Simple Strategies to Shorten Your Sales Cycle

Are you in a hurry? That’s not a bad thing if you’re in sales. You should be in a hurry to shorten your sales cycle. Shorter sales cycles mean that you can sell more. Here are a few simple strategies to shorten your sales cycle.

1.  Identify your ideal prospect.When I hear salespeople say that "everyone is a prospect," I want to toss my cookies. No, everyone is not your best prospect. Why waste time with prospects who are less likely to buy? Your job is to find the prospects most likely to buy.

The easiest way to do this is to look at your business. List your last 20 deals. Include every deal whether you won or lost the business. Now identify some criteria about the prospects whom you call on. It could be criteria like location, size, years in business, title of person you call on, or other variables unique to your business. Answer yes or no for each deal on each criterion.

Look at the results. You’ll start to see trends in the business you win and the business you lose. When I work with salespeople on this exercise, especially experienced sales professionals, they gain surprising and enlightening insights into their businesses.

For example, you may find that you’re most successful with smaller organizations who are in business less than five years where you started calling on the engineering department. If that’s the case, you should focus on finding more prospects who fit this description.

Just remember, you are a unique sales professional. I was working with a group of experienced air conditioning sales professionals where they were all selling the same product. They found that some salespeople did better selling to technical customers and others did better with non-technical buyers.  Some were better with males than females. Your job is to find the best prospects that suit the way you sell.

Past performance predicts future performance. Unless you’re going to change something about your selling or offering, you can expect to get the same results in the future. What this means is that if you want to pursue business that’s different than what you’ve been successful at in the past, you will have to do something different to appeal to this different category.

Now that you know whom you are most successful at selling, you can stop deluding yourself about who is actually a good prospect for your business.

2.  Qualify early. Now that you know whom your best prospects really are, you should quickly determine if your prospects are a match. How? Start with your research. Before you make a face-to-face sales call, determine as much as you can about your prospect to see how the prospect fits your ideal customer profile. There are databases where you can get customer data online and learn what you need to know.

Look back at the prospects you have been calling on this year to see if you need improvement in this area. Of all your prospects, how many turned into real prospects?

If you honestly look at your business and identify your real prospects, you will waste less time on the low probability sales and have more time to sell to better prospects.

When you start selling to better prospects, I can promise you that you will not only shorten your sales cycle, you will sell more.