6 winning strategies to shorten your B2B sales cycle

Struggling with a long sales cycle? Learn how to close deals faster with these strategies.

This one is for my service providers out there: CPAs, advisors, consultants, coaches, etc.

Depending on deal size, closing a lead can drag on for weeks and even months. As each day passes, customer acquisition costs rise while the likelihood of winning the deal diminishes. Regular follow-ups, reminders and negotiations offer little to no satisfaction for both parties.

Here are six tried-and-true strategies that you can use to shorten your sales cycle.

1. Identify your ideal customers precisely

Developing a solid ideal customer profile (ICP) is your starting point for B2B marketing success. Here are a few things for you to focus on. 

Pick your players: Think about the industries and roles that would be a perfect fit for your product or service. Who was your product created for, and who brings the greatest value to the business? In short, talking to the wrong prospect will definitely drag on the sales cycle.

Questions to ask: Who would be your dream client? Where do they work?

Example: VP or Head of Sales at a 200+ employee SaaS company. They offer a CRM solution to healthcare institutions and pharmaceutical companies.

Dig deep: Do thorough research on these potential clients. Gather insights into your target audience’s demographics, needs, pain points and buying behaviors. Identify the gaps in their current solutions and how your product or service can effectively address those pain points. 

Questions to ask: What problems do they face in their day-to-day operations? How do they make decisions? What tools and solutions do they use currently?

Example: They struggle to get in touch with the decision-makers from large pharma companies. They use Salesforce as their current CRM, which is good but poses challenges in onboarding new people and requires specific knowledge for customization.

Show your value: Explain why these clients should choose you. Highlight what sets your offering apart from competitors and what tangible benefits and solutions you provide.

Questions to ask: Why should they choose you? How can you tackle their challenges with your solutions or services?

Example: Matching you with C-level decision-makers from Abbott, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi and other pharma companies. Helped increase conversions from lead to opportunity by 67% and from opportunity to deal by 35%.

Overall, your ICP should be like a roadmap, helping you find clients whose challenges match what you excel at.

2. Launch a well-thought lead qualification system

Now, set a firewall to ensure inbound leads match your ICP. A lead scoring system will help you focus your time and resources on the most promising leads. Verify your leads have the money for your product or service and what size companies are most likely to benefit from your offerings? Startups or enterprises. Does location matter?

3. Tailor outreach to sound personal

Another obvious yet often ignored point is to adapt outreach messages and sales pitches to clients’ pain points. Remember, it’s not just about selling something — it’s about being a problem solver. 

And yes, personalization isn’t just about . To put it short, there are three crucial steps to make your emails resonate:

Do your homework. Grab as many details about your ICP and their company as you can, including their challenges and goals.

Show you understand. Acknowledge a specific problem they might be facing.

Offer solutions, not just products or services. Instead of a generic pitch, suggest how your product/service directly helps your potential clients.

4. Harness the power of automation

Automation in your marketing and sales processes helps you streamline repetitive tasks, freeing up your time to build connections and close deals. Check the following:

Lead scoring from website forms. Not all leads are equal. score inbound leads against your ICP. If they get a certain score, they are qualified to move further down the funnel.

Opportunities distribution. Rather than manually assigning leads to team members, a round-robin system can do it fairly. This ensures everyone on your team gets a chance.

Call scheduling. Automation tools can handle booking appointments, helping you save time aligning schedules and avoiding back-and-forth messaging. There are many free options, ask me if you need suggestions.

Task reminders. Most CRMs have such a default option, ensuring important to-dos don’t slip through the cracks.

Messaging. Canned messages are pre-written responses that save you time while keeping your communication consistent. No need to type out the same responses repeatedly.

5. Optimize sales processes

To achieve peak performance, you should equip your team with the right tools and establish smooth processes. Let’s consider some key strategies for that:

Separate team for manual tasks. Sometimes, adding more people to handle manual tasks, like sales enablement, can free up your sales executives to focus more on actual communication with potential clients and sealing the deals.

Marketing-led lead nurturing. Effective lead nurturing by the marketing team is essential to warm up prospects and move them through the sales funnel. This involves creating relevant content for each stage of the cycle, including case studies, reviews and sales decks.

6. Follow up regularly

Finally, following up with leads quickly and persistently can keep the sales momentum. 

Speedy re-engagement matters. Waiting no more than three days before following up brings the greatest increase in reply rate (around 31%).

Persistence pays off. The first follow-up boosts the response rate by 49%, while the second one boosts it by an extra 9%. At the same time, avoid being too pushy, as starting with the sixth email in a row, reply rates drop dramatically.

Remember, follow-ups are not just about checking in; they are about continuing the conversation, providing value and demonstrating your commitment to helping potential customers achieve their goals. 

Takeaways

The above can be summarized into the following:

• Know your ideal client
  • Customize all your communications and efforts to make sure they "speak" to this ideal client
• Have a system
  • The way to improve sales cycles, or any business cycle, is to have a system
  • Don't overthink it, just start one, test it, and improve over time.
  • Use software to automate whenever possible
• Remember that at the other side of B2B sales there is a human being
  • Because you sell to a business doesn't mean it has to be robotic
  • Get to know the person as much as possible before and during your interactions

What are your experiences?

Do you have any tips you can share about improving the sales cycle in B2B scenarios?

The community will thank you 😊