How to shorten the sales cycle Automate repetitive tasks, set agreed goals for each sales call, explore potential customer objections before answering them, be clear about pricing (very) from the start, make it ridiculously easy for potential customers to sign contracts from any device, focus on your highest-performing channels. The days of a 30-day free trial seem to be over. And there's a reason for that. Reducing the free trial period to 7 or 14 days can create urgency and drive potential customers to actually use your product during the trial period.
That way, fewer people will request the reactivation of the unused free trial period and more people will advance through the sales cycle. Studies have shown that 61% of B2B salespeople send all leads directly to sales. This practice slows down the sales process because tracking the sales flow is difficult when unqualified leads are incorporated into the mix. The same study explained that only 27% of those potential B2B customers will be truly qualified.
But don't despair if not all potential customers are of quality. Capturing leads to 20% more sales opportunities. Early in the sales process, your company must identify potential pain points, obstacles that may prevent sales. Research from Jordan has shown that companies with a well-defined sales process earn 18% more revenue than companies with an informal sales process.
Your sales process, Jordan says, should reflect your buyers' process. Every step of the sales process must show an incremental commitment. Analyze the different stages of the CRM process and decide what tasks can and should be automated. Automating sales activities helps both to gain leads and to improve the sales process, ensuring that potential customers are not ignored or forgotten.
By automating lead acquisition activities, such as email campaigns and follow-ups, users showed a 14.5% increase in sales productivity. Now sales reps can spend more time focusing on well-qualified leads. Use the tips mentioned above to improve and accelerate your sales process. Harvard University estimates that more than 25% of sales cycles take 7 months or more to close.
With this in mind, don't be discouraged if the process takes too long, continue to refine and improve the cycle to achieve your optimal productivity level. The best salespeople follow up with potential customers at the right time, increasing the number of contacts that enter the sales process. A comparative sales study of hundreds of companies revealed that B2B companies have an average sales cycle length of 102 days. However, the same study indicated that the results vary greatly depending on the source of the agreement.
In addition, factors that are unique to each business, such as geography, product line, and sales strategy, can influence a company's average sales cycle. Therefore, the variables are so different that you don't get much value or knowledge from performing a competitive analysis. Now, recheck your customer's personality and look for characteristics that you can score by. For example, US accounts.
UU. They win 10 points. In addition, those in a marketing position get 15 points and C-level executives get 20 points. The higher the score, the higher the ranking.
One time-consuming task that you can easily automate is sending emails. On average, an employee spends 2.5 hours a day writing and reading emails. By using an email automation tool, you can automate email campaigns and free up your sales reps to focus on more important tasks, such as closing deals. However, as we know, there are many sales and marketing steps to “attract the customer” and “close the sale”, especially for B2B companies.
By contrast, most B2C offerings, such as those for hygiene products, retail or online shopping, have a short sales cycle that is often repeated much more frequently than B2B cycles. After extensive research and in-depth conversations with experienced marketing professionals from the B2B industries, I have discovered these six marketing tactics that will help not only reduce the length of the sales cycle, but also attract a wider audience throughout the cycle to increase total sales. . .
