It takes time to nurture and develop your prospects. It isn’t easy to be known for the value you create or to prove you have ideas. The longer it takes you to prove you have the ideas and the ability to help, the longer it takes to create and win an opportunity.
It takes time to work through the discovery process with your dream client once they agree to meet with you. Trying to spend less time working to understand your client’s needs–and helping them to understand them–only increases the time it will take you to win that opportunity. If you win it at all.
Rushing to present your solution in hopes of speeding things along actually slows the process of creating and winning an opportunity. It doesn’t mean that all the work that you should have completed up to that point doesn’t still need to be done. But it does mean that what you present isn’t going to be dialed in tight enough and that you aren’t likely to have the consensus you need.
You can sometimes find an opportunity at just the right time and acquire orders without following your sales process at all. That seems really fast. Until you actually start doing the work and realize that you and your new client didn’t do any of the work together that might have given you a reasonable opportunity to succeed together. Now what you won is at risk of being lost forever. The time you gained is now lost dealing with challenges you hadn’t anticipated.
You gain speed by having all the conversations and gaining all the commitments you need to create and win an opportunity. The sooner you have those conversations and the sooner you gain those commitments, the sooner you win your opportunity. Skipping stages to speed things along actually slows things down.
In all things with human beings, fast is slow and slow is fast. If you want faster results, do the work.