How to Really Speed Up Your Sales Process

A quick Google search on “speed up sales process” reveals 8,010 results!  If you take the parentheses away, the search quickly balloons to 240,000,000 results.

The results on the first page are dominated by the likes of Salesforce, Hubspot, Ondeck, Wordstream, Pandadoc, Vainu, Optinmonster, and AutoKlose.  And therein lies the first problem with shortening or speeding up your sales process.  These posts are all from marketing technology companies, not sales experts, and technology does not speed up the sales process.  It might help with some of the heavy lifting at the top of the funnel, during the process, and at the end of the process. But the sales process is about hitting strategic milestones by having the right conversations with the right prospects at the right time.  Technology does not help you do that.

I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve worked with over the past thirty years where I was told that the key to bringing in and maintaining and growing accounts is relationships and they don’t want to change that.  For maintaining and growing accounts relationships are important, but donuts, coffee and tickets don’t really add value anymore.  And to wait for a relationship to flourish as a requirement for bringing in new business has the opposite effect of speeding up the sales process.  It slows it to a crawl and even then, all you might have is a relationship.  Customers still want value!  Relationships are not a key to shortening or speeding up the sales process.

A significant part of the US market is made up of SaaS companies selling their various cloud applications.  They tend to generate interest by pushing willing prospects to take a demo.  Demo’s do create interest but, in most cases, it’s interest that equates to “nice to have” as opposed to the more important “must have.”  In addition, these demos are usually given to people who don’t have the authority to make decisions and when the application is only perceived as nice to have, they lack a compelling reason to either get the decision maker engaged or get the money approved.  Increasing the metric to deliver more demos does not shorten or speed up the sales process.

There are three things that will shorten your sales cycle:

1. A formal, structured, staged, milestone-centric and optimized sales process.  As this article proves, the top 5% of salespeople are 850% stronger at sales process than weak salespeople. It’s a real differentiator.
2. Reaching Decision Makers.  As this article proves, opportunities are 90% more likely to move to the closable stage when the salesperson is meeting and/or talking with the Decision Maker.
3. Slowing Down.  It’s counter-intuitive but if you slow down, listen and ask more and better questions, and uncover the prospects’ compelling reasons to buy, you will create the urgency required to speed up the sales process as this article shows.

The best way to speed up and shorten the sales process is to slow down to speed up.