Seven Steps to Shorten Your Sales Cycle

Does your company provide customers with expensive business inputs?

Or are you crucial in other ways to your customers’ business success?

When either of those is true, there’s a lot at stake in a customer’s decision to buy. So multiple people will be involved in the decision, as a way to reduce risk. It can take them considerable time to acquire the necessary information, consider it internally, decide, and take action.

Sellers call that the sales cycle, and it can take months or even years, depending on the business.

Especially when you are offering something innovative, that period of time is often considerably longer than it has to be. Sure, some prospective customers move faster than most peers but there are still inefficiencies that delay the decision.

If the time to a “Yes” from your prospects could be shortened, how much more value could they receive?

And if the time to a “Yes” could be shortened, how much more revenue could you bring in, and how much sooner?

More Revenue, Sooner

Below is a real life example of a company that was taking too long to get traction on its innovative offering. They had a great team and offering, and plenty of marcom and selling effort. They needed a stronger marketing and sales message.

Industrial Plankton Inc. achieved 38% compound annual growth in the four years after we worked together.

Their growth rate is shown in blue. Just for contrast, the orange is a hypothetical 10% annual growth — I feel that the company could have achieved that without help.

Using 100 as the starting value of the revenue index, at the end of the 4th year they’d achieved an index of 363, vs. an index of 146 if their growth had been 10% per year instead.

If we applied the example to another company that had $10 million in revenue to begin with, it would have become a $36,300,000 company instead of becoming a $14,600,000 company.

Whether that increase were valued at a multiple of revenue, or valued at a multiple of earnings, 7-figure to 8-figure increases in enterprise value would likely come along with that kind of sales growth.

Not every company I work with has as much potential as this to accelerate their growth, but VisibleValue® marketing message development (and other approaches in our toolbox) can be quite powerful for companies that affect their customers’ success.

Let’s say you want to generate more revenue, faster. How might we work together to do it?

Reducing the Sales Cycle

Big picture, working together we would systematically tackle the following steps:

1. Based on insights we develop together, define a list of target accounts and decisionmakers
2. Define how to equip and coach your advocates/champions at the target companies, so they can build business cases and orchestrate the consideration and decision process internally
3. Develop an insights-informed message that I’d help you implement and stick with
4. Do an action plan and line up the right people (external, as well as any suitable internal team members)
5. Educate and train the selling team on the message and how to integrate their efforts with marcom
6. Conduct an inbound and outbound marketing and sales communications campaign
7. Measure the response and results from the campaign, and make adjustments so that we do more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.

That’s the proven process. If you want to follow that path, and realize that you can get more revenue faster with outside help, let’s schedule a time to talk.