In the current economic climate, the looming threat of a global recession may be unsettling for everyone. However, not all hope is lost folks!
One core principle to navigate through economic downturns is understanding that merely saving your way out is not enough – you must sell your way out of a recession.
You could let this be all doomy and gloomy but why? Because everyone else is freaking out? Because the news tells you to? Screw that, shift your perspective.
The key lies in persuading customers to close deals more swiftly. Easier said though…
At Missing Link, a big part of our business is sales presentations! Helping our customers develop deal-winning Sales is our GAME and we’d love to help you.
If you’d want that then check out our StorySeller program 😉
Now, in us helping business’ for the last quarter century win better deals faster, we always get one burning question –
How tf do we shorten our sales cycle?
Answer? Create compelling events.
How? We’ll get there in a sec…. first, consider what Duke Ellington once said: “I don’t need time; what I need is a deadline.”
Basically, people get things done when there’s a D-DAY. Think of it like this: if you know what urgencies are pushing your customers, you can sync up with those deadlines.
Thankfully, when it comes to creating these compelling events, we have a lot to work with.. There are three levers we can pull to shorten those sales cycles.
Seller-led, market-led, and buyer-led events.
- Seller-led events involve incentives such as early-bird discounts or time-limited offers, enticing customers to make a quicker decision as they may miss out.
- Market-led events capitalize on external factors, such as Zoom licenses in 2020. There was an urgent need for business professionals to get working on Zoom as Covid forced remote working.
- The final and most potent strategy is buyer-led events, where the urgency is driven by the customer’s specific needs or deadlines. For example, let’s say there’s a massive conference and the CFO has to go on stage and present the financial results to the shareholders. There’s a deadline with high stakes and thus urgency is created for us to help them.
To uncover these stakes and deadlines to create that urgency, the tried and tested thing we do is ask them this question:
Why was this the right time to have this meeting?
What happens then?
Well, they of course tell you. It’s here where you can start to unveil what their time frame is and you can guide the conversation to help them see their looming deadline. Then a little (mostly a lot) of panic sets in and they realize that much help is needed to meet that deadline. Way easier at that point to decide to sign on the dotted line.
So it’s as simple as this – if your salespeople are not trying to find that deadline, they are then lengthening your sales cycle because they are leaving it up to the customer to decide.
Create a compelling event to make that deadline visible and close. Get those two things right, you will sell faster.
But again, you’re not left alone to sell your way out of this recession. Nor should you be using these times as an excuse for not selling. It’s simply down to you selling the wrong story. We’d love to help you sell the right one.
