How To Decrease A Long Sales Cycle By Half

TweetHow long is your sales cycle?

Want to learn how to decrease that sales cycle by half or more?

The sales cycle is the length of time from becoming aware that a prospect is interested in your products or services and closing that customer to a sale.

The clock usually starts ticking when a prospect first contacts your business for information, asks for a bid or proposal, or requests a sales call.

The process usually works this way for service companies like mine:

1. Customer makes an initial introduction via email or phone -or- you introduce yourself to the customer.
2. Customer wants to have a discussion about your business and your offerings
3. Customer asks for a bid or proposal
4. Customer asks to discuss the bid or proposal for clarification
5. Customer asks you to visit their office or wants to visit yours

At any point along 1-5 the customer may disappear or just flat out tell you — “we’re no longer interested.”

This leaves a lot of wasted effort on the table.

Use Your Marketing Content To Educate Your Market

The reason that “cold calling” is dead (or dying) is because prospects no longer need a salesperson to educate them about product and service offerings.

They use the web.

All the information the prospect needs is just a Google query and a cup of coffee away.  The prospect has a problem and needs a solution to that problem.

Your prospects are online asking questions like:

• What exactly is this problem and why do I have it?
• Who else has this problem and what happened as a result of the problem?  How did they solve it?
• Are there things I could be doing to alleviate this problem myself?
• What paid solutions are available for this problem?
• How much will the solution cost and how long will it take this problem to be solved?
• Who are the experts that could be hired to deal with this problem?
• How do these experts work?  Is this an hourly thing?  Is it a per project thing?  What is the process that experts use to fix this problem?

Your marketing content should be geared towards answering these questions.  Educating your market and positioning yourself as the expert spoken about in the last bullet point above.

Answering these questions using the content available on your website will cut your sales process down considerably.   Consider the last discussion you had with a prospect — weren’t the questions listed above the exact sorts of things you talked about in the pre-sale calls, visits and emails?

Use Your Marketing Content To Filter Your Market

One of the toughest lessons to learn as a tiny business owner is —– what exactly do I do? and what do I do well?  (jeez that was four ‘do’s’ in a row… is that bad form?)

A successful business knows what it does well and refers the rest to a network of others.

For instance, I offer XYZ service at PDQ price point and to ABC industries.  The rest I refer to others.

Much of your wasted time in the sales cycle is undoubtedly spent talking to prospects that are not a good fit for your product or service.  Through your website content, you can filter these people before they consume (usually) any of your time.

If you have been building content that addresses the above questions you will not even be bothered distracted by anyone that is not a good fit for your business.  They will disqualify themselves well before you ever knew they were there.

Notice that the first four parts of the five step process above (initial introductions, conversation about products/services you offer, bids/proposals, discussion of bid/proposal) can be eliminated or at least truncated by a content rich website that tells your story.   Prospects will disqualify themselves if they don’t like what they see.

And disqualifying prospects is a good thing.  Because the reverse is true as well.

If your web content answers the questions asked above, you will find that the initial contact you have with a prospect is just a formality.  They will be 99% sure that yours is the business for the job.  When you can start the sales process with the last step in the process above, you have eliminated a ton of wasted effort in your sales cycle.

What are your thoughts?  How long is your sales cycle and what do you do to decrease wasted effort?  What advice do you have for the rest of us?

Image courtesy of Laura Mary