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How to speed up your sales cycle. If you’re trying to sell to big companies, you know just how long it can take in today’s market. The sales cycles are going longer and longer, six months, nine months, twelve months. You have all these busy people who are trying to make a decision and it’s taking forever. I want to tell you one secret that I’ve used to cut the time it takes to get into big companies to get in there without competition and to get full pricing from my product and services. The key and the secret you need to know is how to leverage triggering events. So what are triggering events? Triggering events are change in circumstances in a company or the business environment that fundamentally affects their priorities and what they need at any moment in time. Let me give an example. There are external triggering events such as increasing oil prices, hurricanes, changes in government regulations; those are things that are happening outside the company. Competitive moves as well. Or there are internal triggering events and those are things that are actually happening within the organization such as changes in management, fourth quarter earnings, new product launches. Your job is to identify those triggering events that actually have created opportunities for you in the past and then figure out how to align your message and form and figure out how to watch for those triggering events. Let me give you an example. Several years ago, I was reading the Business Journal and I saw an article and it said, this technology company had just received $15 million in venture capital funding and that money was to be used for sales marketing. Now for somebody whose job is focused on helping companies increase their sales, my ears immediately perked up and I went, “Oh my goodness, this could be interesting.” And I kept reading and the article said, “And this money is going to be focused on helping these companies sell to larger corporations.” Well, here we have a company who’s trying to drive sales and wants to sell to larger corporations. That’s my specialty. I sell to big companies. I could call that person up and say, “Hi Eric, Jill Konrath calling. I noticed in the Business Journal that your company just received $15 million dollars in venture funding which is dedicated to helping you crack into corporate accounts. I’ve got some ideas on how to help your engineering types sell to these large accounts. Let’s set up a time to get together.” You can do that too. One of my clients recently did that on hurricane. They sold payroll cards. Companies have, by law have to pay people within two weeks but after the hurricane, everybody was dispersed and so they called one of their companies that they’ve been trying to get into for a long time and said, “With the hurricane, I imagine you’re having difficulty paying your employees right now. Would payroll cards have moved up higher on your priority schedule? And if so, let’s set up a time to talk.” She got a return call in a half an hour. You leverage triggering events. You will shorten your sales cycle but you got to figure out what yours are. You can’t use mine.