The unsolicited email pitch offered me the chance to close deals 500% faster than I am closing them now. Outstanding. Who doesn’t want to compress their sales cycle? Even your dream clients want to produce better results faster, so why not compress the sales cycle.
Can You Make This Thing Go Faster?
But let’s say your average deal closes in 90 days. If you were to close that deal 500% faster, it would close in 18 days. Maybe your normal sales cycle should be 18 days, but it isn’t likely if your real metrics shows 90 days.
If your normal deal closes in 120 days, which is not uncommon for large, complex, business-to-business opportunities that require a lot of diagnosis, consensus, and technical conversations, closing it 500% faster means closing it in 24 days.
Different businesses, different industries, and different customers can all have different sales cycles. This is not to say that most sales organizations couldn’t stand to improve their ability to compress their sales cycle time; most could.
Too Fast or Too Slow?
An unnaturally shortened timeframe comes with a cost.
- Taking less time to understand what your dream client needs can speed your time to proposal while also making it less likely that you hit all the right notes.
- Spending too little time with different stakeholder groups means forfeiting consensus for a faster decision, only to discover the decision is a “no decision” because your prospective client didn’t have agreement from their team.
- Treating complex, longer sales cycle prospects like they are simple, low-risk decisions creates a mismatch in what you want in the way of speed for what your dream client needs from you to make a good decision.
You want to move through your sales cycle efficiently and effectively, but not at the cost of losing an opportunity. If you want to help your client move faster, than you will gain agreement on what the process needs to look like, and you will gain all the commitments you need as you move from target to close.
Going 500% faster isn’t the right goal.
