It goes without saying that when you hasten the sales cycle, you will sell more and thus increase profits. But how can your business accelerate the sales cycle? After all, the same seven steps are still required: prospecting, lead contacting, lead qualifying, nurturing a lead along, presenting the offer, responding to objections and closing the sale. While you can’t leave any of these steps out, there are things you can do to speed up the process.

Businesses should begin by assessing the effectiveness and speed of their current sales cycle, with a concentration on the elements that can cause a slowdown. Outbound sales calls can be automated and made more efficient by making use of power dialing software from PhoneBurner or similar companies. However, when it comes to incoming, how long do sales reps take to respond? Is there a long delay between a prospect reaching out and a sales rep responding? Can this time be shortened? Is there a recommended number of calls sales reps should make daily or weekly in pursuit of new business opportunities?

Next, let’s consider contacting and qualifying prospects. If such a list doesn’t exist already, perhaps your company should create a checklist of effective methods for following up with reluctant prospects. Do your reps call once and if they don’t get a response, do they just forget about it and move on to the next prospect? Have you considered sdr prospecting? Or, should they call, email, leave voice mails, and so on? How streamlined is your qualification process? Instead of subjectively evaluating prospects, we suggest creating a scoring system of desirable prospect characteristics, so your sales team can get the most promising prospects into your sales pipeline as soon as possible. Conversion of the sales might be an important aspect of the entire funnel, however, finding and turning prospects into potential clients is the first step, which can make it all the more crucial to nail. Hence, it could be beneficial for companies to take input from various blogs from the likes of Crunchbase or similar companies that talk in-depth about sales prospecting and its importance.

And the list goes on. Presenting the offer can be sped up via automation. Developing an offer, especially when a business offers product and service variations as well as a range of prices and discounts to diverse customers, is time-consuming and fraught with potential errors. CPQ (Configure Price Quote) software simplifies this process through automation and is particularly helpful for B2B companies that custom tailor their products and/or services to meet customers’ demands for unique sizes and features.

The process of handling objections to the offer can also be sped up. Instead of deciding every time how to respond to a prospect’s objections, a smart business keeps a list of the most common ones. Whether customers take issue with costs, deadlines or any other factors, you can accelerate this step by making note of the issues that arise most often and preparing general responses ahead of time.

The attached infographic, How to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle, is a valuable resource for any business. It summarizes the typical sales cycle and offers ways to speed it up. What company wouldn’t benefit by speeding up the sales cycle in order to gain increased sales and profits? We hope every sales manager takes positive actions after reading this infographic.