How To Shorten Your Sales Cycle
Are you wondering how to shorten your sales cycle? Match your sales process to the buyer’s buying stage. What’s a common question in sales– how do we shorten our sale cycle? That’s one we hear often but not a lot of people have the answer. It’s not something many people talk about but it’s something many people think about, often.
The first thing I’m going to ask you is: where do you intersect the buyer or the prospect in their buying continuum? Meaning, have they never heard of you? Or what you offer? Do they know who you are and do they even have any interest in what you have to offer?
Some buyers will be already way past that. They know they are ready to buy. They know they are ready to take action and the real question is:
“Are they going to buy from you?”
So your first question is whether or not the buyer is ready to buy and if they have awareness of what you are offering and if it fits their needs. Then your second challenge is to come up with a sales process that matches where that buyer is at in their process.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to take a buyer already prepared to purchase and put them through a lengthy explanation process. If they’re already sold on your idea, then don’t waste any more of their time or yours. Go ahead and start talking pricing.
Don’t put the customer through a lengthy sales spiel when they have already made up their mind they are ready to buy.
It sounds simple and it makes sense but the truth is some companies only train sales reps one way. They say what they need to say, almost as if following a script. Too often they get stuck in the script. They forget how to ad lib; how to listen to what the consumer is saying and feeling. They are so stuck on saying their lines that they miss the mark on closing a sale.
You need to train your sales reps to spot where a potential customer is at in the buying process and then latch onto that to meet the consumer’s needs and when possible, to shorten the sale.
How do you shorten your sales cycle?
Well, what we discovered was, you find out where the buyer is on the buying continuum. You must then you make sure you have a process that matches where the buyer is. You want to make sure your sales process is actually facilitating the sale, not getting in the way of you making sales.