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- Hi, there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy. In this episode, I'm gonna share with you the five strategies to shorten your enterprise sales cycle so that you can get rid of the companies that are just trying to waste your time, and find the ready-to-buy buyers, and do it in a way where you can actually get a deal done in the next two to three months, not 16 months, and be sure to stay to the end, where I'm gonna actually share with you my stage sheet. This is the worksheet that I use with my coaching clients to identify the seven specific stages that every sales process should follow, the percent win rates by stage to stage, and even ways that you can audit your own sales process to increase your velocity. Let's kick into it. (upbeat music) I love selling, I love it, I love it, I love it. And the reason why is 'cause I believe that nothing happens in business till somebody buys, and the process of communicating value and benefits is one of the most important skills that you can learn. Selling and leadership, to me, those two, those are the... Start by learning to sell, and then develop your leadership skills. But in regards to selling, if you don't do this right, and I learned this building my company, Spheric Technologies, you can literally get ahead of yourself. You're talking to a customer, they're excited, you're like, yay! You start hiring people, You get anticipating the deal, and guess what? You find out after the fact you weren't talking to the right person. You weren't even talking to somebody who had authority. They couldn't write a check. And the truth is is that inside their company, when they buy software like yours, or deploy it to the company, there are so many different other decision-makers involved in that process that had you known that on the onset, you would have actually adjusted your excitement. Failing to do this will cost you revenue, it'll cost you opportunity, it'll cost you to have a false sense of pipeline that's just not true, and we need to fix it. So here are five specific strategies that I use, and I coach my clients on, to ensure that we increase the sales velocity, specifically around enterprise sales. Number one, audit 3VC. Now, I first heard this term from my buddy, Jason. He runs an incredible agency helping companies increase their revenue, called Go Nimbly, and 3VC is a simple formula. The first V is volume. How much deal are you adding to your pipeline? How many just, literally, deal volume are you adding opportunities to your pipeline? The second one is value. How much are those deals worth to you? Do you got a lot of little ones, you got a lot of medium ones? But we need to essentially focus on the value. The third is velocity. How fast are you working your deals? How fast are you working those deals? And then the C is for conversion. What is the steps involved to closing a deal and what are the percents across each one of those stages to increase your velocity? That is the 3VC. Most people that say, "Oh, I have long sales cycles. People aren't buying. I don't know how to increase the velocity." They don't know these numbers. They literally don't know the volume, the value, the velocity, or the conversion numbers in their pipeline. Because if you're doing mid-market enterprise sales and you're just a small startup, it's a good chance you probably don't even write any of this stuff down. There's a good chance that you've never audited it. You kind of go on, I call this elephant hunting. A lot of founders get stuck in this mode of big opportunity, all energy, this is gonna transform our business, to, ah, man, that was a lot smaller than I thought. So number one strategy to increase your sales velocity and your pipeline, and your speed to close is audit your 3VC. Number two, clarify your market. So clarify market, to me, is know who you're selling to. If you sell software that improves collaboration in a big company, you need to understand what customer type, what audience, your ICP, your ideal customer profile, or your core customer, or whatever you wanna call it, but who's the perfect buyer? You have a DNA as a company, your product has a DNA. It has certain features that make it unique. What customers out there in the market would be ideal for it. Because if you can't answer that, if you can't clarify your target market and be specific, sometimes I call this uncomfortably narrow, if you can't do that, then you're literally gonna be selling stuff to people. And this is the worst part. When you're selling enterprise software, somebody will come to you, they'll ask you a bunch of questions, you'll do three or four or five meetings. And then at the end, when they start getting serious about it, guess what happens? They open it up for a competition. They start asking themselves, "I wonder what G2 crowd has to say about this? I wonder what Capterra has to say about this? I wonder what my peers in the industry have to say about this? And all of a sudden, you thought you were doing a deal with a company, and at the last minute, they bring in a competitive process and you're gonna lose out because maybe somebody else's product is better positioned for that kind of company, that industry, that market. And for me, I think of one of my great clients, Reg, at Stormboard, Reg has a product for online collaboration, and one of the things he discovered that changed the game for it, literally