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hi there okay so what we're going to talk about in this video is how to shorten your cyber security sales cycle by 21 days that's our average that we've achieved for our clients in 30 days or less and that has been pretty indicative of the timeline it's taking us to get to the 21-day average now Beyond 30 days we are continuing to see further reductions in the length of our client sales Cycles um but there are some really quick impactful things that you can do that don't require structural and foundational and heavy process changes um but actually just require your sales team uh and anyone else involved in the sales process sometimes it involves other people more technical oriented people marketing um to think a little bit different and just reset their expectations of what's achievable so I'm going to go through 10 of I guess the most important things that we do for our cyber security clients so we work with cyber Security Consultants we work with msps and also msps uh and these are the things that we imp Implement today in December 2023 going into 2024 so let's jump into it um I think let's let's just talk about what the benefits of a shorter sales cycle is these are just a few of them but these are the obvious ones and and and the data points you see here are actually from our own clients um so we've seen a 5 to 14% uh percentage increase in Revenue collected each quarter uh by our clients who have achieved that minimum of a 21-day shortening of their sales cycle uh obviously you're going to collect more Revenue which means your staff are going to perform uh better they're going to be happier it's going to lead to lower turnover you're going to reduce your costs and time associated with hiring paying uh recruitment agencies um because because of the fact that you're shortening the sales cycle and there's less inputs into the sales process uh you're going to decrease the cost of customer acquisition which is going to increase your profit margins so these are just some of the obvious ones there's a whole lot more um but shortening a sales cycle is something that I know a lot of cyber security uh firms struggle with today and have been for a long time and will continue to do for a long time but what you need to understand is that there are some quick wins but there are some things that it are the juice the juice is worth the squeeze with some of the more difficult things as well and I'll talk about some of those um tactics and ideas um that are very effective but for the friction that they cause the time and effort um is completely outweighed exponentially when you can uh shorten your sales cycle but at the same time uh not hurt conversion and quite honestly when you go through the process of thinking about and implementing different ideas and tactics to shorten your sales cycle you actually just start to focus more on conversion and thinking about how you can improve conversion but it's also quite often just a necessary or a a um a fortunate byproduct of doing some of these things that your conversion does increase so it's you you you'll get a shorter sales Cycle Plus you'll get a higher conversion rate or achieve higher conversion rate so why listen to me so over 20 years I actually have been doing exactly this for businesses as an employee uh two of those businesses I was led the customer acquisition team and we scaled those to nine figure evaluations one of them was acquired a few years ago for uh hundreds of millions um now I do this for our clients my team and I do this for our clients uh under the brand cyberactive and we work with as I said cyber Security Consultants msps and msps um and that 21-day shortening of the sales cycle is what we've achieved for for our clients so it's really uh our data uh and what we've been able to achieve so um let's keep going okay 10 proven and effective ways to shorten cyber security Consulting and mssp sales Cycles so put a lot of focus on lead qualification and this all starts with knowing who your audience is don't guess it don't think you know it do the tried and tested and proven ways to learn about your audience speak to them listen to sales calls listen to Discovery calls conduct surveys hear from the proverbial horse's mouth this is the most effective and one of the biggest return on time that you can do uh in any business so when you really understand who is an ideal client then that means that you only focus on bringing those clients that you know you can close that they're going to be profitable that you know you can service well that are going to you're going to service well and they're going to be happy and you're going to retain them and they're going to have a long lifetime value or a high lifetime value over a long period of time don't neglect or think you already know your clients when you haven't done the hard work you have to speak with them you have to research them um this is a really big leverage point your Discovery must be excellent now if you're watching this and you're thinking what's a discovery well then you definitely need to implement a a a sales process with a discovery component but I think the chances are the vast majority of people and businesses watching this video will in fact have a discovery component to the sales process this is I'm not going to say it's the most but it's definitely one of the highest leverage activities that I'm going to run through today if you can do a really good Discovery if you really understand the prospect that you're speaking to you take the time to dig deeper you ask why you ask why is that why is that why is that you do the the three wise or the five wise you get to insights that other businesses don't get to and these insights allow you to craft an offer