How to reduce your sales cycle

Leon Matschke: so in this video I'll show you exactly how to reduce your sales cycle length. So essentially what we're trying to do is make the same amount of money, but just faster. So this is not about increasing revenue per se. It's just about how do we make people close deals in less time. And a lot of people think that the only thing you can do to affect your sales cycle is what you say on your sales calls, on your demos, in the meetings. That's fundamentally wrong because every interaction from the first contact until someone signs a contract influences how fast someone is gonna take an action. And so fundamentally your business has three processes that everyone needs to go through to become a client. We have first attention to booked call, which is your appointment booking system or lead generation system, right? So a stranger becomes a booked meeting. The second one is your booked call to showed call, which is your nurturing system. So when a meeting is booked, everything that happens until a person actually decides to join the meeting. And the third one is showed call to a closed deal, which is your sales system. So this is actually what you say on your meetings to make people close faster. in each of these three, there are specific things you can do to make people take action faster. And in this video I'll show you 10 fixes that you can just implement right away. Let's get into it. So, first let's get some terminology right. We have two terms that are often misused. So, first we have the sales cycle, which is how long it takes on average from first contact until closed one, right? And so you calculate this by just summarizing the days it took to close each deal. So this is a bunch of numbers. And you divide that by the number of deals you actually closed, right? And so, an example for this, right? You have one deal that took 10 days, one that took 20, one that took 30, right? You have three closed deals, and they took this much time. So you do all of this together, which is 60 days, and then you divide it by the total amount of deals, which is three, and then you get 20 days, which is now your sales cycle, right? Your average sales cycle. And then another term is sales velocity. So this just shows you how much money you make per day. And I wanted to cover this because people always Like there's some people that think this is the exact same thing. Some people mix this up. So I just wanted to clarify. And sales velocity is also really interesting because if you reduce your sales cycle, your velocity goes up, obviously. So the equation for this is the number of deals times the average deal value times win rate divided by the sales cycle time that you calculated here. All right. So to know sales velocity, you need to know your sales cycle. Okay? So So you take the number of deals per day, right? So 20 deals per day, and your average deal value is $500. So that's $500 per deal times a 25% win rate, so 0.25. Okay, that's just like an industry average, around 30%. Let's just go with 25, divide it by 10 days in your sales cycle, right? So if this actually came out to 10 days, then you just input that number here. So your sales velocity. From this equation is $250 per day. Right? And so if you cut your sales cycle in half, you make two times the money per day. So by decreasing your sales cycle, you actually make more money per month, obviously. So in a way, we're increasing revenue, just not per customer. And so let's get straight into the fixes. So we're gonna start with the appointment bookingslash lead generation system. All right. So the first fix is to actively disqualify people who take way too long to just close, right? Simple. So first you analyze all your past deals, all right? Put them in a spreadsheet. And you're gonna filter them by the days it took them to close, right? And you'll have a lot of deals in a normal range and you'll have outliers in both directions. Meaning some take extremely long and some basically closed right away. Those are both outliers. And you're gonna see that on your spreadsheet when you analyze the data. So this is an example. You're gonna have one that just closed instantly, one in one day, three days, right? That's way too fast. Then you have some like 14 days, 14, 15, 17, 18, that's all in a normal range. And then you have like 35, 46, and 49 days, which are outliers on the other side. Okay, and obviously this doesn't have to be 14 days. You just see what's most common for you. Like if you have a more complicated product, then 35, 46, like two months could be the normal range. Six months could also be a normal range. Right? It really depends on what you're selling. And then if you have enough data, so deals, then you can find common characteristics characteristics. And if you have enough data, so deals. You can find common characteristics of your outliers towards the slow side. Okay. So we don't want to necessarily cut out the fast side because that's just not what we're trying to do. But we want to analyze these people. Okay? The slow ones. And then you write down what they have in common and you write down things that they have that people in the normal range don't have. Right? And now in your appointment booking system, you need to adjust everything. So your calendar questions