got win rates to 30, 40, 50%, was understanding for Stormboard, his perfect-fit customer was a mid-market enterprise company that was using Agile development with a distributed team. If those three things were true, then he had the best product in the market for them. And all of a sudden now, all the marketing got better, the campaigns got better, the sales process got better. Because why? You can customise your deck. You can talk about Agile development and how to use their product to streamline the process. It doesn't mean that you don't create a broader horizontal collaboration software. It means from a positioning point of view, especially for enterprise sales, that your campaigns are targeted towards that. So there's a difference what you put on the website, your marketing site, and what you use for your marketing campaigns, for your outbound, for your sales process. And that's what's being missed sometimes. So be sure to verify your market. Number three, map the process. This is really simple. Go to a whiteboard, write down all the different stages, steps that's involved in your current process, everything from a request comes in from your website or an outbound replies to you and shows some level of interest, that might be step one, and go through what happens after that? Do we get on a discovery call? Then what do we do? Do we talk about doing a product demo? Then what do we do? Do we do a POC? What do we do after that? Do we do a proposal? Do we do whatever, whatever? Map it out as it is today, 'cause until you can take it from your mind, put it out in front of you, look at it with your team members, and say, "Okay, this is the nine to 15 steps that's going on right now. How do we compress steps? How do we reduce the friction to go from step one to step two? We've got a proposal. Who writes the proposal? Is there a template? Is there a structure? If there isn't, can we create one? How does the discovery call go? Do you use every discovery? What is the purpose of our discovery call? Is it serving the need of the sales process? No? What questions should we change? What should we stop asking?" And on, and on, and on, and on. If you don't map the process, and you're trying to increase the sales cycle and the speed, it's like you're trying to push on a wet noodle. You're trying to move a wet noodle forward, and it's not doing anything, because to me, the process is where the opportunity lies. It's where each stage has friction, has outcomes desired, has principles. What are we doing at the proposal stage? Should we just send the proposal to the customer? No, you should schedule a call to review the proposal with the customer. Little things like that. You may not have this experience. That's fine. Map it out, bring somebody in. Get a mentor, ask your team, trust me. Go play secret shopper amongst top competitors. See how they do it. Be inspired. I call this R and D, rob and duplicate. Figure out what's working in the market and adopt it if you don't know any better, but mapping out the process is key. Number four, instal automation. Now I love this. Automation to me, the way I think about marketing and sales is, we need to take care of the market till they're ready to buy. We need to use automation so that we can support the process, so that every interaction with the customer is consistent. It's sharing the same message. It's positioning the product statement. Some people are like, "Oh, I run a complicated sales process." I don't care. You can absolutely automate certain stages. For me, if you just think the three simple stages, is there the get them? So if somebody fills out a form, how do I get them to book a demo, or book, yeah, in your world, it's probably a demo, so how do I get them to book a demo? How do I get them to show up for a demo? And then after they show up for a demo, how do I follow up to move things to the next stage? If you just broke down those three stages, got an email, need to get them on a demo, got a demo, get them to show up, they showed up, but I need them to take the next stage, and you just write two or three emails at each one, and even text messages. The level of automation sophistication you can do today with, like, a Zapier zap or some off-the-shelf, $15 a month, subscription software. It is mind-blowing how cool and automated you can do this. Not to take the personality out of it. You can personalise every one of these things. Also ask yourself, in all these messages, the automation, are you promoting the value? I see a lot of people that have demo request form, and it's all about like, "Get on a demo with one of our sales reps." I don't wanna be sold, and I don't need a demo. But if you said, "Hey, get on a strategy session and we're gonna do a customised presentation of our product with our product specialist," I'm more interested. Why? 