Solutions to help: Shorten time to close

Understand prospects before you engage

The more your sales person knows about a prospect’s needs and the business reasons driving that need, the more they understand the buying criteria, the easier it will be for them to build a relationship and move the sale along.

Our ARM Business Platform ensures we understand as much as possible about a prospect before we pass a lead to your sales team. We provide our Clients with detailed written information as well as a verbal briefing and out WebONE Integrated Marketing Database enables us to list all communications, all collateral that’s been sent along with our assessment of the relationship. This, plus other critical information we gather, not only significantly improves your chances of winning and saves your salespeople time and effort, it also shortens the time between sales becoming engaged and the deal closing.

Receive leads with trusted relationships in place

It’s important that leads are qualified so you don’t waste time and resources trying to chase prospects without a real need, or with an unrealistic budget, or deal with the wrong people who have no authority to buy, or who have a problem you can’t solve.

But if the first conversation your sales person has with a new lead is focused on interrogating them about their budget, authority, need and timeframe it positions them as a pure sales person who is intent on selling them something, not as a subject matter expert who can help them.

The ideal lead is someone who already has a trusted relationship in place with your company, who you know about, who has been gently pre-qualified and who already understands how you can help them.

That’s what our ARM Business Platform enables us to deliver to our Clients; qualified leads with trusted relationships in place. So when your subject matter expert (your salesperson) engages with them, he or she already knows a lot about the prospect, their needs, beliefs and prejudices, their timeframe and budget before they speak.

The people we pass across as leads have already shared valuable information and know about your capabilities, have received relevant collateral and see your company as an organisation that cares about their needs and can help them.

This removes barriers and enables your salesperson to build on an existing relationship and be seen as a consultant so it takes less time to close the deal. Our Clients’ sales people know the prospect’s timetable when they engage so they can close more rapidly and forecast more accurately.

Don’t involve your sales reps until the time is right

One of the biggest reasons why sales people don’t make their quotas is that most of them only spend around 25% of their time selling. The other 75% of the time is spent prospecting, nurturing and in administrative tasks (forecasting, updating the CRM, sales meetings, training, reporting, etc.).

But even the best salesperson isn’t very good at consistently nurturing and prospecting. That’s because they will, quite naturally, drop these activities whenever something more important comes up – like preparing for demonstrations and presentations, writing proposals, closing a big deal, negotiating a contract.

This means that your most expensive resources spend half their time doing things they aren’t very good at. Something that our consultants at the Database Dept. can do much better for less money.

Sales people can also spend large amounts of time chasing “leads” that are a waste of time because they aren’t properly qualified or because it’s too early in the buying process for sales to engage.

The ideal time for sales to engage is when the prospect is ready to buy and not before – but only if someone else has already developed a relationship with them. When our Clients’ sales people engage they already know what the prospect’s issues and concerns, timeframes, objectives and beliefs are.

And the prospects are already are educated about how our Clients can help them. When this occurs, the time between sales engaging and the deal closing is shortened considerably.