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Today, we will get into the biggest mistake that unknown brands make with enterprise sales.
When I was leading my team before, we closed over 35 $500,000 plus deals. After completing so many cycles, I started to notice some specific patterns.
Once, we had a deal that was not big according to enterprise standards. We attended between 18 and 20 meetings over about two years and flew back and forth. That was not a smart use of time, based on the size of the deal and what we were doing. We ended up burning a lot of time, energy, and effort without even getting the deal. It was painful, and I don’t want you to have to go through that.
I have seen companies taking 2 to 3 years to get big deals. They focus on process, leads, marketing, or ideal customer profile, which are all important. However, nobody seems to focus on time or how fast they can make the deals go through the sales process.
Once we started focusing on what we could do to speed up the process exponentially, we compressed large deals that would normally take two years down into between five and nine months. I call that “time to close”.
Here’s a simple example:
If you have 12 $200,000 deals in a 12 month period, it equals $4 Million in revenue annually. If you focus on tightening the time frame and reduce it from twelve to six months, you could get to a total of $8 million annually. So, just by focusing on how to speed up the process, you will double your revenue with the same resources.
When things happen in a much tighter time frame, you will have happier customers, people who are much more engaged, and more predictable growth.
Now, when I engage with companies on scaling revenue, I do a minimum of a three month-engagement where we implement a seven or eight-figure sales system within that time frame, rather than doing a six-month or a year-long engagement.
There are four quick steps you can take to do that:
- Identify the average sales-cycle length for your big deals.
- Identify the number of weeks per stage.
- Identify the longest stage.
- Ask your prospects what would speed up the longest stage. (Ask at least ten of your prospects that question.)
If you are relentless in following those four steps, you will begin to see the patterns. In doing that, you will be able to halve the time it takes to make the sale and double the revenue.
This method applies to any type of sales process.