for inbound leads or your SDR scripts. Right, if it's outbound to actively disqu like actively qualify people to only get clients in your normal sales sales cycle length. So if you notice that that everyone that took longer than 30 days to close had didn't have a specific problem in their process that you solve that the ones in the normal range did have, then you make an active effort to ask if they have that problem before they ever book a meeting. And now if they don't, you just disqualify them because you know. If they don't have this problem, they're gonna take way too long to close. Okay, so that's the first fix. The second one is you limit the booking window. Okay, so for inbound leads, you don't allow bookings further than four days out. Very important. And for outbound, you just train your SDRs to always push for the same or next day first. It's very important. I see a lot of training that just says, yeah, just ask for the meeting. But they don't say how to do that. And then the SDRs just ask on the phone, well, when do you have time? And then the prospect says, ⁓ in three weeks, and then you create the opportunity and it sits there for three weeks before the first demo even happens. Turns out it's unqualified, but you know, your pipeline just gets messed up, your forecast gets messy. Just don't do that. Train your SCRs to push for same or next day, always first. So you just ask, how does later today at 4 p.m. or tomorrow at 11 or 5 p.m. work for you? That's three times for today and tomorrow. If they say they don't have time, you can still push out. But you're you're trying to do it as fast as possible. And the majority of people will just say, ⁓ yeah, I have time tomorrow. Or yeah, let's do it. Let's do it later today. Boom. And if you do this, it will also increase your show up rate by a lot, right? You can get like ninety-five percent plus if you just do this right. So you shouldn't lose any deals on no shows. That's it's like the easiest thing to fix. I made a whole video on that, by the way. So you can watch that after this. but you shouldn't be losing deals on show rates, just as a small side note. All right. So limit booking window to four days out, you train your SDR so always push for a same and next day, and then if they don't have time, you gradually book. Book out from that. So if they can't do today or tomorrow, you say, okay, how's the day after tomorrow work? Okay, how's Friday? And then you you gradually just make it longer and longer. And also you can analyze for this part. If you realize that all of these ones that took extremely long also didn't have time within seven days, then you know that everyone who doesn't have time within the next week is probably gonna close in longer than three months or way longer than your average sales cycle should be. So what you do? Disqualify them. Or at least you nurture them. You don't immediately create an opportunity out of that because that's gonna mess up your pipeline and your data. We don't want that. The third fix is the pain cycle. Okay, so you need to create urgency by asking people what they've tried before, for how long they tried it for and how it went. And you go through these three things, right? Until they say, I've tried nothing else. Okay, so what have you tried before? Okay, how long have you been trying that? Okay, how'd that go? Not good? Okay. What else have you tried? Okay, how long did you try that? How did that go? And you you see how it's a cycle, and then you ask, okay, what else have you tried? What else? What else? Until they say nothing. This is called the pain cycle, and it creates massive pain, and pain is a requirement to sell because you're solving problems. If there is no pain, you can't sell anything. Okay, and the more there is, the faster they will act. It's like imagine you light a fire under someone, they'll do their best to run out. As fast as possible. Right? So this is why pain is extremely important. So again, you train your SDRs to ask pain point questions to create urgency in the prospect's mind. If you have inbound leads, you make a VSL, you you rewrite your website copy to talk about specific pain points and just instead of just talking about your solution. Okay? There's I'm gonna cover this again later in the sales system, but I'm putting it here too in the appointment booking one because your SCRs should also use this. Okay. The fourth fix is you adjust your copy. So I already touched on this. And the same analysis you did in this fix one, right? You need to also find common problems and pain points of the top 20% of your customers that you have. All right. And with top 20%, I mean the people who just spent the most amount of money. They stayed the longest if you have a subscription service. and they complained the least, right? You wanna find your top 20%. And then you rewrite every marketing email, every website copy, everything that your customers see, your prospects see, to only address those people directly. You call them out, you mention their problems in their own language, and you'll get way more of those people and less of the ones you don't want. Okay? And as a bonus, again, this will also increase your conversion rates and profit margins by a lot because they just spend more money, and every dollar they spend more goes straight to