and a proposal that perfectly meets the business business challenges and problems that they're facing and ticks their desires at the same time and this obviously separates you and and you stand out from any other firms that they're speaking to but this process of doing an excellent Discovery really sets up the foundation for uh everything that comes after it so if you need help with Discovery um reach out to me I'm more than happy to send you over questions that we use for our Discovery and what we give to our clients um but it's it's a lot of sales reps go into a discovery meaning I don't think they go with that that mindset of of placing the gravitas and the importance upon it that it really is because it really allows you to separate yourself from the competition and deliver a much much better quality proposal which means ultimately they're going to convert at a high rate there's going to be less back and forth because you've answered their questions and and these are the reasons why this is a critical way to shorten your sales cycle okay A Defined and repeatable sales process is a must so this is just what I was touching on there but once you have a defined and repeatable sales process with Define steps so maybe it's a a five-step process or a three-step process and you you have metrics at each of those uh steps those stages and you have kpis only then are you able to systematize that process bring in salese that can plug into the sales process uh which allows you to hire even lower quality salese because the process is doing a lot of the heavy lifting um but when you have a process that eliminates the guesswork eliminates the arbitrary uh nature of sales reps at times where they want to you know do custom element it just lengthens the sales process you need a defined and repeatable sales process typically a three or a five-step process I find works best for cyber security firms intelligently use technology Automation and AI so if you're not using a CRM get one do a little bit of research most most of them will will fit your needs um but make sure you invest the time in setting it up correctly so that it actually meets the needs of your business build out your own pipeline that meet again meets your sales process meets the needs of your business um automation automation is a big one you can use this obviously in email follow-up sequences SMS sequences um when people land on your website people engage with your sales reps you can automate a whole lot of those processes and it's beyond the the scope of this video to go into too much detail but any process that is repeated again we're doing a repeatable sales process so a lot of the activity can be automated in the sales process um and then AI definitely you know I our team we invest a couple of hours each person a week to learn how we can apply a AI to the jobs that we're currently doing uh and how we can help uh how we can leverage AI to do jobs that we're not even doing currently so we're trying to look forward so again beyond the scope of this video I'll do another video on how we're using AI for our clients um but invest in technology use it wisely all right now this one may be the single most effective tactic out of the 10 that I'm going to run you through that has the lowest uh required investment of time and effort for the biggest return so stop scheduling meetings one or more weeks in advance once two to three days re you need to reset your expectation of The New Normal in business we value uh people taking their time to come back with us we we accept someone when they say allow me some time to think through this and get back to you which is perfectly fine but more often than not we push out that timeline much longer than it needs to be so if you stop scheduling meetings a week or more in advance trust me your clients your sales prospects will be more engaged less chance they're going to be uh hit up by a competition by a competitor of yours uh they're going to be more enthusiastic they're going to remember more of what was said in the last call so there's less uh going over things that you've already talked about uh every other stakeholder is going to be more likely to remember what happened in the earlier uh meetings so just if you've got a if you if your typical sales process includes four five or six meetings then if you take three to four days of each of those and instead of scheduling a meeting out one week in events you do two or three days right there you've saved 18 18 to 21 days in your sales process just right there with this one thing and it's really really easy obviously there is um you know you're going to need to work a little bit harder a little bit faster you're going to need to think about how internally you can rally the different stakeholders to make sure that you can get everything ready for those meetings in two to three days um but it's definitely possible it allows you to shorten your sales cycle significantly and allows you to collect a lot more Revenue so it's a really really good investment of your time and your team's time and this is a similar sort of message but respond and follow up quicker again it may require you rallying the team or getting a team together and resetting the expectations of what is a new normal uh what you're expected to do when following up with a client but get back to them as quick as possible don't wait 24 hours don't take wait 48 hours because again what might seem like small incremental time adds up significantly over the course of a sales cycle so instead of waiting 48 hours to each email that you get from a cent during the sales process turn that into 4 hours turn that into 6 hours and and if there's 30 or 40 different touch points probably even more over the course of a sales process right there