One lament you hear from Executives is that their sales cycles are too long. This makes revenue forecasting unpredictable and erodes your profitability because your Cost of Sales (COS) is too high. This is extremely impactful if you are selling a solution priced under $15,000 per year or offer a subscription.

Let’s discuss 5 ways you can shorten your sales cycle by 50%

1. Create a Sales Driven website

Most websites are information only. What you need is a transformational website that guides every buyer through the buyer’s journey. All of your education and preference setting should be conducted on your website.

So, what is a Sales Driven Website? Think about the best practices for your buyer and your best seller. The website should guide every buyer through the education, evaluation and preference setting process. 

Most importantly, give your buyer the opportunity to choose their path – by industry, solution, role or other criteria. Every purchase should start with the digital buying process. 

Next, take your best sales executive and map the sales steps they take. Integrate these steps and tools into the buying process. You want to automate as much of this process upfront as you can.

Finally, decide whether this purchase can be done online or offline. Most transactional sales can be done online. Most consultative sales must be accomplished with your sales executive so accelerate the engagement with your Sales Driven Website.

2. Create a Buyer’s Guide

Your buyer does not know how to evaluate and buy your service or solution so why not create a buyer’s guide that helps them focus on the key evaluation and decision criteria?

The Buyer’s Guide should highlight the most important evaluation or decision criteria for your service or solution. It should also include a one-page “shopping list” to make it easy for their evaluation process.

3. Create a ROI Guide

Your buyer does not know how to cost justify your service or solution to their management team or company. The biggest competitor for most companies is “do nothing” and the root cause is a lack of a business and financial justification. This Guide will help your buyer determine the monetary and business justification that is needed to move forward.

The key to this Guide is not only to point out the areas of business justification and how to quantify them but also to provide real life examples of how other customers have justified the purchase of your service or solution.

4. Gain Agreement with your Sponsor on the Entire Evaluation Plan

Most sales executives close the buyer on the next step. This alone leads to elongated sales cycles. Instead, a better way is to map all of the steps in the evaluation process with your buyer and agree on the steps and timeframe.  Either party can still opt out of the evaluation process, but at least you know where you are both headed.

We call this the “plan letter” which includes all of the steps in the evaluation process. You can also expand this to include steps in the deployment or implementation process if you are working toward a “go live” date. Together, you and your sponsor can collaborate on the schedule to ensure that the dates are set and the right individuals participate.

5. Create a Quick Start Program

If you can prove the value of your solution or service in your customer’s environment, you create a platform to expand from and you help them eliminate risk. The key to the Quick Start Program is scoping a deliverable that can be implemented and create value in 30 days. This offer also helps move up the decision point for your buyer.

Historically this may have been called a free trial or proof of concept; however, the Quick Start Program goes much further and presents a totally productized deployment with the proof criteria. 
If you value what I have shared in this blog, download my Revenue Acceleration System here, which includes a detailed infographic to see how you can follow my unique framework to scale your business, step-by-step.