your bottom line. So you just make more profit. Okay. So this doesn't just decrease the sales cycle. Okay. So you filter by who spent the most, state the longest, complaint the least. You see which pain points they shared in the sales calls. You can just ⁓ You know, take all your transcripts from the sales calls, give them to Claude, some AI, ⁓ and it's gonna summarize this. Then you adjust every text, every message, website copy, videos, ads to speak to that ICP, right? Your new ideal customer profile. Because the top 20% of your customers will bring 80% of your revenue. Okay? So you only want to sell to these people here at the top. You'll make way more money than that. You'll make way more money if you do that. Okay? So let's get into the nurturing system next. So everything that happens from book call to showed call. So fix number five is to pre-handle objections. So if you notice, for example, that a ton of deals get delayed because of follow-up meetings or stakeholders not being involved or trust issues or FAQs, right? You notice that the same questions come up over and over again, right? And they weren't answered yet. Then you need to make an active effort to include these in your nurturing slash pre-sales process. Okay? So in this. So let's say you notice that a bunch of like you get a bunch of follow-up meetings, like two extra meetings per deal, just because the decision makers weren't even there in the first meeting. You can make this very strict to make it mandatory to invite guests into a meeting for inbound bookings. You can train your SDRs to always ask who needs to be involved in the calls, right? To do some multi-threading. You need to do active research on LinkedIn, for example, to find people who might need to be involved. And then you message all of them separately on your own. And you don't wait for your single prospect to invite other people. So you just approach them yourself. You say, Hey, I just scheduled a call for tomorrow with this guy. We're going to talk about this. I think you should also join. Simple as that. And then you just message everyone. And you come prepared, asking, okay, like if you do the call. Instead of asking who else needs to be involved, you directly ask, okay, do you also want me to invite John, the CRO? Does he need to be there? You mention a name, you know the role, know what they do. It's way easier to say yes than to say, ⁓ we need to involve this person, this is his email, phone number, title, this is responsibility, right? This works wonders. Just do this, and then you'll never deal with this again. You can cut maybe one or two follow-up meetings per deal, which is gonna like decrease your sales cycle by two weeks, just like that. If you have constant pricing issues, you make a VSL, a video sales letter to show the value more and better and answer frequently asked questions before the call. Right? And then you make it mandatory to watch this before the call. For inbound, this is easy, right? They're gonna see it anyways. For outbound meetings, you send them an appointment confirmation email and then you link a video explainer, which is just your VSL, in that email, and you say, please watch this before the call so you can come prepared. Simple as that. You qualify based on the budget, right? Employee ranges, annual revenue, anything that gives you an indicator of if they can actually afford your stuff. And you can use the market analysis from the first fix to actually do this. If you constantly have trust issues, you make sure people see social proof before the call. Same thing. If it's inbound, after they book, make them redirect to a social proof page. If it's outbound, in the same appointment confirmation email under the video explainer, also say results we got for our clients. And as I hyperlink and it goes to your website, shows a bunch of case studies. It just works. Right? Here, like I said. Also, video proof is better than text proof. So if you have actual videos of your clients saying that your stuff works, that's way better. And specific proof is better than generic proof, right? A one sentence testimonial. Is not as good as a whole written case study with bullet points and numbers and like just proof. Okay. So you can pre-handle all of these things pretty easily, and you can cut like two, three follow-up meetings and a lot of time in your actual meetings where you just answer questions. You can cut all of that by just making sure people get the answers before they even ever join a call. Okay. And you're also gonna get people who disqualify themselves after seeing the video because they just don't like your service. And you wouldn't have sold them anyways. So you save a meeting too. It's just nice. Alright. Fix number six. You frame the call. So the more most important thing about sales in general is frame control. If you have a position of authority in your cults, then you can get away with almost anything. And people are more likely to comply with your requests. That's just how it works. So instead of saying, for example, discovery call, like everyone else, you can use something like application call. The power dynamic shifts from let me show you what I have to let's see if you are a good fit for us. It's just a name change that can already make a difference. Same event, same length, same