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Sales representatives have always had an uphill task of closing quality deals without taking much time. The hard part is time constraints and limited resources.
But today, the exponential growth in technologies has significantly reduced human efforts and made the sales cycle less complicated and more fast-paced.
With tech-savvy companies gaining a strong foothold in the market by harnessing the power of sales intelligence platforms, companies with outdated sales approaches must consider ways to speed up their sales cycle.
So let us explore the winning strategies to help you accelerate your sales cycle in 2022.
Focus on the outcome-worthy channels
The foundation of growing your customer base starts from the channels you’ve set up. With content like blogs, marketing emails, and pay-per-click (PPC) being used in broadcasting your offerings’ presence in the modern world, you need to spot the right channel garnering interest and prioritize it to scale up your sales pipeline.
Sales teams must constantly revisit their strategies and review the performance of channels they market on. Post a thorough assessment of the channels; they need to quickly phase out the ones that produce unsatisfactory results, considering the investment and resources involved in managing the channels.
While the focus can be on the performing channel, it also serves as a reminder to not go overboard with that particular channel and minimize the use of other alternatives. The new-gen sales team must stay cognizant of emerging trends and experiment with new channels often to expedite the sales cycle.
There are innumerable sales intelligence platforms in the market today to help you establish strong and create channel-specific content. This data availability also helps achieve consistency across the social media channels, thus shortening the sales cycle.
Targeting With Personalized Content
Content is the king would be an understatement in the post-pandemic marketplace. The incredible growth in social media channels and their out-of-the-box content forms is a case in point.
It becomes necessary for sales reps to devise content that is more likely to have an impact and lure prospects into buying their offerings. And with a robust library for every sales cycle touchpoint, sales teams are well-prepared to meet customer expectations now than a decade ago.
Studies have indicated that personalized content boosts deal closure rates by 67%. While a few studies also stated the number was as high as 75%. Regardless of the number, the message is that you need to engage our leads/prospects with highly personalized content to stay competitive and fast-track sales processes.
Sales intelligence platforms like Draup are helping sales teams achieve consistency in messages and personalize experiences across all channels in a unified manner. With its insights, the AI-driven sales intelligence platforms create targeted and personalized messages that almost instantly strike a chord with prospects.
Unclogging the Sales Pipeline
Sales representatives are always inundated with unqualified prospects in their pipeline. This leads to a tedious work process and teams being saddled with mountains of insufficient data and information.
For a quick and hassle-free process, clearing the pipeline from all the irrelevant data becomes a crucial step in the sales cycle. This enables sales teams to prioritize the qualified leads first and spur up the otherwise slow-moving process of closing deals.
Here’s how sales leaders can clear the cluttered sales pipeline:
- Recognizing the unwanted leads present in the pipeline for a long period and discarding them.
- A well-thought-out pipeline strategy that keeps a tab on communications, goals, and action steps.
- Giving sales reps comprehensive training on how to maintain CRM. This would allow everything to be streamlined, from regularly updating prospects’ information to learning which team member is in contact with the said prospect.
Making Social Proof a Prerequisite
Social proof is a must-have component to escalate the sales cycle further. This aforementioned proof serves as a positive response from your existing clients that can be leveraged to sway potential prospects.
Sales proof cuts down on time spent convincing the prospects about product or services’ credibility in the market. Peer reviews and testimonials have become the major catalysts in garnering potential customers’ confidence in your offerings.
Case studies are the most impactful examples to help customers understand your offerings’ reliability in the real-world market. Another plan of action can be to host a meet-up that allows prospects to interact with satisfied customers from a similar vertical and talk about the success rate of your offerings.
Irrespective of the action item you pick from the aforementioned social proof techniques, focusing on what your clientele has to say about your business becomes a must-have to maintain a positive brand image all through the sales cycle.
Automate Your Sales Pipeline
Marketing and sales teams are two departments constantly bogged down with management roadblocks. The irregularities and inconvenience in sales teams often take most of the managers’ time in analyzing leads, tracking conversations, and closing them quickly.
Automating certain time-consuming and repetitive tasks can help representatives concentrate on other aspects of sales, including procuring new leads and closing existing ones. Two of the most labor-intensive sales tasks that need an immediate shift to automation are follow-ups and lead qualification.
With an easy-to-follow tool like CRM, you get to completely overhaul the approach to manage the ins and outs of your sales cycle efficiently. In this field, AI-powered sales intelligence platforms have proven to be highly beneficial.
When integrated with your CRM, sales intelligence platforms like Draup empower sales teams with a cutting-edge toolkit for the digital era. This invaluable addition to the sales process also helps sales managers identify bottlenecks in the sales cycle and then formulate a scalable and faster qualification solution.
The general rule of sales is only to emphasize on prospects interested in your offerings and who earnestly follow your content. But the major roadblock here is how to define/categorize them?
Enter AI-driven sales intelligence platforms such as Draup that take the weight off your sales teams by collecting, interpreting, and presenting real-time buyer insights, thus cutting down on time and escalating the entire sales process.
The insights gathered by the sales intelligence platform are validated by Machine Learning algorithms with the support of AI, further instilling confidence to proceed with the lead and close the deal quickly.
