September 23, 2018 | Andrew Lawlor

More than a quarter of all B2B sales cycles take seven months or longer to close, according to Harvard University and Gallup. What kind of difference would shortening your own sales cycle make to your business? And what can you be doing to move to that goal?

I meet a lot of companies that are making changes to drive shorter sales cycles, and they are seeing great success as a result. Here are some of the steps their sales teams are taking to more readily close the gap between “It’s a pleasure to meet you” and “It’s great doing business with you.”

1. Integrate your marketing team into the sales process.
   Your sales staff doesn’t have to do the job of shortening sales cycles all on its own. It has a potential helping hand in the form of your business’ marketing team, and it should reach out and grasp it.The relationship will have its basis in leveraging the marketing team’s expertise at high-quality lead generation, and its marketing automation tools, to bring the top leads to the sales team’s attention. Rather than just handing sales the contact details of anyone who fills out a lead capture form, for instance, marketers can help their colleagues by immediately and automatically connecting them with those who display the strongest interest in your business’ product or services for a quick lead follow-up.At the same time, marketers can keep the conversation going with potential buyers who are still in the research stages. They can nurture them along via personalized email campaigns. That way, by the time these leads’ names reach your sales teams, they will be more than primed to buy and likely to act faster.

2. Bring analytics into the equation.
   Your organization has a ton of data about its customers, but is it making the most of its knowledge to push deals to the finish line faster? It’s not easy to do so when so much sales-related information lives across email messages, reports, spreadsheet software, and CRM and other applications – and when pulling it together to gain productive insights to take customer conversations to the next level is laborious and time-consuming.The picture changes when businesses have access to analytics technology that enables them to gather sales and customer data from multiple sources automatically, summarize it visually and refresh it regularly.At last, it becomes possible to instantly see all the open deals involving products that have sold well in the past, so that staff can focus on putting the pedal to the metal on these opportunities that have a good shot at closing quicker. Or, they can quickly view which open deals are furthest along in the sales stage, so that energy can immediately can be put towards accelerating them. They can even set a sales pitch in motion for a quicker close by diving into data to learn who a prospect’s key decision makers are, so that the right parties are targeted from the start.

3. Mobilize your sales team.
   It’s a mobile world, so the idea of ensuring mobile access to CRM solutions sounds obvious. And yet, in some organizations, sales teams still lack an effective and easy way to access and update customer information and accomplish tasks right from their phone when they’re on the road. Which, of course, is where they spend most of their time.That scenario has to change if a company is serious about reducing customer purchase times and pulling in revenue faster. Any business – every business – must be able to leverage mobile devices and mobile sales and customer apps to move the sales cycle along in real time. That way, they’ll literally have in hand the capabilities to do everything necessary to promptly settle a deal – whether that’s pulling in a remote teammate to satisfactorily help answer a prospect’s last nagging question to actually submitting a complete order.

4. Energize your social media presence.
   It’s more the rule than the exception today that your company’s prospects are learning about your brand and offerings with the help of social media. LinkedIn, in particular, is a good gathering spot for the professional community that may be in need of your B2B products and services.Your sales teams should be meeting with them on social media’s turf. Their time there shouldn’t be spent on hard sells, though. Rather, your teams should be sharing their knowledge of trends and issues impacting the industry, markets, and buyers that your solutions serve. Providing content that informs, educates, and responds to users’ questions and concerns is the first priority here. Once your team establishes their voices as trusted parties, they can begin to introduce some low-key commentary around the benefits of your offerings and even add some links to more specifics on the corporate homepage and other appropriate sites.This all sets the stage for going into a harder sell at a faster pace once prospects do bite. If the groundwork has been properly laid, that ideally will translate into a more immediate close of business, too.

5. Be more responsive with price quotes.
   No deal can be concluded until the seller provides a quote for the product or service in question and the buyer, of course, agrees to it. Unfortunately, sales cycles frequently bog down in quote generation, often because of the pricing complexities that tend to go hand-in-hand with complex and costly products. Things have only grown more challenging in today’s dynamic environments, where businesses have to architect configurations and quotes with a close eye on fast-evolving market conditions, competitive offerings, and customer demands.Sales cycles can be put back on the fast track when companies take advantage of technology that automates configuration, pricing, and quotes (CPQ). Some of these solutions integrate with Salesforce CRM software to provide sales staff with an integrated end-to-end experience, but depending on your situation, you may need customization of your Salesforce system in order to integrate it seamlessly, and sometimes those kinds of integrations require a high level of expertise.

Many businesses, including the countless invested in the Salesforce platform, will conclude that they certainly can be making greater efforts in this direction, whether it is customizing and integrating their CRM and marketing apps and data or adding to their toolkits by building productivity-driving custom apps on the Force.com platform. If you think your business can do a better job maximizing its sales force technology or benefit from application development efforts to speed up its sales cycle, don’t hesitate to be in touch with our team here at Aptaria.