If you want to improve your sales statistics, you should learn how to speed up your sales process. With my clients, one of the first things we do is look at how many days it takes to complete a sale – from the moment they uncover their lead to the time they sign the deal. Once we know this, we can start to work on reducing their sales length and making them more efficient and effective in their selling.
Here are three ways you can speed up your sales:
Don’t Waste Time
It is about sales velocity – the quicker you move prospects through the purchasing cycle, the more time you will have to work on other opportunities. I am an strong advocate of automating as many repetitive tasks as possible. I want to make sure anything occurring more often than once gets automated and put into a system. This way, I am not wasting my valuable time repeatedly doing one-off work.
Your customer is also feeling the same way. They do not want sales people wasting their valuable time. In days past, the sales person would be the supplier of all information, and would guide the prospect through every stage of the sales process. Times have changed, however, and with an abundance of information available on the internet, prospects are holding off before engaging with the sales person. When the prospect comes to you, they could be more than halfway through the buying decision. So why do most sales people want to track the prospect all the way back to the beginning rather than simply finishing the sales process?
When you drag the prospect back to the start, you are doing two things. You are unnecessarily increasing the length of time to close the deal. But the bigger problem is you are wasting the prospect’s time, and endangering your chance to close the sale.
It used to be that in qualifying your prospect, you needed to find out the 5 insight areas (needs, wants, dominant buying motive, authority to buy, and financial capacity). But now, you have to find out the prospects preconceived perceptions of your industry, your company, and your products. You can see how the glut of available information can cause a problem for both the buyer and seller – the Internet contains great information, bad information, wrong information and slanted information.
That’s how your prospects develop their preconceived perceptions of your industry, your company and your products. The old idea of you or your sales person delivering information and talking about your products or services is outdated. Today, the buyer’s perceptions (correct, incorrect, or even misguided) strongly influence whether prospects buy from you or from your competitors. Therefore, the first order of business must be to determine the buyer’s perceptions.
Plan Your Meetings
Another way to speed up your sales process is to plan your meetings in advance. Too often, business owners have meetings without adequate preparation or identified objectives. If you don’t know what you want to have happen in the meeting, you are just wasting everyone’s time.
Show Your Difference
Your inability to differentiate your products and services from other products and services in your marketplace guarantees your sales will grind to a near halt. If everything in the market looks exactly the same, then more often than not price becomes the tie breaker. In a way that matters to the prospect, you need to be able to explain clearly and succinctly how and why you are different. If you can’t do it now, don’t talk to another prospect until you can! Read “Differentiate or Die” by Jack Trout. This will show you why differentiation of your products and services is critical to dominating your competition.
Next Steps
- Start monitoring how many days it takes for you to close a sale.[spacer height=”8px”]
- Develop new questions to determine prospects preconceived perceptions.[spacer height=”8px”]
- Check to see where the prospect is in their buying cycle.[spacer height=”8px”]
- Plan your meeting and develop goals for each meeting.[spacer height=”8px”]
- Learn how to differentiate yourself from your competitors.