How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle and Close More Sales

Here is a question I recently received from a worried salesperson:

“Paul, I have a problem.  Four years ago, when I started in this position, my sales cycles were pretty short.  I was often able to get a customer to sign a contract within one to two months of our first meeting.  These days, it can take four to six months to finalize a contract!

As far as I can tell, I am not doing anything different.  Customers just seem more reluctant to commit these days.  They push off making a decision for a “few weeks” and before I know it, a quarter has passed.   What can I do to shorten my sales cycles?”

Despite the popular idea that salespeople are all pushy and ruthless, most salespeople are like this salesperson: courteous and accommodating. If a customer tells you to call her in two weeks, you do it, no questions asked. Unfortunately, that is the problem.

Before you agree to call back “in a few weeks,” you need to find out why the customer needs more time.  If the customer’s reasons are vague, ask more questions until you get a specific answer. Once the reasons are explicit, you can begin to create mutual accountability.

Accountability is important because it means that both parties are required to take action. For example, you might say the following to your customer:

“I can definitely call you in two weeks. So we can avoid playing phone tag, let’s get our calendars out and pencil in a date and time for our follow-up meeting.  In the meantime, you mentioned that you will be consulting with your boss to get his thoughts.   Where do you think he’s going to see the value?  How will you convince him if by chance he doesn’t see this as a priority as you do?

This type of dialogue allows you to get commitment from your customer as to when you will be meeting again (whether on the phone or in person), who else is involved, what resistance might come up and whether your contact is motivated to convince others on your solution.

If your customer has any doubts about doing business with you, now may be the time he or she will bring them up. For example, the customer might say, “During the next meeting we need to talk about budget. We only have $50,000 allocated for this project and what you are proposing is about 30% higher.” This gives you a chance to research less costly alternatives for the project and come to the next meeting prepared, instead of being blindsided by a customer’s demand that you lower your price after you have given your presentation. Getting this potential objection or concern out in the open beforehand is key. It is hard to overcome an objection that is brought up at the last minute. It is impossible to overcome an objection that is never verbalized at all.

4 responses to “How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle and Close More Sales”

1. Qualifying which customers to focus your energy and time is key. I’ve spun my wheels too many times on what I thought were opportunities when in fact they were just telling me what I want to hear vs what they intend to do. It’s imperative to always have your customers have “skin in the game” on each and every call so that when they want me to follow up, I expect them to do some homework or activity that demonstrates sincerity, and many times it’s a simple as bringing other relationships to the table on our next meeting.

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   • Anne, Great observation. I like your suggestion about getting the customer to have “skin in the game” That’s great closing skills because your customer is investing either time, money, resources, and/or other people which demonstrates a sincerity in moving the relationship forward to the next step. Thanks for sharing.

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2. I love that question! Even though I train teams in ‘how to reduce decision making time’ it is easy to overlook the fact that the influencer and ultimate decsion maker may not have been met.
   In the meantime, you mentioned that you will be consulting with your boss to get his thoughts. Where do you think he’s going to see the value? How will you convince him if by chance he doesn’t see this as a priority as you do?
   My first trainer Adrian Webster who inspired me to to set up years later, talked about Don’t Talk to Sooty (a glove puppet from British TV) talk to Mr Corbett. The change I find is so many infleuencers are asked to do a job of filtering, they are often unqualified to do so, and unable to aswer searching questions. Your approach must work well and I shall be using that question when i am encoutering a Sooty! thank you for a great post, Jeremy

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   • Jeremy, thanks for your feedback. Isn’t it amazing when we rely on people to sell for us who are either unqualified or not motivated, we set ourselves up for failure? Your analogy about Mr. Sooty is on target. I think you should get a video clip of Mr. Sooty and Mr. Corbett for one of your training sessions and introduce the concept. thanks again.

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