you're saving days and days and days okay let's keep going the power of video to tell stories indoctrinate and educate can't be uh under undervalued it is so powerful so one way that we like to use the uh video in our salus process and and we use with our clients is after the discovery call but before the proposal we send a recap of everything we went through we uh we um confirm what our understandings were and um talk about what the next stages of the process are going to be in this in this video we also talk about case studies that are relevant testimonials um and any experience that we have that is relevant to things that were Unearthed during the discovery process this gets the prospects excited it gets them to buy into our process more and who we are as a company our clients companies it gets them more enthused it it it it it makes you stand out and it from what most of the competition are doing and allows you to develop a level of rapport with not only the prospect that you're speaking with but also other stakeholders in in the prospect business because you better believe that if there are multiple stakeholders in the buying process which there almost always are that those videos are going to be shared even if you don't suggest that they do it those videos will be shared with other stakeholders mapping content to each stage and answer common questions so what are we saying here we all know that the 80% of the questions are the same from one Prospect to the next and they're typically asked at similar stages of the sales process so think about what questions are are asked on that first initial Discovery call that you can send it an email or put on your website before they even get on the the first call or you send it as a custom video before that first discovery call what questions are asked during the discovery what questions are asked uh after the discovery but more often than not on the pro proposal call well then include those in that follow-up video that I just talked about so it takes some time just thinking about each of the steps getting with your team what questions are typically asked at each stage and thinking about what is the best mechanism and the most timely mechanism to deliver that information you're basically putting that into code you're putting it into the the digital ecosystem that does work for you for for you know what it takes work away that you and your team were doing you don't have to answer the same questions time and time again and what that allows you to do is have more productive meetings because you're talking about things which are closer to the the uh the purchase decision and you're not talking about those um you know administrative type questions and those questions that can be easily answered in a video or on a web page or in an email this is a huge huge one again really undervalued by a lot of firms within Cy Security in actually a lot of Industries but you need to be leveraging stories and case studies and quantifiable results that you're achieving for clients that look like your prospects if they're in the same Niche that's perfect that's what you want if they're in a similar uh adjacent Niche um have a similar problem that's better than nothing case studies build your credibility as a business they shorten the sales cycle because buyers buy into you they believe you they believe that you can get results for them uh and they are an extremely powerful way to bring down the length of your sales cycle this last one okay so keeping regular communication with your marketing team is essential because of the role that your marketing partner whether it's a agency or a uh or in-house team because of the role that they play in helping you create some of this content that we've talked about or setting up automations setting up the uh implementing AI into your sales process often times it is the marketing team that takes control and and of a lot of these things so you need to set up a culture and a and regular meetings or whatever it requires so that there is regular and open dialogue so you're giving timely feedback about what's working and what's not because these are doing having a marketing team that is supportive and buys into the idea of shortening the sales cycle will also mean that they will come to you with ideas as well when they know that that's a a common shared Collective goal so if you need help standing up from your competition uh we do have a model where we don't work as an agency we partner with our our um cyber security Partners businesses we um have money back guarantee we also structure our deals in such a way that we only grow when we add real Revenue to our partners businesses um and it's really a win-win uh type of deal structure where all of our incentives are aligned and we are Specialists as I said we only work within the cyber security realm um and manage services so at this point we really know uh the industry the various Industries the sub the sub Industries the sub niches but also your customer BAS as well if you do want to add an additional wonderful High vared clients every month um the types of things that we will do we obviously will come with a custom proposal based on what you need uh and we sort of do it in the the well not sort of we do do it in the uh the the in the capacity of done for you coaching we coach your team we consult and then we can hand over the Rings to your team uh if you want to um take on everything that we've been doing uh or we can just continue to work for your business and generate your revenue and um and work that way that's also a very common as well so um if that sounds interesting just go to cyberactive tocom and you'll speak with uh one my sales team or myself thanks so much for watching hope you got some value from this