Streamline your sales cycle management for Supervision

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welcome back to another edition of whiteboard Wednesdays and uh got a lot of great comments in the last presentations hopefully this one will deliver as well the topic today is sales energy investment essentially the the energy we invest in the sales cycle and I wanted us to think a little bit about how we spend our time and our Energy across a particular sales process so we'll start by just asking the question how long is the sales cycle how long does it take close a deal and in most cases when I ask a client that their answer is well it depends of course right it depends when you say well okay what's the average and you get a lot of fuzzy answers but for the purposes of this conversation let's just say it's 90 days right I personally don't believe you know you can sell something and get a deal through all the process and Logistics and all that stuff and under that but you know a lot a lot of companies really it's more like 180 days possibly as well so we started over here and this is you know we'll call this day one where we have first contact with our Prospect and then we'll call uh call this day 90 where we where we hopefully generate some Revenue over here all right and this will represent our sales process as a whole so one of the questions I'll ask is from first Contact how quickly can we uh can we deliver on the things that customers need to make a buying decision Discovery uh you know we've got to ask a lot of nice questions we have to do a demo and then of course you know clients always want a proposal and typically the answer I get is somewhere around two weeks right in fact a lot of companies many companies Pride themselves on being very responsive and being being very very able to uh to meet clients needs and desire for a proposal and all that kind of stuff so we'll put the fact that we do a proposal over here as well so you know be very response in this area the question I ask after that is what what happens over here right so it's two weeks we get all this other other time and space you know what's what's going on and I think you know where this is going we spend time following up spend time checking in and and most of all we spend time waiting for us a little clock right here right and that's really a very frustrating part of the sales process and in fact if you think about it uh from a from a management or or a sales leadership point of view all of this sales waiting time is reflecting the fact my little funnel here so we've got a lot of opportunities sitting here at the bottom of the funnel at what would be called a proposed stage that we really don't know what's going on so how is this working for us what what are the what are the pros and cons potentially of this of this scenario well first of all I'd like to point out the fact that if if we if we get all this stuff done over here right this discovery The Proposal the demo we have to acknowledge that this is in all all reality 70 to 80 percent of our of our total effort right all the work all the things we do in the sales process that's probably seven to eighty percent of maybe a little bit more following up may take a lot of time checking in May taking a lot of time but it's not necessarily time consuming this is where the bulk of our uh of our of our work happens the other thing I'll point out is that uh lots of things don't progress over to a closed one over on that side lots of lots of opportunities fail so obviously our our goal over here is is clothed one right that's that's where we make our money but lots of these opportunities end in closed lost it could be for a variety of reasons could be because they bought from a competitor could be because uh you know the the sales process simply stop moving forward other things took their attention and uh you know they were distracted so fundamentally one thing we can point out is that the majority of our effort is is actually spent on a significant number of opportunities right in a normal pipeline process 70 to 80 percent sometimes more of the opportunities we work on never come to fruition so a lot of energy is spent right here on these folks well what do we do about this what's the problem well a couple things first of all at this moment in time at this line what I like to think about is we have given the prospects all the info they need right they've got everything from us and don't have a whole lot of motivation to uh to respond but keep us in Loop Etc so we've got this this misportionment of energy to result we also have this front loading of work which in a lot of ways could could contribute to poor leverage in the in the follow-up process what do you do about it right how do we solve this problem is really the question that uh that most people ask how do we fix this Townsend um one possibility and it's actually not uh the one that's gonna work is can we get the deals to close faster can we compress can we make the the sales cycle shorter right and my my uh my my belief on that is in general no right it's not it's not something in our control clients will buy companies will buy based on their process their need and it's going to take how long it's going to take there's obviously things we can do to divergency and uh and get ready to timeline but fundamentally uh companies are going to take a certain amount of time to buy something and we're not going to impact this uh this uh this this area way too much as I see it the problem the primary problem that we're dealing with here right an abductable block on this is for selling too fast we are just rushing to get stuff done and compressing all our effort up front so from a solution standpoint I believe the only real uh option we have is we've got to figure out how to move this line we've got to figure out how to extend or expand or or prolong the amount of time it takes for us to get all the information on the table and make sure it is aligned to the the probability that sale so one of the things I was trying to point out with this 80 of our efforts spent at 80 percent of the deals that don't close is that if you look at a pipeline and you think about probabilities of a pipeline right we might call this zero percent twenty percent fifty percent eighty percent if we could avoid you know say sending proposals out for prospects that were really at twenty percent but we we wanted to call 90 was a proposal they would naturally follow the funnel and we would we would save time and energy so really you know the key to solve the problem is moving this line right here moving this line of all of our effort and aligning that effort to the stages of the sales process and all also customer investment and not creating a a uh a gulf here a gap where our only option our only means of communication the only thing we have to talk about is hey how's it going uh where's that deal at have you made a decision are you still considering Etc and kind of this uh this this no no man's no person's land over here anyway I hope this gives you some stuff to think about in terms of how you uh you approach selling and and maybe detunes some of the urgency that either you or your organization feels you know with respect to getting a proposal out the door personally I don't think a company should be in a rush to get a proposal get pricing or even do a demo we want our customers energy over time to align with our energy and not having us front load that that work we do in the sales process on a lot of these deals that don't close anyway I hope that's been helpful and look forward to your questions and your comments