffers.
The good news is there are numerous ways sales and marketing teams can work together to achieve sales goals. For instance, have your marketing and sales teams work together to outline the buyer’s journey and create buyer personas. In this way, you can create alignment between the two teams that will support the rest of the sales process.
The Final Say
That’s it—6 of the best ways to accelerate your sales cycle! You’ve now probably identified a few areas where your sales cycle is flawed and already have lots of ideas to fix them. And if you still haven’t figured it out yet, use these strategies to dig deeper into your sales process and determine your breaking points and solve them.
