Client Onboarding Checklist: Steps, Templates & Best Practices
Sales cycles last between 30 to 90 days and can vary wildly depending on the size of the client and the complexity of your solution. If you don't close a sale during this period, your competitors will.
But how do you structure your formal sales process to achieve your sales target? It all comes down to managing the stages of the sales cycle effectively, from prospecting to getting them to engage to closing the sale. Understanding your sales cycle helps you communicate better with your prospects, sell more seats and get more deals signed.
Ready to learn more about optimizing your sales cycle? This article will cover best practices for managing your sales cycles to close more deals.
The sales cycle is a series of steps that you go through to get a prospect to make a purchase. It can be simple or complex, depending on the type of product and service you're selling. The sales process starts with identifying potential leads and creating communication channels with them.
From there, you need to nurture those relationships until they are ready for your sales team to close the deal.
The sales cycle can be broken down into several stages: prospecting, contacting, qualifying, educating, handling objections, closing and follow-up or nurturing. Each stage has its own best practices that will help you get more deals done and close them faster.
We’ll touch on each of these stages in the latter part of the article. Keep reading.
A sales cycle and a sales process are both critical pieces of your business’s overall sales tactics. They sound similar but are different things.
The sales cycle represents the chronological sequence of steps that a sales team follows, beginning at a specific point in the sales journey and concluding with the successful closure of a sale.
Conversely, the sales process is the strategic and tactical framework employed by the sales team to consistently navigate through the multiple sales cycles with each new prospect. It outlines methods, tools and techniques used to move prospects from initial contact to sale completion.
Essentially the sales cycle describes the steps businesses go through to close sales while the sales process explains how sales teams execute these steps.
Every sales cycle, regardless of its length, goes through seven sales stages. The cycle is always running between your sales and marketing teams and the customers they’re communicating with.
The seven steps of a sales cycle are as follows:
A recent industry survey found that 90% of all companies that use a formal, guided sales cycle were ranked as the highest performers. But what makes a sales cycle so important? Let's discuss this.
Understanding your customer's needs is the first and crucial part of any sales process. It's important to know why your customers make purchases and how they use your products or services to provide them with the best experience possible. The more you know about each customer, the easier it will be to provide value and build trust over time.
You can only sell a product or service that meets their needs, so you must understand their wants and how your products meet them.
Suppose you're not keeping track of each phase of the sales cycle and how long it takes each prospect to progress through it. In that case, it's impossible to know if there are any bottlenecks anywhere along the way and whether they're caused by poor customer service, lack of product knowledge or something else entirely.
By tracking each stage in the process, you can identify and fix these problems before they become significant issues for your business.
The sales process will always be different for every customer. Customers have different needs, and some may be at different stages of the buying cycle.
Understanding where each customer is in their journey allows you to target them with the right type of messaging at the right time. Then you can develop new sales tactics for your team that help you close deals faster.
Read this article to see top sales strategy examples from real-life brands to inspire your own.
The sales cycle is a great way to identify new leads and sales opportunities. You can use it to create a pipeline of prospects and ensure that your team is always working on the right deals.
This will help you close more deals faster because you won't waste time trying to sell products or services that don’t match your buyer persona and ideal customer profile.
Let's discuss a few stages of the sales cycles for both B2B and B2C and understand the difference between them.
The sales cycle is the amount of time it takes to reach a sale. A buyer's journey starts when they first become aware of a company or product and ends when they purchase it.
A B2B sales cycle can take anywhere from several weeks to several months, while a B2C sales cycle is much shorter and more transactional.
For example, if I go online and buy something from Amazon, my transaction is complete within minutes. But, in a B2B scenario, when I'm searching for a new CRM system, I may have to visit multiple websites and speak with several salespeople before making a decision.
In B2B, you generally need multiple accounts or decision-makers to approve a sale, whereas one person decides in B2C. This means more time is required to build relationships with these individuals and their superiors, who may be located across various departments or even countries.
To buy a product or service, a consumer needs to have a problem that your product can solve. This problem can be as simple as an itch that needs scratching or as complex as keeping up with the increased competition in your industry.
The customer's mindset is only sometimes clear-cut in B2B because multiple people may be involved in deciding to purchase your product or service. In B2C, the customer's perspective is usually quite clear: they need a product that solves a problem, and you have it.
We've come to the crucial part of this article, where we will discuss the stages of the sales cycle and provide you with the best practices to create a streamlined sales cycle.
Creating a sales cycle includes the following steps:
Prospecting is the process of finding and qualifying new leads. It's important to prospect your buyers because this will allow you to identify the most likely to buy from you and how much profit they could generate.
Once exposed to your products or services, these potential customers can then be qualified based on their needs, budget, timeframe for buying and other factors that influence their decision-making process.
Here are some prospecting tactics you can use to identify your potential buyers:
Once you have found and gained access to your potential customers, it’s time to learn more about them. If you're selling a product or service, who are the people most likely to purchase it? What are their demographics and psychographics? Do they have any specific pain points that you can address with your offering?
Creating a buyer persona is the best way to succeed at this stage of the sales cycle. A persona is a fictitious character that represents your target audience. It's not just a name and a set of demographics but the whole person you'll be selling to.
It's essential to create a persona that is as detailed and specific as possible. This will help you better understand your audience and what they need from you so that you can build relationships with them over time.
Visme's extensive library includes 50+ persona templates you can easily customize and create your own. Here is an example of a customer persona template from Visme.