'Cause I just changed the whole positioning to be valuable for the person, valuable for them. Not about me, make it about them. Just think about this. If you're doing SMS notifications- I just want you to know, I'm dropping some serious value in this episode, so I want you to take notes. If you're doing SMS notifications, are they selling the benefit of showing up for the demo? If you're just saying, "Hey, confirming our call is tomorrow at 1:00 p.m," man, you're dropping the ball. Where are the value drivers? Why should they show up for the call? Are you gonna teach them about the industry? Are you gonna give them an access to an exclusive resource? Are you going to audit their situation and give them three key things they're gonna learn to take away, to improve their situation? There's so much low-hanging fruit around automation. Even just follow up. So like following up if somebody doesn't go to the next stage, building that sequence out and, literally, until they hit Unsubscribe or Leave me alone in reply, you literally should follow up and have a cadence where it's like one day, three days, seven days, 10 days, and then every 15 days for eternity, honestly, as long as it's value-driven, as long as it comes from a place of service, then I think it's game on. Installing automation could be a game changer to increasing the velocity of your current sales process. Number five, advance the sale. So there's a few non-negotiables. When I work with sales teams, I coach a lot of incredible SaaS founders, and sometimes they'll bring me in, they'll hire me to do a training for their sales team. The first one is BAMFAM, book a meeting from a meeting. It is irresponsible and absolutely a cardinal sin if you're on the call with the potential buyer and they wanna review things, for you not to schedule that next call in your calendar. You can say, "Hey, how much time is it gonna take you to review it?" They say, "10 days." "Perfect. Let's schedule a time in 10 days from now. 2:00 p.m. work for you?" "Yes, perfect." Here's what we're gonna do on that call." And you make it valuable for them. Why? Because they need to wanna get back on that call, and hey, by the way, when you get on that call, "I'm actually going to do some research, I'm gonna tell you who are the five companies in your industry that are crushing it around this problem that you're trying to solve right now. So even if you don't move forward with us, I wanna give you that as a gift. So will you show up?" 'Yeah, absolutely." "And will you make a commitment to me that if something should come up, that you just let me know prior so that I can open up that spot and make it available to somebody else that's looking to get in to my calendar. Can you make that commitment?" "Yeah, for sure. I can do that." Perfect, they have a verbal commitment. Again, hope you're taking notes. That's the kind of stuff that will absolutely crush it for you. Multi-threading accounts, asking a company, "When you've bought software like ours in the past, how did you guys make that decision? Who was involved in that decision?" That's called multi-threading, 'cause now what you're gonna do is you're gonna have a list of three to five people that were involved in that decision, and you're gonna ask if you can reach out to them to answer or get them prepped on specific things or concerns they might have. If it's a technical leadership, maybe they have certain compliance or security stuff that they're gonna need, and you're just saying, "Hey, I just wanna know what that is. I'm gonna reach out and talk to that person. I'm gonna figure that out so that as we work on the business case, we can solve some of these things." That's multi-threading accounts. There's so much around advancing the sale. Even the idea of selling a POC, a proof of concept. So proof of concept is the simple idea that I don't need to have you deploy my software to everybody in your organisation. I just want you to identify what team, that if we could make it absolutely rock and work for them, that that would be a great case study and example that you could use it to sell it to the rest of the business. We just need five or 12 people that are perfect, and it's a paid POC. That's why to me, sales cycles that last 16 months, it's 'cause you're trying to sell, you're trying to boil the ocean. And it's possible, but then you get into budget constraints and timelines and all that stuff. Literally ask yourself, what can they spend? 10 grand, 15 grand, 25 grand? Get a POC sold, get it deployed, ask them who's involved, run the process, manage it with your customer success team, get the case study, ask them, "What does success look like? And if we achieve that, then what would be the next day? Well, if we can do that in this quarter, then boom, cue through, we should probably get this approved. Great. Let's move that deal forward." That's what I'm talking about. Always advance the sale by figuring out what's the next stage, getting the commitment on the call now so that nobody feels like there's follow-up that's outstanding, and we get the commitment earlier on. So quick recap of strategies to shorten your sales cycle. Number one, audit your 3VC. Number two, clarify your market. Number three, map the process. Number four, instal automation. Number five, my favourite, advance the sale. So as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I wanna share with you literally the most powerful worksheet. You can download it, just click the link below to download it. I'm gonna show you the different stages of the sale. I'm gonna show you how to audit your sales process using the 3VC framework and identify the opportunities that you can literally put into your business today to shorten your sales cycle. So click the link below to download your copy. If you like this episode, be sure to hit the Subscribe button, like it, share it with somebody that you love. And as per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday. Shorten your sales, like, fasten, (laughs) fasten. I'm gonna teach you how to fasten down your seatbelt.