Sales Cycle Acceleration
(The Five Pillars for Revenue Growth @ SP Home Run)

Sales Cycle Acceleration (The Five Pillars for Revenue Growth @ SP Home Run)At SP Home Run, our clients have found the greatest success growing their revenue when they’ve integrated these five essential pillars for growth in their overall strategy and company culture:

Meet The Five Pillars for Growth:

  1. Differentiation
  2. Thought Leadership
  3. Competitive Positioning.
  4. Sales Cycle Acceleration
  5. Revenue Growth

 

Sales Cycle Acceleration Defined

To accelerate sales cycles and close sales faster, a company must have a strong grasp on its primary buyer persona and secondary buyer persona -- as well as the buyer’s journey that each buyer persona goes through. This is the active research process someone embarks on in between first looking for the answer to a problem, challenge, or goal and when this person ultimately makes their purchase. By better understanding the unique struggles of a company’s most and second-most important economic buyers and the process each goes through to make decisions, a company can proactively address questions and concerns unique to that persona and dramatically speed up the sales cycle.

How long is your company’s average sales cycle length?

If you have a high degree of clarity on this number, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re in the small minority.

Now going even deeper, do you know how your sales cycle length varies by buyer persona?

And do you segment your leads to add value in different ways?

 

Segment, Nurture, Accelerate, and Close Faster

Most companies -- especially small businesses -- mistakenly lump all of their prospects and clients into one bucket.

While this approach may have been effective in a bygone era, your prospects and clients today have much higher standards.

The titans of selective consumption like Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, and Sirius XM have completely ruined it for mere mortal companies like yours.

Selective consumption has made it possible for your prospects and clients to get exactly what they want, when they want, 100% on their own terms.

Personalize or Perish

As a result, a plain vanilla one-size-fits-some approach -- usually fueled by a cocktail of arrogance, ignorance, and living in the past -- just won't cut it anymore.

If you don’t give your prospects and clients exactly what they want, exactly when they want, rest assured your company is one click and browser back-button away from irrelevance.

So what can you do to combat that?

The solution requires a two-pronged approach:

  1. Understand exactly who your buyer personas are -- and their true goals, plans, challenges, and secret motivations.
  2. Understand exactly how your buyer personas navigate the buyer’s journey for a product or service like yours.

When your company invests the resources to properly segment your leads by buyer persona and buyer’s journey stage, your prospects and clients have a much more favorable impression of your company’s ability to address their goals and solve their problems.

 

Staying One Step Ahead to Be Proactive

However, the benefits are much greater. By now understanding exactly what each buyer persona wants to know at each stage of their buyer’s journey for your products and services, you can proactively deliver educational resources that stay one step ahead.

So with better segmentation, and having resources for each buyer persona and buyer’s journey stage, you’re proactively educating your potential clients about what matters most to each.

That way, by the time your sales team is involved, your sales team can do what it does best: selling and closing, rather than educating on a one-off basis.

 

Building Blocks for Sales Cycle Acceleration

For data driven companies that track average sales cycle length, this kind of approach can lead to dramatic sales cycle acceleration -- as companies are no longer depending on how frequently a sales rep can reconnect with a lead and deliver the exact information at the exact moment.

Instead, your sales reps can observe how each lead interacts with different kinds of content and offer assistance at the exact moment that active buyers are ready for a sales-related conversation.

Moreover, your sales team will be an order of magnitude more helpful to prospects and clients as your sales reps will be able to personalize the conversation to the kinds of issues that the person has shown the most interest in.

If you’re serious about seeing a dramatic increase in sales cycle acceleration, typically a minimum of 20%, here’s what we recommend.

Recommended Resources

If you’re a CEO, president, founder, or owner of a small business in South Florida, and you’re trying to position your company as the premier provider in your industry, differentiate from larger competitors, improve processes, and build trust among your prospects and clients, here are some recommended resources:

  • Download Free Sample Excerpts from Market Opportunity Research Reports
  • Register for an Upcoming Workshop
  • Schedule Business Advisory Consulting