How to shorten your sales cycles

The feedback we often hear is that sales cycles are getting longer

It makes sense after all there are “risks” involved in any buyer purchase

Risk such as, will the solution work?

Or if I choose the wrong vendor will I get fired?

We know that buyer groups are getting bigger 

For example buyer teams will involve the user department, finance, IT, etc

Getting any consensus is hard within the buyer team

Afterall, all of the people involved will bring their biases

“we worked with x company before and it was a nightmare / amazing”

Plus all of the buyers will have also done their own research, they will part of industry whatsapp groups and networking groups

They will also bring that information to any consensus gaining meeting

Bringing that all together and making a decision is hard work

Time after time, our customers always tell us that we have been able to reduce sales cycles

By looking on social like experts that can help, rather than just yet another sales person, is a start

We are already then liked and trusted by our buyers 

Also having more than one or two contacts in an account helps

It elevates sales people to have more meaningful conversations 

Right across your accounts 

These meaningful conversations will shorten the sales cycle 

By shortening the sales cycle sellers are able to sell more, faster

Better still, they can get to more deals faster than their competition 

We have worked with a number of clients that were able to do this very effectively with us

One, an e-learning company, was able to bring-in two specific deals (usually deal time of 12-18 months) in 6 weeks

This is obviously an exceptional instance but it showed the power of developing multiple conversation streams simultaneously within a target account rather than relying on simply 1 or 2 relationships

Typically we would expect clients that follow our well-defined process reducing deal times to between 50% and 75% of the expected timeframes as being normal

Want to know more about social selling, check out my new book

"social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition".

In this brand new edition, I have updated all the text, I have also got 15 practitioners, so people who are doing this already to explain how they are get (practical) business benefit. From the CEO that has been running a digital business for over 18 months to sales leaders who use social selling every day.  

Articles on how these business have and are implementing digital, from Mercer, Telstra Purple, Ring Central, Cyberhawk, Namos, Ericsson, DLA Ignite and more.

What does Mark Schaefer, Marketing guru think of the book "social selling - techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition"? watch the video here

It's available on Amazon worldwide.  Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.