Optimize Your Sales Cycle Steps for Teams

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so with that said what are the stages of the sales cycle that you've identified that is a very interesting question I will tell you that we've worked with companies that are everywhere from cabinetry manufacturing to truck manufacturing and sales a semi truck you know the big cinemas to financial software all across the board and it brings me back to a discussion on what we would identify as typical sales cycle and they're not too far off from industry to industry although it may may vary now there are two sides of the sales cycle there's the sales cycle for new customers okay or prospects and then there's the sales cycle for current customers then they both look similar what I like to do is break them into stages and in each stage are what we call predominant activities okay so for instance to answer your question directly for a new customer or prospect obviously the first stage is prospecting within the prospecting there are many predominant activities such as doing your due diligence on the prospect and determining you know qualifying when are they really a prospect and sometimes you can't do it till you get to see them but there are activities within the prospecting stage the second stage would be the interview and so you would have an interview stage and some people call it a sales call I call it an interview because within that stage they always say well you know you have to gather information on the prospect and so all that information does this help you qualify am I wasting my time or not okay and they're certain there's a list of things you need to gather but are you a talking to a person who can pull the trigger is it in their budget and B do they have the budget after the interview stage it may vary from industry to industry but generally the objective of the interview stage is not to gather data it's to sell the next stage and that would maybe be the proposal so once you get proposal stage the objective is to sell into the negotiation stage so you have prospect interview proposal and negotiation in the proposal stage the predominant activities are to get feedback on your proposal and the way I always like enter that stage David is that I always tell the customer it's a working document here's the proposal it's a working document between us we'll collaboratively build a program or a system or a product or we'll build a partnership based on your feedback the objective of the proposal stage is to engage the customer in negotiation and just by asking for their feedback you start in the negotiation stage and in the negotiation stage obviously the objective is to get to the close and that's the next stage so you have prospect interview proposal negotiation close and there may be steps you know between those different industries you may have to go back and propose several times but once you engage them in negotiation our research shows that you should be able to close them 75 to 80 percent of the time and if you don't it's probably something you missed okay mm-hmm then from close many different industries vary but from close we generally go right into the referral follow-up and referral stage which is the last stage and that's why they call it a cycle because the referral starts the sales cycle all over again and and that would be that's pretty consistent in every business but there are exceptions