How long is your sales cycle?
Long enough to make the sale.
That’s a tongue-in-cheek answer but it is the answer.
The sales cycle for my services business is short…
Discovery > Website > Sales Call > Purchase
This can all happen in 24-48 hours.
My education business has been a bit more complicated…
Discovery > Landing Page/Website > Lead Magnet > Email Sequence > Sales Page > Purchase
This could last anywhere from two weeks to two years between first discovery and purchase.
A lot of content is delivered, all designed to build trust.
I’ve used webinars, reports, video series, email courses, infographics and blog posts to convince a prospect that my solution is the best for their problem or goal.
How do you figure out what should be in your sales cycle?
That depends on a few variables:
- Pricing point
- Complexity
- Competition
- Audience sophistication
- Niche targeting
However, there is one variable that drives more action than anything else:
Motivation to change.
As marketers for eons have said –
Feed a starving crowd.
The hungrier your audience the less you have to do to convince them to buy your food.
So, simple advice to follow – make sure you are selling something people are hungry for!
This doesn’t answer the question of how long your sales cycle should be though.
The answer is ‘whatever works’.
What actually matters is how you test to figure out what works.
For my services business I could have built an education funnel as I had in the past for my teaching business.
That would require a lot of work, but I could do it.
In this case though, it wasn’t necessary to start there.
We had a hungry enough audience to test first.
What actually mattered was what segment of the audience we went after and that our first impression content did the selling.
In other words, making sure we found the right people AND presented enough key content on our website to get the sales call.
From there, the sales call was enough.
When I say enough, at least enough to grow beyond $100K/month in revenue and become a seven figure business.
The status of the person who showed up on the sales call was what made the difference.
If they felt the problem acutely, had money to spend on our solution, and the benefit of solving the problem was clear to them – that’s an easy sale.
If the wrong person showed up on the call, a lack of budget or urgency, or a misalignment in needs, it would kill the sale no matter what we said.
No amount of ‘education’ in our sales process would help.
Everything came down to discovery.
Could this be the same for your company?
Maybe, but don’t assume it.
To sell my teaching products I had to teach first.
It was super rare for someone to show up ready to buy after just reading a blog post.
I had to give people an experience of my education before they paid money for more.
Hence, a longer and more complex sales cycle.
What you are selling matters.
My advice is to understand your options first.
Understand what types of content people use and what the purpose of the content is when it comes to making a sale.
Understand who your audience is and why they are hungry to pay money for something.
This matters whether you are selling e-commerce products, services, software or education.
From there it’s a refinement process.
Start with a minimal viable sales cycle and get some prospects to go through it.
Then keep refining.
This has been my ‘job’ for over 25 years for many different businesses.
It should be fun, because it leads to actually growing a business.
Keep growing!
Yaro
P.S. No sales cycle works without people first discovering your business.
Once you build a sales funnel, even if it’s just a website to start with, your life will become all about how to find new leads.
This is a never ending job, which means at some point you will need help.
If you’re looking for a low-cost ($2,000/m for full-time hours) marketing assistant, get in touch.
I’ve been using assistants to help with content, ad media creation and SEO for years.
I can help guide you in the right direction.
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