person, same closer, just a different name for the event. Right? Again, doing this will also increase your show out rates, which is a nice bonus. People will take it more seriously and be more likely to comply with requests, like inviting all stakeholders into the first meeting. So again, you pre-handled an objection. It's it's just awesome. It's like these subtle nuances that just make a a big difference. Right? And if you can save even one follow-up meeting by just changing the name of the events, then it's worth it. Like you just change a name and you can save one meeting. Which is like if the meeting was next week. That's seven days of your sales cycle just cut because you change a name. Talk about high leverage. So fix number seven is you just prepare for the calls. This is extremely important, right? The STRs or account executives should prepare before the calls. So you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to, for example, search up every relevant person to this deal before the first call, like I already mentioned earlier. You can message all of them to introduce yourself and ask if they'd like to join, right? Multi-threading is extremely important, and this just means Engaging multiple people in a company, usually for bigger companies, ⁓ and can save you two to three additional meetings, especially for enterprise mid-market deals. Again, you just like 10 minutes of effort. You go on sales nav, you go on the company, you have a persona set up where you filter for specific people that are relevant to your process, right? Maybe operations team or the finance team or sales team, right? Whatever you use. You just get a list of everyone who works there, and then you just message them. In one template doesn't even need to be personalized. Like, hey, it's Leon from up on leads.io. I've just booked a call with so-and-so person. We're gonna talk about this. This might be interesting for you. Wanna join? Here's the link. Just let me know so I know if if if you'll come or not. That's like the top of my head, you can just use that. And you send that to every single person who might be relevant to the deal. And suddenly, instead of having one guy on the meeting and then he needs to internally sell it to everyone else. You get five people in the meeting, you can sell all of them at once, and then you save a bunch of time. And that's exactly what we're trying to do. And last but not least, let's get into the sales system. All right. So fix number eight is you need to spend time on pain. I already touched on this a little earlier, but I'm gonna expand on this now. The more pain you identify and expose in your prospects' brains, the faster they want to act, right? Like I said with the fire earlier. So because deprivation creates motivation. As an example, if you haven't like if you haven't eaten in one hour, so you ate last hour and now for the last 60 minutes you haven't eaten anything. You're not that motivated to eat because you're not hungry. You just ate. Okay? You have no deprivation yet, so you have no motivation to eat. But if you haven't eaten in three days, you're gonna basically forget everything, all your responsibilities, be and you'll try your best to find food because you feel like you're gonna starve. Right? If it's four days, it becomes even worse. If it's seven days, like you feel like you're almost gonna die. And then, you know, you have a lot of motivation to find food. It's the same solution, right? It's food here and it's food here. But it's a different time frame. So the more deprivation you can find, the faster you can sell your thing. So extremely important. So you use the pain cycle, like I said, in every call. What have you tried before to fix this? Okay, interesting. How long did you try that for? ⁓ two months. Okay. How'd that go? Alright. What else have you tried? Okay, how long did they did you try that for? And you keep going and you ask those questions until they say nothing else, and then you max out the pain. All right. You have you you pulled out the maximum amount of deprivation that you could through a call. And the more you do this, the more cycles you have for this, the more motivation they will have to do something about it. Which means they will book faster, they will show up, they will close faster, they will sell it better internally, and everything just gets better. Okay? And this graph here just visualizes the same concept. Let's get into the next fix, fix number nine. You need to understand the decision criteria of every stakeholder. All right. Especially this is especially important if you don't just sell to one person, obviously, and it's like bigger yields with multiple people. Getting everyone on the meeting, I just covered how to do that. But it doesn't matter if you have everyone on the meeting if you don't know how to sell to multiple people at once. Okay? Too many people focus on the company's pain points and general criteria. You need to understand that every person In your call has individual pains, desires, motivations, and goals which you need to know. Okay? It's not just the company, these are individual people that work there. Every time someone else gets introduced, you need to take some time to ask them questions about them. Even if it's in a group setting, you can name someone, you