Sales Cycle Reduction Equals Sales Acceleration. What would it be like if you could reduce the time it takes you to close orders from new customers by 10, 20, or 30%? Think about how a reduction in your sales cycle could lead to rapid improvement of your sales results and your revenue generation. Many companies neglect to take time to analyze their sales cycle and look at ways to reduce it?which can be done by more clearly defining their sales process and looking for areas to eliminate lengthy steps or delays.

Best in class companies are constantly analyzing their sales cycle and their sales process to look for areas of duplication of effort, missing links in the hand off between marketing inside sales and field sales. The development of sales tools to improve their sales process and also looking at improving the qualification so that they are only working on customers who truly have the best opportunity to buy from them. These are just some of the things that great companies are doing to reduce their sales cycle and accelerate their sales.

If your company is suffering from a long sales cycle and it feels like longer than it should be, now is a good time for you to pull your sales team leadership together to meet with a sales pipeline development consultant to analyze your sales process and look at the typical steps in the process and what the delays are associated with each step? particularly as it relates to customer decision making, but also as it relates to internal process steps that you can reduce.

If you pull your team together and brainstorm on each of the different aspects of the sales cycle and how to reduce duplication and reduce delays, you'll find that you can probably come up with some improvements relatively quickly that could easily improve your ability to close deals faster, focus your resources on more qualified prospects, and win more proposals. Think about sales cycle reduction as one of your strategic initiatives in 2006.

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