The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

B2B sales can sometimes feel like a never-ending marathon, especially when those sales cycles stretch on and on.

As a CRO or sales manager, your job isn't just about closing deals—it's about keeping your team's spirits high through the inevitable ups and downs and understanding what is closed lost and simply something that is taking time to move through the prospect's processes.   

The first step is to ask questions early and often in the sales process; here are some great ones.

By embracing technology such as lead intelligence, marketing automation, and effective use of a CRM, salespeople can waste less time doing data entry, understand more about their leads, and document all of this information so it's shared across the organization. 

In this post, we'll review each one of these productivity-enhancing technologies, enabling you to be one of the companies that gains a substantial advantage over competitors and develops a more productive sales team.

My years of working in a blended role—as part seller and as part consultant—keeps me grounded and attached to the needs of sellers as well as customers and new business prospects.

Here’s some advice that I’m using in my sales role and passing along as a consultant: during this time of turmoil one of the most important things you can do is listen and demonstrate empathy. You will have plenty of time to sell in the future (post-turmoil). Also, if you listen closely enough, you will discover business needs unknown a couple of weeks ago.

It's not out of character to hear a sales manager say, 'ABC: Always Be Closing.' Or to have a salesperson live out that phrase daily. But in reality, to close more business, you must sell less and help more. 

No one likes to wait!

We don't like to wait in lines, on hold, or for Christmas morning. We want things now! As a society, we've become accustomed to instant downloads, on-demand programs, and same-day Amazon Prime deliveries.

Which is why sales organizations want to accelerate the sales process. For years, B2B sales were often seen as a long, complicated process where the salesperson could do very little to speed up the sale, but today you can speed up the process by simply slowing down!

During the sales process, it’s important to have open and upfront conversations about how advertisers measures success. Clients will make their decisions to buy again based on the success, or failure, of the campaigns and solutions you sell them. 

Questions about success and client expectations should take place throughout the steps of the sales cycle, and your questions will differ based on where you are in the sales process.

I have been doing sales training and consulting for nearly 20 years and I always get a chuckle when salespeople tell me they need to find ways to close business in two calls. When I hear this today, I wonder where these people are living. Do they live on the same planet as I do? It’s not about the number of calls—it’s about the length of the sales cycle. And the sales cycle doesn’t start until the buyer is ready for it to start.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I discussed some of the reasons why the sales cycle is getting longer for many deals (sales cycle is the term that describes the time that elapses from the first contact between salesperson and prospect to a done deal). These longer cycle times are gumming up the sales pipeline for many companies, postponing revenue, adding expense, increasing uncertainty, and making life miserable for a lot of sales executives.

Some of this slowdown in the sales cycle is unpreventable. But that’s no reason to overlook the many things salespeople can do to counter the trend and speed things up. Here are some ways that smart salespeople keep opportunities moving:

Most people define sales cycle as the time that elapses from the first contact between salesperson and prospect to a done deal. The sales cycle varies radically for different types of products and services, for different prospects, for deals of different size and scope, and for quite a few other variables.