say, you, what do you think about? And then you go through each person. Okay? You can then connect their personal pains to the company's pain points and make everyone love your solution. Because if you have five stakeholders, if three are convinced and two aren't, you might get the deal. But they're gonna internally have a lot of meetings back and forth. Talk about this, talk about that. We disagree, we agree, let's do it, let's not do this. And then it just stretches out the sales cycle. And we don't want that. You want to have everyone in the same boat because then they can make a decision like this. Like they're gonna sit there after the meeting. Do you want this? Yes, yes, yes, yes. All right, let's do it. Simple, right? For example, a company like has a problem, spends too much time and money on manual reporting for whatever that might be. The CFO has a personal desire to keep costs as low as possible and appeal to the board, right? Because he has to make reports to the board. The sales team lead won't care about the board. Okay? So if you only mention this, then you won't have this guy in your boat. The sales team lead just wants the team to reach their targets because saving time would increase the efficiency of the team, which means the team gets paid more, reaches a target. So the sales team lead also gets paid more. Alright? So you need to cover this too. The CRO, right, the chief revenue officer, just cares about how the time saved will increase the revenue. Okay. Just care about money and numbers. And the sales team itself just wants to go home and get paid. So your solution should not make their job more complicated, because the team lead is gonna ask the sales team what they think of it. Each of these needs to be addressed. If you only talk about the benefit of how it will save the sales team's time, you'll miss the other points and it will be harder to sell internally since not everyone is on board. Okay? So take the time to understand each person's individual pains, desires, motivations, and goals. And you write them down in your CRM for each person. And then you make a business case so you can present to cover each and every single one. And then you sell everyone. Because If someone needs to sell it internally to someone else who's not convinced without your presence, they're gonna fuck up because they don't know the product as well as you do. They don't understand the problems as well as you do because you're in sales and they're not. Okay? So do this. It's extremely important. And the last fix is a very simple thing that makes a massive difference. Never leave the meeting without booking the next meeting. Okay? If you ignore everything else I told you, just do this. A lead should never fall between the gaps because then you need to constantly follow up, chase them, waste resources and time of your sales team for no reason. So make it a habit to use the last five minutes of a call to find time for the next call. And the same rules apply in the like as in the appointment booking system. You always push for the next few days and you gradually move the window out if they don't have time. But don't suggest three weeks from now, right away, for no reason. Unless you actually need three weeks to prepare something for the next meeting. But if your sales cycle is three weeks longer just because you can't do your work faster, then you should find a way to fix that. Okay? Like if your prospect has time tomorrow, but you're not ready by tomorrow, that's a you problem. You should find a way to do it. Use AI, use automations, just find a way. Because again, saving three weeks is massive. Okay. It's such a simple fix, but it always happens. Even if the prospect says, I don't know when I'll get back to you, you can still just book a temporary slot and say we can always move it, right? Just say, okay, then let's put in ⁓ Friday just as a temporary slot, same time as today. If you can make it, it's fine. Then we can still reschedule, but let's just keep it in there. It just works. And nine times out of ten, the person will show up to that meeting. It's not just temporary, even though you said it is. And then you talk again. Simple as that. Okay. And now, real quick, if you're a B2B company, so you sell to other businesses and you want more sales calls booked for your sales team, we currently offer a free pilot campaign to run outbound for your business, right? So we start a campaign for completely free. We send emails, we book the calls in for you. All you have to do is attend the meetings yourself and close them, take over from there. We handle the Legion, the data, the infrastructure, everything. You can try it for completely free if you click the first link in the description, apply for the pilot campaign. Now we can't offer this to everyone, but just see how it works on that website. Book a call if it's relevant. And yeah, if you want more tips like this, daily we have a newsletter. You can sign up on the second link. ⁓ I'll just send valuable stuff. It's no marketing, no fluff. I just share share stuff like this in more bite-sized versions directly to your inbox. All right. And with that, if you like this, subscribe and like. If you have any questions, just comment. I read every single one and answer everything and yeah, I'll see you in the next video.