How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle | Sales Strategies

Today, I will be exploring how you can improve the metric of sales cycle length: how many days it takes to close a piece of business. If you can move that, for example, from 90 days to 80 days or 120 days to 90 days, you can dramatically improve your sales velocity.

How Do We Speed Up the Sale?

1.) Co-create urgency with your buyer. Specifically, find out early in the sales cycle how a customer wants to buy from you and when they need to have the product or service in place. You then have to work a buying project plan back to the point where they have to say yes in order to meet their implementation deadline. If they communicate their implementation deadline and you tell them when they need to buy in order to make that happen, you’ve co-created urgency together and you’ll speed up the sales cycle.

2.) Talk to multiple people inside the organization, including the buyer directly. You will want to be proactive when it comes to that because the vast majority of sales cycles are elongated—elongated as a result of the delayed process of reaching out to someone in that organization and receiving the dreaded response, “Great, let me take that to my manager.” This process indeed drags on, and your contact within the organization is constantly waiting for their manager to make a decision—a manager who has not been involved in the discussions, has other priorities, and does not have a sense of urgency. As a result, indeed, we see an elongated sales cycle.