How to Speed Up Sales Cycle and Close Deals Faster
How to Speed Up Sales Cycle and Close Deals Faster?
Are you looking to speed up your sales cycle and close deals faster? If your sales team is spending too much time collecting, tracking, and managing quotations, contracts, and information, they may not have enough time to make meaningful connections with potential customers. In this article, we will share how to streamline your sales processes by generating sales orders, quotations, and invoices quickly, and getting all the data you need to improve your sales strategies for better and faster selling.
What is a Common Sales Cycle?
Every business adopts a sales process to meet its revenue generation goals. This process involves generating leads and converting them into paying customers. Let’s explore what a common sales cycle looks like.
1. Generate Leads
The first step of a sales cycle begins with creating customer interest, attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing.
2. Create Opportunity
When a prospect is keen to find out more about your products, a sales opportunity is created.
3. Sales Quotes
Once the salesperson finalises the deal, a quotation will be sent to the customer.
4. Sales Orders
If the customer finds the quote reasonable, they will send a purchase order. Your company will then raise a sales order and pass the order details to the logistics team. This is when the warehouse staff comes into play – to complete the picking, sorting and packing.
5. Shipments
The goods are then transferred to an approved logistics partner who will deliver the products to your customers.
6. Invoices
An invoice will then be generated and sent to the customer so that your company receives payment.
7. Accounting
The payment will be sent to the account team for them to consolidate the statement, completing the sales cycle.
What are the Gaps in Today’s Sales Cycle?
Any company that doesn’t use an automated system has to manage the sales processes manually - slowing down the sales cycle. Forbes reported that only 35.2%1 of a salesperson’s time is spent on active selling, the rest of the time is spent on administrative tasks, internal approvals, and internal policies.
Manual processes such as recording leads and managing opportunities via Microsoft Excel lengthens the time required to close deals. Using paper, email, or fax to manage sales orders, shipping orders and invoicing is time-consuming due to the need for multiple rounds of amendments with customers. The lack of an all-in-one workplace platform increases the time needed to share the deal status with different stakeholders across departments.
Employees manually entering information into Microsoft Excel increases the chance of human error such as entering the wrong quantity, price, bill, or shipping address. Data is not portable in paper-based documents hence data cant be reused easily. And a salesperson would be required to re-enter the data manually each time when needed. This is challenging to manage data when you need to retrieve some documents.
As we are aware, excel and paper-based spreadsheets aren’t the easiest tools to manage large amounts of data. It also takes a long time to pull data for reports and to analyse purchase history. Furthermore, sales reports are tedious to generate. This makes it challenging for sales leaders to make quick and informed decisions in real time.
How to Speed Up Sales Cycle?
In order to speed up the sales cycle, you would need to accelerate the sales processes. This will help you close deals faster and bring in revenue quicker.
Here are the best ways to streamline and automate your sales processes.
1. Identifying and targeting the right prospects
One reason why sales cycles are long is that salespeople are selling to the wrong people. To close the gap, target your prospects better by creating custom forms relevant to your sales process to reach your customers and understand their requirements better. This way, you get to gather crucial data and focus your efforts on the prospects who are most likely to convert.
2. Qualify leads quickly via a centralised CRM system
Once you’ve identified potential prospects, quickly qualify them to determine whether they are a good fit for your product or service. This can be done by asking your prospects a series of questions to help you understand their needs and budget. Store your prospects’ information and requirements in a centralised CRM system. This enables you to record and qualify leads seamlessly.
3. Streamline your sales processes with automation
Automate repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails and scheduling appointments with your customers. This can free up your time to focus on more important aspects of the sales cycle.
4. Provide values
Prospects are more likely to buy when they see the value of your products or services. Offer a free trial or consultation to help them understand the benefits of your offering and build trust. Record the status of a prospect onto the CRM to help the sales manager and marketer build an account-based marketing strategy.
5. Keep the leads warm
Once you’ve qualified a lead and provided a free trial or consultation, continue to schedule follow-up meetings and send relevant information to respond to any questions in a timely manner to keep the prospect engaged.
6. Share and collaborate among stakeholders
Once the prospect is ready to buy, close the deal as soon as possible. Generate sales quotations and sales orders automatically using a low-code business application and notify all parties of the deal closure.
7. Continuously measure and optimise
Take a data-driven approach to your sales process by measuring how long it takes for a lead to close and look into your process to continue optimising it. Create custom reports and dashboards that can help you analyse your sales data. You can use this data to gain insights into your sales process and further optimise your sales cycle.
How did Insurance Agency – Insurance110 Benefit from Kintone?
Insurance110 is an American insurer well known for its wide range of insurance products to Japanese expats. In 2016, insurance110 was in the midst of opening its fourth store. Yoshihiro Arishika (CEO and Founder of insurance110) and his team navigated the expansion process and realised there were serious challenges in doing so, some of the challenges are as below,
- Manual insurance processes: Employees had to use paper forms to register customer information, and the approval process was done manually. It was difficult finding out customers’ status, and the management has no visibility over customers’ information due to the lack of a reporting tool.
- Data legacy: Sales data were managed using Microsoft Excel and shared via Dropbox, and it was updated by an employee daily. Although data was managed in a shared digital format, important information gets deleted accidentally when multiple employees work on the same document simultaneously.
Yoshihiro started the search for a new solution and found those solutions were not up to speed and scalability until they were introduced to Kintone. With Kintone, they were able to build customised applications specified to their insurance processes. And employees with minimal IT knowledge were able to build insurance forms themselves. The transition from their existing systems to Kintone was smooth sailing too. All-in-all, they increased productivity by 9 times with Kintone’s drag-and-drop application.
Get Started with Kintone – an All‑in‑One Workplace Platform!
A streamlined sales process results in shorter sales cycles, increased revenue and more time to focus on higher-value tasks. The right technology, tools and people are key to optimise your sales process. Implementing a reliable end-to-end digital solution designed to help you do more with less can be the game-changer, get started with your 30-day Kintone free trial now!
References