Now that you've identified your target customer, the next step is to establish an initial point of contact. Your initial point of contact with the customer should be a strong one. This can be through a form on a lead magnet, landing page form, email, phone call or social media post.
Use Visme forms to create highly engaging forms with interactive features. Visme Forms is a no-code, easy-to-use form builder that helps you attract more prospects. Collect emails in the analytics dashboard and gain insight about your subscribers right from the start.
Once you've established this initial connection, you'll want to continue engaging with them until they're ready to take action on your offer.
For example, send an email introducing yourself and your company and offering value to the customer. Then, if you don't hear back from them within a few days, you can follow up again with another email or phone call.
We recommend including compelling sales enablement materials to further nudge the prospect down the funnel such as case studies, presentations, lead magnets, ebooks, sales playbooks and more.
Captivate your prospects with this case study template below.
Once you've established an initial connection with your customers, it's time to qualify them. This means finding out if they're actually interested in what you have to offer. One way to do this is by asking questions like:
Find out if your contact authority has purchasing authority, and then determine whether they are interested in your product. If that's not the case, you can ask your prospect to connect you with a manager or a decision-maker.
Now you know that your prospect is interested in your product or service and has the authority to purchase, so it's time to educate them on what they're buying. This means showing them how their business will benefit from using your product or service, as well as demonstrating how easy it is to use.
In addition, you will want to educate your customer on what makes your product different from the competition. You can do this by providing them with case studies, testimonials and other evidence that supports the value of your offering.
To succeed at this stage, you need to create a lot of content for your customers, such as ebooks, infographics, webinars, blog posts and more.
You can also create videos explaining how your product works and testimonials from customers who have successfully used it. Create compelling explainer videos for educating customers using the template below.
Or put together compelling product presentations with the help of this template below.
Get some help creating lots of content by taking advantage of Visme’s AI Writer feature. Prompt the AI to write text that matches your brand and sales voice. Give it examples to work from and refine the final result to flow with everything else.
This is the most important stage in the sales funnel because it's where you will close more deals. To do this, you need to understand your customer's objections and address them head-on.
Some of the customer objections may include the following:
For example, let’s say you are selling SaaS products, and someone says they don't have any budget for new software right now. You can offer them a free trial so that they can try out your product before deciding on purchasing it.
Sales Battlecards are a helpful way to prepare yourself or your team for any customer objections or questions that may come along during the sales cycle.
Once you have answered all the objections and made your case for why your customer should purchase, it's time to close the sale.
Ask them if they have any questions about your product before they buy it so that you can answer those questions. Then, get the customer's payment information and process their order.
If you fail to make a sale on your first attempt, it doesn't mean the deal is dead. Remember, a sales cycle is always in progress until the customer makes a purchase or decides not to continue.
Once you have established a relationship with your customer and sold them your product, it's time to nurture the relationship. Send them emails and sales offers over time to let them know about new products that might interest them. This is called upselling, and it can be an effective way of increasing your revenue.
You can also read our detailed guide to learn how to create a sales process to close more deals.
There is no specific formula to calculate a company's sales cycle, as it can vary depending on the industry, the product or service being sold, and the particular sales process of the company.
However, one way to calculate the sales cycle is by dividing the total number of days to close all your deals by the total deals won.
For example, if you win 60 deals in Q1 and the number of days from the first touch to closing the sale for all the deals combined is 720, your sales cycle will be 720/60 = 12 days.
Additionally, companies use various metrics like "sales cycle duration" and "sales pipeline velocity" to measure the sales team's performance and optimize their sales process.
Sales cycles vary for every business and their particular characteristics. That’s why it’s not possible to give a definite number for an average sales cycle length that applies to every industry.
A Benchmark Survey by Marketing Sherpa provides average sales cycle lengths per industry type. Here are the results:
Performance tracking is a crucial element for sales cycle success. There are several KPIs you should be monitoring to improve your sales cycle every time.
Sales Cycle Management (SCM) is the process of managing leads throughout all of your sales cycle stages, from the first touch all the way through closing. To successfully close more deals, you need to focus on this process.
Here are a few tips for managing your sales cycle properly.
If you still have questions about sales cycles, these frequently asked questions might have the answers.
A full sales cycle goes through the seven typical steps; prospecting, connecting, qualifying, presenting, overcoming objection and closing.
Your full sales cycle might not be the same as your competitors. You decide at what point the sales cycle starts; when you start the lead generation process or when a prospect makes initial contact.
An end-to-end sales process is a sales technique that starts with lead generation and ends with closing a sale that you then nurture towards more sales. It’s the repeatable steps that the sales team follows from beginning to end and has the same seven stages as the full sales cycle.
A marketing sales cycle integrates sales and marketing to move potential customers from initial contact through completing a sale. The stages of a marketing sales cycle is the same as the marketing and sales funnel.
The cycle is the repeatable action prospects make to transition from awareness to interest, to consideration and finally conversion.
You can't be everywhere at once, so use tools to help you scale your sales efforts. This will allow you to stay focused on closing more deals and growing your business.
Visme is the perfect tool for businesses who want to quickly create modern and professional sales presentations, infographics, lead magnets, ebooks, marketing collateral and sales collateral. So don't let your skills on the design front hamper your ability to sell more and grow your business. With Visme, you can create stunning sales materials according to each of your sales cycle stages and get ahead of the competition.
Sign-up for Visme and get access to thousands of ready-to-use sales templates and powerful design tools to customize them.
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