Mastering the Sales Cycle: Beyond Cold Calling for B2B Success

Are you focusing too much on cold calls and neglecting the rest of the sales cycle that can make or break your deals?

There is way too much on cold calling. On any day, you can find all kinds of self-proclaimed experts publishing posts about cold calling. Occasionally, you will find these experts arguing over the best way to make a cold call. One expert will focus on how you introduce yourself, while another will claim that they can improve your chances of a conversation and acquiring a first meeting. It is rare to see the cold call expert offer anything important outside of their chosen area of focus.

Here at thesalesblog.com, we are interested in the full sales cycle and all its stages, strategies, and elements. Salespeople have only one vehicle for winning deals: the sales conversation. Without understanding it from end to end, you can’t reach your sales goals. Cold calling is just the beginning.

Once you have secured a meeting, you are on your way to your audition. In the first meeting, your contact will hope against hope that you will be able to create the value they need to move forward in their buyer’s journey. Too many salespeople fail the audition. These sales reps hear, “Reach out to me early next week,” ensuring that they will never see this contact again. It’s a sure sign you’ve wasted their time.

If you were to obsess over the first meeting in the same way you obsess over cold calls, you would learn how to create value and make it easy to ask for a second meeting. Once you master the first meeting, you can move onto other segments of the sales conversation.

You have successfully moved into the second meeting. Now you are in a good place, except you still know only one single contact who is not yet your sales champion. You know that the nature of what you sell will need more stakeholders and a leader who will need to greenlight your solution and your investment.

If you have mastered the ability to acquire the right task force members to engage with, you reduce your sales cycle and make your case with the leader who is going to autograph your contract in the future.

Now imagine that you are deep in discovery, and you are asking questions about the client’s company and their industry. At some point, you ask your main contact about their problem. The look on her face suggests that you may not be the best person to help them to make a significant change in their business. You are now sitting in your car, holding your heart.

Because you did no research on the company or the industry, and you did not meet with any of your peers who have already figured out the industry and the common problems and how best to solve them. If you spent the same amount time on research as you spend on cold calling, you would have coasted right into the next conversation.

Since everything is going straight to Hell, you may as well pitch your solution. You start by asking your contact if you can share your solution. Your contacts are now getting tired, and a couple of stakeholders stand up and walk out of the conference room. You feel like you are going to be sick. You carry on sharing the many features without a single word about the better outcomes the client needs.

If you had spent the time you spend on trying every new approach you find on LinkedIn, you would learn to address the strategic outcomes the client needs. This would have you moving closer to the signature instead of worrying about removing the opportunity from your pipeline.

You are going to provide your client with a presentation and a proposal, even though you are not optimistic about your chances. You have no typos and remembered to change the company’s name and logo. You are waiting for the call to tell you they decided to go in another direction—that direction is away from you and toward one of your many competitors.

If you had studied all the stages of the sales conversation instead of limiting your studying to cold calls, you would have increased your ability to win deals that you are now losing.

Your role as a full-cycle salesperson requires you to be able to handle every aspect of the sales conversation. When you prioritize something like cold calling, you get into the conference room, walking out with nothing other than your laptop and your car keys.

If your company doesn’t provide you B2B sales training in a modern approach, you can pursue it for yourself. If you want to explore this opportunity, you can go here.

Are you focusing too much on cold calling and neglecting the rest of the sales cycle? If so, you are losing deals you could win.