Sales professionals are trained to spend time educating their prospects about the products and services they offer. This is totally normal and even expected!
But there is something that many people don’t realize when it comes to this principle of buying and selling. We often underestimate how much time it takes to actually make a sale.
It can be hard to quantify just how long it takes for someone to agree to buy from your business, but we do know that it can take anywhere up to seven steps or “channels” as they call them in the industry.
That means it will probably take at least six minutes of your time every hour for each channel until you get your first sale. Some say it can take closer to ten hours if you're doing nothing else with your time!
How does your business shorten the B2B sales cycle?
Make the information available online. Automate your processes.
77% of buyers report spending more time on research in 2020 than they did in 2019. By the time your potential buyer is considering a solution, your website must meet them with all the information they’d find through their own research.
Buyers begin researching the product or service
85% of prospects are dissatisfied with their experiences of talking to sales reps on the phone. A lot of times, sales reps spend too much time talking about why a customer should buy what you’re offering and not enough time talking about how you can help the customer achieve their goals. Personalize the messaging.
Make the price available online
Sales reps dance around the topic of price because they are nervous or uncomfortable being direct. Or, sales reps don’t know what answers potential customers will ask them so they go into a rambling explanation that ends up taking longer than expected.
Either way, this doesn’t make them feel good and it could even hurt your sales by creating a sense of mistrust or dissatisfaction. If a buyer asks about the price of a product or service, give an honest answer and be prepared for some questions. List the pricing on the website. If your website doesn’t have those answers ready, find out why.
B2B Buyers begin researching your company
For B2B buyers, referral leads have a 30% higher conversion rate than leads from any other channel. Buyers may reach out to speak to your company because of “Contact Us” forms or “Call Us” CTAs on your business’s website. After speaking with your company’s sales rep, a customer may say “no”.
Here’s a reason for the length to the B2B sales cycle: your business website doesn’t close B2B sales or offer pricing so your sales teams are using emails, chat, trade shows, and cold calls. Meanwhile, 48% of salespeople never make a follow-up attempt. This is a bad practice because 92% of salespeople give up after four “no’s,” but 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes.” All of these factors contribute to the delay in sales.
Potential B2B buyers are researching your competitors
Sales reps begin their day with a quick scan of their email, phone messages, and/or chat conversations from the night before to see what you were up to. This is called monitoring or surveillance. It’s kind of like watching someone else's house to find out who they are and what they're doing.
Sales professionals must constantly monitor social media sites, watch TV for clues about upcoming products and services, check online reviews, and so forth to stay competitive. In fact, studies show that almost one third of all sales come from things found through surveillance. Why do some salespeople seem to be in a constant state of vigilance?
Because they're trying to figure out how to position themselves next to their competition. They'll surf around looking at competitor websites, reading articles, and gathering information and insights about them. Consider the information your competitors make available via their website. Are you outperforming the content online that answers buyer’s questions?
They need to get approval from a supervisor or a manager
If your company is still cold calling, cold emailing, and using trade shows, it’s possible you’re not hearing back that a potential B2B buyer is interested. This is when “buyer’s decision momentum” comes into play. This is when a few of the other people in the company put more pressure on the person making the buying choice than should be imposed.
It can happen at any stage of the process, which is why having an easy way to switch off this buyer’s momentum is so important. This is when you follow-up via website content that fully answers any questions. Why does this matter? Because it takes too long to close sales and the longer you wait the less likely you are to achieve your goal!
If your business is struggling to speed up the sale then you’ll want to look at how you're handling rejection. Are you responding with criticism or defensiveness instead of solutions? Or are you using silence as a tactic rather than offering alternatives? There's no one right answer here, but these strategies won't work if you're not working through them with sincerity. You'll have to test what works for you and learn from mistakes.
Hopefully you'll find some tips here that help you along the path towards faster sales.
