Optimize your b2b sales cycle for support with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

now if you've ever heard the term time kills all deals it certainly can be true in fact on average the longer a deal stays open and not closed the worse your chances get of you actually closing the deal hey welcome back to my channel the number one place for b2b sales professionals looking to increase their commission and sell smarter so they can sell more in today's video we're going to cover something that's incredibly important for sales professionals to understand which is how do you accelerate your sales cycle so as a sales rep it's important to understand ways that we can actually shorten that time frame from the time that you take a cold lead or a prospect that you just met all the way to the end zone which is where you close the deal which is how we get paid now with all that said i would be remiss if i didn't mention the fact that you should always be playing the long game when you're selling in fact if there was one thing that i would use as my you know kind of unfair advantage is that i am incredible at playing the long game with clients and what that means is adding value over time not trying to close a deal with every single prospect because every buyer is not at the same place each buyer is at a different point in their journey when they're looking for a solution or a product to solve their problem but most sales reps fail because if they're not working with a client that's ready to close right now they tend to just forget about them and they never follow up so with all the advice i'm going to give in this video please remember one thing you need to follow up with your prospects over time and you need to keep nurturing those leads and those relationships and continually add value so that you're actually building trust with those prospects over time so that when it does come time that they are in that right space to purchase your product or solution they're only thinking of you and no other company so let's move on to the first tip tip one is incredibly important and that is you need to improve your qualification process now let's talk about why this is important well if you want to accelerate your sales cycle you need to make sure you're working with the right clients and the qualification process is entirely about you and your company determining if the prospect or the lead that you're talking to or the company is the right company for you to work with and the way that you do this is you have a series of questions and an actual profile perfect customer avatar or persona that you want to work with so number one everyone is not your customer but when you run a really good qualification process to determine the amount of budget that you typically need to sell your product or service are you working with the right decision maker are you meeting that customer or that prospect at the right time in their buying cycle if you sell software for example or maybe an alternative solution maybe they only buy every two to three years and you're meeting that prospect you know in the first year of a three to four year agreement well that doesn't mean you should just let that prospect go away and never talk to them again that's someone that you're going to follow up with and nurture that relationship but the fact of the matter is that prospect is not someone that you're going to close this year unless there's some huge material impact change that they need to make because something's not working out with their current vendors so tip number one is incredibly important and that is you need to improve your qualification process if you want to sell more deals and you want to close deals faster you need to be working with the right clients and the way you do that is number one by making sure that you have the perfect customer avatar or profile of the personas you're going to be selling to so if you know that your product or service is not meant for enterprise level clients and you're better served supporting the smbs small and medium-sized businesses then number one don't try to sell to enterprise customers if you're not a fit for those people or vice versa if you're meant to sell to enterprise clients but smaller companies can't afford your product or service why would you spend time with them the fact of the matter is that everyone is not your perfect customer and it doesn't mean that you have to have a perfect customer to sell them something but in order to actually drive the right outcome which is going to be measurable and actually provide the benefit that a customer is looking to get out of the investment they make with you and your company you need to make sure that you're doing a really good job by qualifying customers in or out and get rid of the tire kickers that are going to waste your time and really don't either have the authority they don't have the budget and really maybe they're not even strategic enough to buy your product or service in the first place so instead what you end up doing is wasting a lot of time so tip number one improve your qualification process make sure you're working with the right prospects the right customers and that will have a tremendous amount of impact on how fast your deals accelerate from one step to the next in your sales cycle now as i mentioned in tip number one you need to make sure that you have a really good qualification process but i also mentioned in tip number one that you need to have what's called a customer profile or avatar and avatar is your ideal or perfect customer so this is the type of persona that you're selling to if you don't know who your perfect persona is for your product or service or ideal persona for that matter then you're going to be selling to the wrong people and while selling is primarily taking a lead or a prospect and helping them understand what their current