How to Shorten the Sales Cycle in Your Small Business

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In business, sales never come as fast as you want or need them to. You must learn how to weed out unqualified leads, have confidence and remove your fear of selling for good. But, to do this you must have a sales process. The key lesson I learned is the gap between getting a prospect and turning that prospect into a customer can become shorter and shorter with only a few steps. There are ways you can shorten the sales cycle in your small business.

Here are ways you can shorten the gap:

Step 1: Know who your target audience is with 100% certainty. Nothing else in removing the gap between prospecting and completed sales will work without this foundational step. You want to know: who they listen to, where they hang out – both online and offline, what is their sense of humor (this is very important believe it or not!), and the one problem or challenge keeping them up at night.

Step 2: Tighten up your business brand. Design your signature content and, by extension, your business around your ideal customer. Use the lingo of your ideal customer. Mimic the style of the experts he or she pays attention to. Create Facebook posts based on what she likes to see from businesses similar to yours. Create a brand image with attractive logos, tag lines, and clear messaging about who you are as a business, where you are going, and who you’d like to come with you. Note: A blog is a great place to make this step a reality you can create, nurture, and control well into the future.

Step 3: Review your previous sales cycle. Ask yourself how long it took to go from prospect to sale with all of your products – even if it was one sale of one product or service. You need this as research for how to cut down on time – and extra steps – in the sales process.

Step 4: Beef up your brand awareness: Use what you’ve learned about the length of time and the steps necessary to close a sale. Did your ideal customers in those past sales convert faster than customers who were not in your ideal target audience? Most likely the answer is yes. Solution: Beef up your brand awareness. Start using one social media platform more to draw in your target customer to your website.

Step 5: Make them testify to your greatness. When you have strong brand awareness around your business, sales normally taking one year shrink to six months or less. The key here is getting your ideal clients to say amazing things about you – and record them! Video testimonials are the Holy Grail, and they’re just as tough to get, too. Start out with written testimonials on trusted platforms such as LinkedIn or Yelp. The more of these you have, the shorter the steps in your sales conversion cycle and the more your sales funnel is filled with highly qualified prospects.

Put these steps to work and let me know how you are succeeding with this. I am confident this will shorten the gap between meeting a prospect and closing the sale.

If you could use even more help with your sales; I have a great free gift for you. I, along with one of my favorite sales experts in the world – Jeffrey Gitomer – am giving you a free, webinar series called, “How to Really Make Sales.” Jeffrey is the New York Times Bestseller author of one of the top selling sales books of all time “The Little Red Book of Selling.” He and I are sharing our knowledge next week, Thursday Dec. 4^th on How to build a relationship. We did this at the end to close out the series, because we believe you really start building the relationship after the sale.

Don’t miss out on this invaluable information. Register here: http://www.getsales14.com.

If you want to build rock-solid relationships with your audience and the influencers of your audience, don’t miss the last webinar in the series – taking place LIVE on GoToWebinar at 1pm ET and replay at 4pm and 7pm that same day.

Thursday Dec. 4th, 1pm ET – How to Build a Relationship

Here’s how you can get your gift: