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[Music] what is sales cycle acceleration one of the problems that we hear about quite frequently is that sales cycles are getting longer and longer it's taking too long to close and that's not just a problem that you're facing it's an industry-wide kind of economic condition thing and it has nothing to do with macro conditions like recession depression all that stuff it has to do with the general trends are moving towards buyer buyer decisions being made more by committee more and more people being involved purchase cycles being pushed out even longer just has to do with people becoming a lot more risk-averse and much of it has to do with the new buyers journey if you look at how obsessed we've become with our mobile devices and now heavy of users we've become with search engines and social media pretty much every buyers journey now starts with somebody asking a question they ask a question on social media like on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or they ask a question of a search engine or an assistant like Google or Bing or Siri or kakano or Alexa and what are they asking about they're asking about problems that they're trying to solve they're asking about questions that they want answers to they're asking about goals they're asking about challenges and the key thing if we really want to understand how we can best accelerate our sales cycle we need to really nail two things we need to understand who our buyer personas are and we need to understand their buyers journey a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of one of your ideal clients based on research and educated speculation for most small and medium-sized companies that are brand new to this way of thinking that a brand new to this strategy start with simply having a primary buyer persona and a secondary buyer persona other people that are like your third fourth fifth priority put them in a parking lot and come back to it six months to a year down the road after you get the basics down with your two most important economic buyers at this time you're thinking about your primary and secondary buyer personas you may also want to think about a negative buyer persona who is an absolute train wreck to have as a customer or client and do you want to segment them out as rapidly as possible so you don't waste marketing and sales resources on that person so once we understand our buyer personas next we need to understand their buyers journey that they go through in between when they first learn about your company and when they become a paying customer or paying clients so the buyers journey is the active research process that someone goes through and between if when they first learn about the existence of your company and when they become a paying customer and the buyers journey can be broken down into three broad categories awareness consideration and decision and the awareness stage which is the longest part of the buyers journey people have a symptom they have an itch they have a problem they have a goal they have something that they're trying to solve they may not be able to articulate it as well as you would like them to be able to articulate it but they know how to articulate it in their own words and that's why it's super critical that we don't guess what those words are we must get their own words when our ego gets no way when we get lazy when we make assumptions that's when things go off the rails and that's when we don't have a snowball's chance in heck of trying to figure out how to master the buyers journey be relevant in the buyers journey and accelerate the sales cycle so it starts with understanding the buyer persona and it also starts with understanding okay after awareness what do they look at next in the consideration stage usually they're starting to compare their different options that are out there they have a name for the problem and they're looking at you know what are the different ways that you could potentially solve it the decision stage is where they're actually starting to look at specific companies and specific products the problem is for most companies that are new to doing this that don't have a good digital strategy that they don't know and much about content marketing or in down marketing almost all of the content on their website almost all the content on their social media and digital presence focuses on the decision stage and it makes the very flawed assumption that every single person that comes through the door is ready to buy immediately which we know is absurd what says cycle acceleration is all about is understanding who two most important economic buyers are right out of the gate let's say your primary and secondary buyer persona and understanding those three stages that they're going to go through awareness consideration and decision so if you think about two buyer personas and three stages of the buyers journey we have like a two by three matrix a two by three almost think like a tic-tac-toe board or think like a spreadsheet and the better job that we can do with filling up those six boxes with content that is relevant to each of those buyer personas in each stage of the buyers journey the better her job that we can do in accelerating the cell cycle if you skip this there's not much you can do to accelerate the sales cycle short of doing silly things that are destructive to your margins that are destructive to your reputation yeah Lee one can dangle discounts and promotional pricing and all kinds of promotions and all kinds of other nonsense like that but if you truly want to be perceived as a thought leader as an industry expert if you really really want to understand how to add value to that buyers journey and accelerate the sales cycle that's critical that we understand who our buyer personas are and the stages that they go through in the buyers journey so we can truly accelerate the sales cycle [Music]