Collapsing Sales Cycles

If your sales cycle is long, read this.

Truth is, anyone who promises to collapse your sales cycle length to one call is full of sh*t. That’s not how most selling works, especially enterprise sales.

However, there are a few things you may be able to do. These aren’t rules. Just simple improvements to your sales process that can push more people down the pipeline faster.

First, I would recommend standardizing the sales process. If you can create the same type of discovery to demo to proposal to scoping process, this will help you evaluate where the problem is.

Most founders let their salespeople or biz devs sell in any way they want. Which is great! But at certain point, the lack of standardization makes it hard to identify bottlenecks.

Second, building a video sales letter (VSL) is probably the most important factor for collapsing sales cycle length. It’s like a video-version of a whitepaper, and you make prospects watch it before showing up to the call.

It addresses concerns, objections, and the steps of your solution, product, or service. Since you’re doing this upfront, you may get some people who will buy a $50k solution in one call. Not always, but I’ve seen it happen.

Third, I would infuse more personality into the sales process. I just spoke with a guy who sells a SaaS for a contract value of $750k annually. Would you fly out and meet with a prospect in person if they were about to pay you that? I would!

Infusing personality and human connection into the sales process feels old school. Especially with our new-age Zoom selling. However, doing so can be the difference between a one-off customer and a long-term relationship with someone who pays you millions.

These aren’t set rules. Just interesting things I’m picking up on lately. Try some of these out in your company and let me know what happens.

Thanks for reading,

Austin Weatherhead | Growth Partner @ Zunesty

P.S. If you have a friend who’s a founder or exec, please forward this newsletter to them so they can sign up here.

Whenever you’re ready, you can set up a meeting with me at our growth firm Zunesty to see if we’re a good fit to work together. We build custom growth plans for your business before we ever make any sort of proposal, so the calls are more to learn about your company and connect. Grab a time to talk here.