An iron-clad sales cycle is the Robin to the Batman that keeps your sales process fast-moving.
Many organizations have varying approaches, but one thing stands clear: the sales cycle determines how fast you close the deal.
However, only 38% of organizations have an optimal sales cycle that lasts under three months.
This means that the remaining 62% have sales cycles longer than three months. A shorter sales cycle is always better because it helps close deals faster, save more on sales activities, and get better sales ROI.
To shorten your sales cycle, you need:
- Data and intelligence about your prospects
- A way to convert this intelligence into sales tactics that can help shorten your sales cycle
A CRM solution shines a light on customer data with intelligence that guides salespeople and marketers to reduce their sales cycle.
Here are 6 ways it helps.
1. Shorten sales cycle with 360° buyer information
Lack of transparency in activities between the sales and marketing teams has always been a challenge. This exists due to fragmented data across multiple tools such as CRM and marketing automation software.
A unified CRM syncs sales and marketing data in a single location. If you are a salesperson, this allows you to easily access your marketing team’s campaign information, understand past behavioral and transactional information about prospects, and get insights such as their activities before signing up.
On the other hand, as a marketer, a CRM allows you to access insights gathered by the salesperson, create discounts or promotions, trigger discount reminders or notifications, alert users about features that matter, and qualify them.
Insights into each other’s funnel help both teams have meaningful engagements with prospects, ensuring that you influence them to make the right decision and this helps you close deals faster and shorten your sales cycle.
Freshsales comes with built-in marketing automation, providing you visibility into data from marketing engagements, nurture email performance, and track events, all from within a single dashboard.
2. Optimize your sales cycle with on-demand reports
Analyze, learn and fix.
Take a look at how your salespeople perform at every stage in the buyer journey to understand what works and doesn’t.
With a CRM solution, you get insights into emails, calls, campaign performance, and deals such as:
- Study open and rotten deals
- Analyze sales metrics such as deals won versus deals lost and forecast sales team performance
- Identify growth opportunities and make better decisions with marketing analytics
- Sales call metrics such as call duration, recording of the calls, view interaction history, and even view notes
Freshsales manages and tracks your sales and marketing performances within a single interface. You get a reporting dashboard to track sales and marketing analytics, call metrics, and a visual pipeline to forecast deal performance.
Learn more about sales analytics
3. Set goals and motivate salespeople to close deals faster
There’s nothing more motivating for a salesperson than working towards the goals you set for them. Goals help quantify sales performance to keep your salespeople motivated.
You can specify a time range, set goals based on the number of deals currently in the pipeline, customize them based on a particular product or territory, and track their progress with a CRM solution.
Set goals based on the past performance of your salespeople, or set individual goals per salesperson and set the duration to be weekly, monthly, or even yearly. It’s up to you.
This helps motivate your salespeople to work faster towards achieving these goals and also helps speed up your sales cycle.
(Pro-tip: add an incentive here for extra motivation!)
With Freshsales, set goals based on factors such as revenue and current pipeline performance to shorten your sales cycle and achieve targets faster.
Learn more about sales goals
4. Shut-down manual dependency with automation
Salespeople often get held back from achieving their targets. These include updating and logging customer data, calls, and sending emails to name a few.
A CRM offers workflow automation across a wide range of functions such as lead follow-ups, field updating, and attracting new leads.
As a result, salespeople focus more on the open deals in the pipeline and move them to closure faster, thereby shortening the sales cycle.
Freshsales offers intelligent workflow automation that helps salespeople automate repetitive tasks, streamline processes and be more productive overall. This means that your salespeople can automatically trigger emails based on time or date, raise invoices, or even set triggers to automate lead qualification.
Learn more about workflow automation
5. Supercharge email sending with automated sequences
Your prospects have a higher chance to convert if you engage with them as soon as they enter your system.
A CRM helps you automate this process by setting up a series of personalized emails to be sent at specific times and intervals.
With this, cover every customer touchpoint to ensure you don’t lose your prospects’ interest and always have meaningful conversations with them.
And more meaningful conversations result in higher conversion and shorter deal cycles.
Freshsales comes with sales sequences and allows you to manage your outreach process better. You can automatically run sequences of actions over SMS or emails on specific days, or even run them based on your prospect’s behavior. With this, you can manage follow-ups with ease, send welcome emails to new prospects or even re-engage with cold ones and focus on selling.
Learn more about sales sequences
6. Deliver highly personalized engagement with AI
Normally, you capture a new prospect, qualify them, and interact with them based on the interest they show or the ability to purchase and take them through the entire sales cycle. If you are like most others, this process is fully manual.
But what if you can automate the capturing and the qualification process?
A CRM with artificial intelligence helps ensure that no prospect is left unattended and helps qualify them in real-time, distinguish between cold and hot prospects, understand which deal is more likely to close, and take action on the deals that are at-risk.
AI can help considerably shorten your sales cycle by helping your team work better and faster while also being able to focus on building relationships with customers.
Freshsales has Freddy AI assistant built-in and provides your salespeople actionable insights, predictions, and recommendations that are unique to your business.
Freddy AI identifies the best prospects with predictive contact scoring, provides insights on deals, and drives them to closure; it suggests the next best action to drive conversations and notifies you about out-of-office prospects.
Freddy AI also reduces first-response time by automating chat conversations on your website using intent-based NLP suggestions.
Learn more about Freddy AI
Freshsales completely adapts to your sales cycle and helps you shorten it so you can close deals faster and smarter with features like Freddy AI assistant, advanced reporting, sales goals, and much more.
Try it free now for 21-days. No credit card required. No strings attached.
