Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

2 great ways to shorten the sales cycle by making fewer unnecessary calls

  

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I got a great call this week from Brendan, an old friend who routinely makes $500,000 a year as a field sales rep. He had a dilemma: 150 new hot leads are coming in this week, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to handle the volume (his company has no inside sales or business development function, but that’s another story for another blog post). Even though he’s never taken our inside sales training course, he needed some help right away, so we began by diagnosing how he’s making his calls. And we found two important kinks: he was making too many unnecessary calls to the same prospect, and his evaluation process was unfocused. Here’s what we found… 

Typically, his first call to a prospect is made with the objective of scheduling a second call to discuss the prospect’s situation. If that second call is successful, then a 2 week evaluation of his software typically takes place. Brendan’s got a great pre-sales tech support team that carries much of the load during the evaluation process. 

So I asked Brendan “why do you bother with the second call?” It’s hard enough to reach people in the first place. I suggested he set his initial call objective to fully qualify the prospect, instead of having an objective of scheduling a follow-up call to qualify. Just do it all on the first call. That’s one way to compress the sales cycle. Here’s another problem Brendan was running into: 

Prior to agreeing to set up an evaluation, Brendan wasn’t asking “What do you need to see in order to agree to buy our solution?” As a result his pre-sales tech support team discussed every feature the product had, and got the prospect bogged down to the point he or she often got confused with issues that had nothing to do with solving the original business problem. And often, the prospect then needed more time after the original eval had lapsed to figure out all this new information that had nothing to do with his or her initially stated needs. Then the eval would commonly take days or weeks more to close. To correct this, Brendan will now have the prospect articulate what he or she needs the evaluation to prove in order to buy the solution. Then Brendan will convey that to pre-sales tech support, and ask that pre-sales focus on just those issues. Sure, prospects will bring up other items, but pre-sales shouldn’t pro forma bring them up. After all, the objective of the evaluation is to facilitate a “buy” decision, not to provide information. Providing information, based on the prospect’s business needs, is the salesperson’s job, and team communication is critical.

So now Brendan’s on his way with those new leads. He’ll be able to process them faster, because he’ll be making fewer calls. And his sales cycle will compress too, as he partners with pre-sales tech support to better focus on his sales objective. 

So now Brendan’s going to make more than $500K this year, armed with these new ways of compressing the sales cycle. He’s an old friend, so I didn’t charge him for the consulting. Geez, what’s wrong with my business model?! 

Add these two concepts to your Best Practices Playbook consistently, and you’re sure to meet Brendan at President’s Club one day.