state is and helping them understand how you're going to get them to the next state over here you still need to make sure you're selling and talking to the right individuals and so if you don't know what your perfect customer persona or profile or avatar is you should develop one now if you're looking for ways to develop that perfect customer profile hopefully your company's already created one for you but if they have not feel free to check out my book the intelligence factor which is right here i'll put a link down below for the book i have an entire workbook that goes along with my book and that is to help you actually through the prospecting phase and one of the chapters in the book is actually developing your customer avatar so that you can improve your sales cycle and actually be selling to the right individuals now tip number three is you want to be prepared in advance for each meeting that you have with your prospects now we don't have a lot of time to waste when we're meeting with prospects and customers and so when we do meet with them we want to make sure that we're actually making the best use of that time we want to make sure that we're getting the right amount of intelligence and information so every time we meet with that customer we're actually guiding them to the next phase in the cycle so what i like to do is i like to build a list of questions that i use on every meeting so i typically take about 30 minutes to prepare for each meeting and i'm looking for ways that i can accelerate that person to the next phase in the sales cycle or i'm going to rule them out through additional questions depending on which phase in the sales cycle it is and determine that maybe they're not the right fit for me and my company so that one of the main reasons why most sales people have deals that take a really long time to close is they're not asking the right questions so it's critical if you want to have faster sales cycles if you want your deals to close faster you need to ask more questions questions like who else is involved in the sales process have you ever made a purchase like this before when you made a purchase like this last time how did it go who else was involved did you have any budget issues is this project already funded is this investment already funded but those questions are going to help you gain information so that you can then guide your prospect to the next phase in the sales cycle by recommending or asking them a question that is a non-friction ask saying hey where do you think we should go from here and because you have the right information you can then guide them to the next phase in the sales cycle which is then going to make it all that much easier to close them eventually when because you've already gotten all that information up front you see most deals that don't close is because you don't have all the information you need to close the deal and i would say this is further exacerbated the larger your deal is so when you're working with a customer that has it that is potentially making a seven or eight figure or even ten nine or ten figure investment you need to ask a lot of questions because number one there's going to be a lot of people involved it's a very large budget or overall investment they're going to make if they do choose you or one of your competitors and so there's a lot of information you need to collect to make sure not only are you the right fit for them make sure they're the right fit for you but also make sure that you know all the negative consequences of maybe choosing and switching from this current solution they have to something else or maybe who are you competing with is there an incumbent vendor in there there's a number of different reasons why your deal will take a really long time to close maybe it's the fact that it's not really a priority for other stakeholders it's just a priority for the person that you're working with again the larger the client you're working with the more common this becomes which is the further point of why you need to ask questions and prepare in advance now the fourth tip is something that i think is uh often missed by sales reps and it's because they're so worried about building the questions like i just talked about in tip number three but they forget about setting a goal for each call so what i like to do is before i actually have a meeting or a call with a customer i guess right now because it's coveted oftentimes they're both a meeting and a call done over zoom or webex or or microsoft teams but nonetheless when i have that meeting i'll plan and advance the questions like i just described in tip number three but then in addition to that it's critical that you actually set a goal for the call and i don't just mean what my goal is but i also want to understand what my customer's goal is so what does my customer or my prospect want to get out of the meeting what is their goal for talking with me if they're going to spend you know 20 30 minutes or even an hour meeting with me and my company what do they want to get out of it and if their goal is that they want to understand more about my company and our ability to help them well that's me understand where that prospect is in the sales cycle which means they're probably not all that comfortable in my company's ability to solve their problem and so i need to give them more information give them more case studies or social proof tell more stories about how we've helped solve additional problems ask more questions they're going to help them identify what their problem really is and how we're going to help them get there and how we've solved that problem before but you need to understand what their goals are and then also you need to understand what your goals are and so for every call especially when i'm selling with other team members maybe from a solutions team or something like that i always ask them when we meet as a team to prepare for the meeting say what are we trying to get out of this call what's the goal and what's the outcome we're trying to achieve and often times this will hey maybe it's i want to find out who else is involved in this deal and if i can find out who that executive stakeholder is that would be a goal that's achieved we can maybe get an introduction to that person or maybe it's we need to invite other people to the next meeting so that we can move it down the sales cycle or maybe it's we need to identify who the procurement person is that we'll be working with if we move to a contract there's a number of different goals that i will write down and talk to my team about so that we're very focused on what we're trying to get out of that call and so just make sure when you go into any call with a customer you've got a goal what are you trying to get out of it how are you going to get there and if you can't get there what's a pivot point what can you do to get as close as possible to achieving that goal so if one of your goals for example is you want to move that customer prospect to the next phase in the sales cycle what are you going to do to make that happen what questions are you gonna ask but if you can't move to that next step what's the reason why and what do you need to do in order to get that customer to that next phase so that's incredibly important and hopefully that's helpful for tip number four and moving on to tip number five and it kind of goes along with the entire idea of preparation and that is use an agenda for your meetings now i can't tell you the number of times that some of my colleagues that i help with on sales calls do not prepare an agenda in advance and they just try to wing it and frankly it's insulting to a customer when you're not prepared it shows a lot of immaturity and generally most sales reps are not skilled enough to just wing it completely on a sales call and so i don't know why you want to do business development to set an appointment with a customer and then not prepare for the most important part which is the actual meeting so do yourself a favor and if you want to accelerate your sales process do some work and put in the due diligence to prepare for that meeting and part of that preparation is creating an agenda and the reason an agenda is so important is number one and make sure your meetings are valuable and you get a lot out of them and your customers get a lot out of them but it also helps engage the prospect even further right so there's nothing worse than meeting with a customer or meeting with a salesperson who didn't really have a plan for when they wanted to talk with you therefore just becomes a colossal waste of time and generally when you're trying to wing it you miss information and back to my previous points when you don't have enough information that's when your deals often times take far too long and so again when you have an agenda you can make sure that you get the right information you're looking to get out of that prospect to determine if they can or cannot move to the next phase in the sales cycle if they're the right fit for you now one other thing that i find is incredibly helpful and i did not invent this or create this idea i actually got this from john barros a while ago is you actually create the agenda and then you leave a couple open slots on that agenda for your prospect your customer right so you'd say okay introductions if it's the first time you're meeting you know what's the main topic you're covering a couple things that you're looking to get out of that meeting and then you leave to two bullet points two or three for the customer and then you send them the agenda to show you're prepared you say hey bob you know i created this agenda for our meeting tomorrow and maybe even do it a couple days in advance okay i created this agenda for our meeting i left a couple open bullet points because it's important to me to understand what your goals are for our call to make the best use of our time and then you send it to them it engages the prospect in the actual meeting and it actually brings them into a more heightened state of awareness to be prepared oftentimes customers are running from one meeting to another meeting and then they hop right into the meeting with you frankly they're not paying attention a lot of times because they've got so many other shiny balls coming at them constantly it happens to me all the time so one of the best things you can do is create an agenda to keep your prospects and customers engaged in the meeting get them to pay attention if you need something from them in order to accelerate and move to the next phase in the sales cycle you need to make sure they're paying attention and you do that by creating an agenda when you have an agenda you have a plan and they can follow along and it just makes for much better conversations and when you don't have to constantly go back to the customer for more information i don't know if you've ever been there before but i have it slows things down dramatically because people again are busy you need to find ways to use these little shortcuts and not waste time moving on to tip number six be clear with your pricing early on there is nothing worse and more detrimental to a relationship with a customer and frankly something that's going to slow down your deal then bringing up pricing at the very end nobody likes gotcha moments in fact one of my pet peeves is creating a proposal for a customer and then leaving pricing for the very end the whole idea of building this suspense to the very end oftentimes what i find is that when we leave pricing conversations to the very end of either a proposal or really any phase in the sales cycle once you've created a solution or if you've got a product that kind of has a static price and it just comes down to the amount of volume you