However, shorten its sales cycle is easier said than done. If you want to shorten your sales cycle, here are five ways to do it.
Not all leads are ready to buy when you are ready to sell. You will easily guess if a prospect is not ready to buy during the commercial negotiation.The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can remove them from your commercial pipeline in order to focus your efforts and resources on leads that are ready. You can always look back on the unfinished ones when others Buy signals are received and when you notice that their purchase conditions or their needs have changed since your last exchanges.
In order to shorten your sales cycle, you really need to understand the needs and goals of your prospects. Research their businesses and find out what their goals are, then align what you're selling with those. Your potential customers will only be convinced to buy what you're selling if it helps them achieve their own goals, and once you convince them that your products or services will do just that, they'll take it into account.
Hiring junior staff is generally a waste of time. The best way to discover needs of a customer is hiring the right decision maker, and that often means the CEO. You don't want to be sidelined by managers who don't fully understand their CEO's needs or wants and who don't have the purchasing power And the decisionmaking.Your inbound marketing strategies should be tailored to target CEOs and senior managers who make decisions and buy products and services. By targeting this audience with higher buying power, you'll be well on your way to shortening your sales cycle and closing your sale.
Unless you've been connected to the decision maker, you're probably just one company on a long list of other businesses trying to sell products and services to them. Your prospect probably doesn't know your brand and has no reason to want to buy from you. You need to stand out among all the other businesses and the best way to do that is to build trust through online reputation, credibility and the customer development.By taking the time and effort needed to Educating a prospect, you will establish a climate of trust with him in order to take him from the stage of awareness to that of consideration and, finally, to that of purchase.
Your salespeople should never leave a meeting or end a phone call without getting the next step - an upcoming meeting with a set date and time. Don't let weeks of no contact go by: prospects will forget you. If the prospect isn't ready to take the next step, it's a clear indication that they're not ready to buy, and you can move on. Spend some time on good leads, research the needs of your prospects, target the right people with your inbound marketing strategy, build trust through your online reputation and keep the attention of the prospect. All of these steps will allow you to shorten your sales cycle in order to save time and improve your margins, which will ultimately increase your financial results.Do you have good visibility on your sales cycle? Do you have the ability to analyze it in order to reduce it according to your goals?