Make More Sales Cycles

We are Changing How the Game is Played

You have a Sales Cycle. It is typically defined as once you have identified a prospect, how long it will take for them to either decide to buy your solution or someone else’s solution. That length of time could be two days, two weeks, two months, two years or more. During the sales cycle, you engage in very specific activities, including documenting requirements, building relationships, understanding the buying process, offering proof statements, demonstrations, presentations, proposals, etc. All these actions require you or your sales team to perform each one of these steps in a competent manner.

Whether you are aware of it or not, you also have a Prospecting Cycle. The dominant strategy for prospecting in most organizations is guesswork. To prove our point, consider the following:

The most common eventuality when you make a prospecting call is to encounter the Key Player’s voicemail:

Do you leave a message?
If so, what do you say in the message?
How long do you wait before following up?
Why?

If you were to ask any ten sales people the above series of questions about handling this most mundane of activities, how many different responses would you get? Would you get the same answers next week if you ask them the same questions?

You WILL get many different answers and by definition, at least all but one would have to be wrong.

The Prospecting Cycle is often overlooked. Like the sales cycle, the prospecting cycle consists of a series of activities which include, but are not limited to, finding the right person, promoting your value proposition to that right person -- especially if they either don’t know who you are or they didn’t wake up in the morning saying, "I need to buy one of these today" -- securing their time to have a first meaningful business conversation and making sure that you take advantage of that first conversation because you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Prospecting is the calisthenics of selling. Like calisthenics (sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, etc.) which don’t require any special equipment, the tools used in prospecting (such as the internet, Google, email, the telephone) are ubiquitously available to all. Like the calisthenics that you perform, it matters less how many you do and more how well you do each one of them.

FRONTLINE Selling has developed a methodology to help our clients master their Prospecting Cycle. The methodology, called RAMP-UP (Repeatable and Measurable Process for Upgrading Pipeline) is the recipe that identifies all the potential prospecting activities that one can encounter and how to perform each one of the activities with perfect form.

To learn more about how you can master your own prospecting cycle, click here to be in contact with one of our representatives.