sell it hinders your trust with your customer your ability to create trust for that matter and when you bring up price at the very end and your customers not prepared for whatever your product or service costs then they have to go back usually to talk to somebody else if you're not talking to the decision maker to actually see if they can spend that amount of money or worse yet they introduce other competitors into the situation that you're going to compete with because they were surprised and so what i like to do is i like to bring up the concept of pricing as early as possible to start preparing my customers and prospects for what it potentially could cost and so i'm in the services business meaning we do a lot of consulting so every customer situation has a different price and that's because we're solving different problems but generally i i like to start conversations out with what do you think something like this should cost or what kind of budget have you prepared for this problem and i try to understand where the customer is with their budgeting and funding process because number one that's part of qualification but the other part of this is it gets the conversation going early i like to remove the most friction from the conversation about price as possible i hate and absolutely hate getting all the way down to the end of a proposal and then telling the customer what my price is when i could have just told them at the beginning it's probably going to come in this range or this range because typically we know how much something is going to cost and the longer that you wait and wait to bring up price so the very end later on in your sales cycle the worse it will get for you so my suggestion for you is bring up price and the actual overall concept of pricing and what something may cost as early as possible don't be afraid be confident in your product or service ask questions when customers throw out some arbitrary number that's way off from what your product or service may cost don't get defensive just ask them this question okay where did you get that from what did you base that information off of and just shut up and let them answer that question because oftentimes they're not comparing apples to apples and so there's no need to get defensive there's no need to try to defend what your price may be instead just try to understand where they're coming from have some empathy that maybe they're just not that educated on what it costs to solve their problem and so again just to drill this point home further if you want to improve the acceleration of your sales process and close deals faster don't wait till the very end bring price up early and finally tip number seven if you want to close deals faster and you want to make your sales cycle shorter then you need to start getting over objections early and often and the way you do that is by handling those objections before they ever become objections right and so you set up these blockers and bring up things that you know are going to be potential objections way earlier in the sales process and when you do that your customer doesn't even need to bring up those objections in the first place and when you make statements and bring up concepts and ideas that you know are potential objections it removes it from the customer's ability to use it against you as a potential detriment or blocker from your deal moving forward plus it does bring ideas and and problems to the table early and often that you can then help solve and overcome those objections because you're bringing those ideas to the table so much earlier you're not waiting till the very end because you were afraid to ask a question or there was an objection that you weren't sure was coming because you did your due diligence up front and you were prepared and you had written down objections that you know were potentially coming and you actually had a way to solve that problem or handle that objection before it ever became one it doesn't happen later on in the sales cycle and you actually remove those roadblocks that prevent your deal from closing on time and one of the ways i've been able to be really successful and close deals incredibly fast in my industry is that i handle objections before they're actually an objection and i bring up these concepts and ideas and i ask questions that get the customer thinking about things that they may not have thought before or i know that will likely come up down the road that way when i get down to the point of a negotiation or the time to sign a contract i'm not dealing with objections that i could have handled earlier on in my sales process like in the qualification or discovery phase so i hope that helps you that is seven tips and ways that you can accelerate your sales cycle now these may not seem that complex to you and frankly they're not most things in sales are not that complex and if you actually look at the seven that i provided you today they're primarily focused on preparation and being well prepared for things that may come up whether it's objections preparing an agenda bringing up pricing early thinking ahead involving other stakeholders asking questions and building those questions in advance those are all things that are not incredibly sexy they're not overly strategic and complex but most reps fail to do them and unfortunately it causes them pain later on and it's one of the number one reasons why sales reps that are struggling is because their sales cycles last forever and ever and they're actually unable to actually close the deal that's it for today's video thank you for watching please hit the notification bell subscribe and be notified every time i release a brand new video and hey if you're looking to close more deals and crush your quota click the link down below and learn more about my 21 day b2b quota crushing challenge until next time we'll see you [Music] then you