Every company out there wants to shorten their sales cycle. After all, it enables one to hit their goals, bring in extra revenue, and it offers insights into sales process inefficiencies. Shortening the sales cycle is one of the most important things an organization can do to help its sales team excel. But how to accomplish this goal is another matter. At the end of the day, every sales manager has their own approach. Some give their reps free range to do whatever they want, and others demand a hard drive on the first call. And others (specifically tech companies) have a product team that tries to make the buying process as streamlined and automated as possible. In the right circumstances, these tactics can be effective. However, if your company wants to have a long-lasting, scalable effect on your sales cycle, you need to launch an air raid on the problem’s core.
This is where the growth marketing stack is your saving grace. When your company invests in this approach, you get a custom stack of strategies and technologies that run in synch to achieve the same goals. From serving as a multi-channel approach to generating traffic and converting leads into sales, to running marketing automation and advanced lead scoring capabilities, growth marketing stacks help companies achieve all of their goals through an agile, measurable manner. Shortening the sales cycle is one of many things growth stacks do, and here are four ways the approach achieves this.
According to HubSpot, the average sales rep spends 17 percent of his time researching and prospecting leads, and 21 percent of his time writing emails. It is pretty common to see top sales reps dedicating more hours in the day inputting and organizing data and information than actually closing sales. Growth marketing stacks utilize sales automation technology that take these tasks off your team’s plate so they can actually spend their time selling. When organizations invest in growth marketing stacks that offer sales automation technology, each engagement should begin with an audit to determine which tasks are the most repetitive. Then sales enablement experts will determine which tasks should (and can) be automated. Once this stage has been completed, your growth marketing agency can begin automating more complex items like email prospecting.
Any decent sales rep can get a prospect on the phone to discuss a deal. However, not all sales reps can clearly communicate a goal on the call, reach a mutual agreement, and work together to achieve that goal. When goals are agreed upon a map is created for conversation, and when things veer off track, you have a map that will help you circle back. In addition, setting shared goals prevents a guessing game where both parties are left wondering where they stand in the deal cycle at the end of the call.
According to Search Engine Land, 60 percent of all Google searches are performed on mobile devices. And this makes total sense considering that 9 out of 10 people carry a phone or tablet on them at all times. When organizations form partnerships with growth marketing agencies, their custom growth stack tracks buyer behavior and adjusts sales techniques to accommodate the results. This way forms can be filled out on the go, and contract signed right away from a single device thus shortening the sales cycle by eliminating a lot of the back-and-forth with prospects.
Remember when companies stopped advertising in the Yellow Pages? As technology advances, target buyers look for products in a new manner. But just because you are dealing with a digital marketing channel doesn’t necessarily mean it is worth focusing on. Some channels simply don’t attract leads or, more importantly, garner conversions. When you invest in a growth marketing stack, your internal team will be working closely with your growth marketing agency to determine where to focus efforts for the highest returns and track the channels that perform the best while building out systems to support additional focus on the appropriate areas. Growth marketing agencies check channels in an agile process that examine quarterly, annual and year-over-year engagement. Just because one channel is killing it in the summertime, doesn’t mean it’s worth channeling tons of time and dollars throughout the year. In addition, analyzing data from specific channels can be used to improve traffic quality through adapting multiple strategies. Growth marketing stacks come with technology that bridges marketing to sales so that channels can be measured and tracked for performance. And when the right channels are focused on at the right time, your sales cycle can pick up some additional horsepower to speed up.
Download our FREE guide on the WEBITMD Growth Marketing Stack and learn how the approach can not only shorten your sales cycle, but increase leads and conversions by aligning marketing with sales.
