How to shorten your sales cycle without urgency tactics.
To shorten your sales cycles stop trying to create urgency.
Instead figure out how to make it easier to buy from you.
If you have a product or service that requires a consultative, B2B sales approach, and you have a sales cycle of three months or longer, you should stop wasting your time trying to create urgency. Urgency either exists within your prospect or it does not. Your job is to uncover it, but if you try to force your own timeline on your prospects you are wasting your time. Urgency tactics have a reverse effect on your time to close, close rates, and client retention.
To shorten the time to close, instead focus on uncovering the biggest, most urgent problem that your product or service solves for your prospects. Then if you can align your solution to their problem in a way that demonstrates value that far exceeds the associated costs, the prospect will purchase as soon as they possibly can. But it’s only when the prospect is sold on your value that you can effectively offer incentives like discounts or bonuses for signing sooner.
Meanwhile if you have not demonstrated value, there is no discount, deadline, or squeeze tactic that will make them buy by the end of the month. In fact, the data shows that urgency tactics have been proven to reduce the odds of a sale. According to a Demandbase survey, “57% of B2B buyers prefer to buy from salespeople who do not apply tactics or apply pressure in follow up”.
Buyers don't elongate the sales cycle, sellers do.
A value-based selling approach can shorten sales cycles but salespeople may still still unknowingly extend the sale by making it difficult for the buyer to buy. Remember a truly qualified sales prospect is willing to talk to you because they think (and hope) you can solve their problem. The prospect has been on a path heading toward making a purchase and sales must be careful to not get in the way, and simply guide the customer further down the path by removing any remaining obstacles. When sales shows up and tries to prematurely influence the close date, it will have negative effects.
How to Remove the obstacles and shorten the time to close.
1. Do your research. The prospect has done theirs. You need to learn as much as you possibly can about the prospect, their company, and their industry. If you know their industry well, fantastic, but if you don’t it's ok just make sure to learn as much as you can before you speak to them so they feel like you understand them.
2. Ask for more information on their current situation. Ask them to answer a short list of questions prior to the call so you can expedite the call and jump right to diagnosing problems. This info is good to get in advance because you don’t want to frustrate your prospect by asking too many questions on the call. The questions you do ask on the call should be problem-centric questions that dig beyond their current situation to diagnose their problems.
3. Only Share Information that You Know is Relevant to Advance the Sale - less is more. People who are familiar with agile software development methodologies understand that when you build you do not want to build based on assumptions. You only add features and functionality that you can validate as necessary based on the users input. The same goes for selling a product, do not show any product or features that are not necessary and relevant to helping them make a decision. Use the information you have gathered to determine what you need to share at this juncture. Sharing too much will always complicate and elongate the sale. This goes for demos and proposals, never just throw things at the wall to see what sticks.
Here are some other ways you can make it easier for your prospects to buy and shorten your time to close at the same time.
Don’t offer payment terms that are only favorable to you. Make it easier for the buyer by giving them payment options and incentivize them for choosing options such as full upfront payment that typically benefit the seller.
Do not waste time with pointless follows ups- Buyers need a clear vision of the path to purchase and sales needs to light up that path with clear next steps. If you find yourself in follow up purgatory it's not the prospect’s fault it’s yours.
Never send out a proposal without scheduling a call to walk through it. There is a chance they never read it! Proposal software is great these days but proposals don’t close deals salespeople do. If your prospect refuses to agree to a time, first of all its not a good sign but in the instance where they just can’t find the time to meet, record a video walkthrough and perhaps embed the video in the proposal itself. Inception? No just smart selling!
Be responsive and immediately follow up on reasonable requests/ Equally important here is recognizing when requests are not reasonable or are not critical to advancing the sale.. Don’t get pulled into the weeds. Can you validate that they need this info to make the purchase? Can you save this information for onboarding?
Keep your promises. Deliver information when you say you are going to, especially proposals and/or pricing. The prospect is evaluating you based on what buying experience is like. In fact CEB/ Gartner research shows that the buying and onboarding experience has a bigger impact on retention than the actual delivery of the product or service.
Nail down next steps as soon as possible. Here is were salespeople can considerable condense their time to close and lose less deals. Time is the killer of all deals and your prospect’s excitement for making this purchases wains every day you do not speak with them. Also you don’t want any uncontrollable/unforseen obstacles to creep in and sabotage your deal.
In summary, if you can really master problem-centric, value based selling, coupled with a tight sales process, your sales will not delay and your prospects will move quickly. If you find yourself in a place where are trying to create urgency it is unlikely your prospect is sold on value and you need to circle back in the sales process, not move forward.
At TripleDouble, we love analyzing existing sales processes with the hopes of helping you remove any obstacles that are making difficult to buy from you. Schedule a free one hour sales process audit call today!
