Create a Predictive Sales Cycle to Drive Repeatable Quarterly Results

There are definitely dozens of articles written about how to shorten a sales cycle. I thought I would consolidate the best sales tactics that actually drive results in a repeatable manner with you all. This is a consolidation of my experience and my colleagues, who are some of the top sales Account Executives in the SaaS industry.

Prospecting Stage

Building a quality pipeline is every Account Executive’s (AE) priority. If not, they will not have the pipeline needed every quarter to hit their target and make the money in a predictable manner.

By focusing on High Intent Leads that are from the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) as prospects, it will eliminate wasted time on the junk leads that will never develop into a deal.

High performing Account Executives work their network with outbound marketing and personal communications that generate the majority of their quality opportunities, which provide a higher predictability to close. Because these leads are usually generated from people they know, they can usually drive the sales cycles faster working their network.

By setting weekly goals for building a quality pipeline, the Account Executive will have the opportunities for next quarter to drive the deals to close to hit their target. This provides the ability for Account Executives to have a combination of opportunities they can close in a shorter cycle time while continuing to move longer term opportunities to the next step.

The common forms of prospecting that are best to work into a weekly schedule:

• Cold emailing

• Cold-calling

• Working your network

• Following-up on leads

• Checking in on referrals

• Social selling

Will it help in the current period? Possibly. But it will definitely help the next period.

Building quality strategies and tactics over quantity is more effective in developing higher quality opportunities. When building sales automation processes, we recommend creating an effective lead scoring definition based on historical opportunities that closed to quickly qualify out leads not worth the AE’s time.

Equipping and enabling AEs with high quality content will improve their efficiency in prospecting. The Marketing team is the most effective supporting arm to help build high quality content with interesting and fun stories to share with their network as a hook. The Marketing and Sales team can experiment with various ROI messaging until they find the sweet spot in the market based on what is resonating .

Qualify Stage

Rather than having each AE define their own sales approach to qualify their opportunities, it is best to have a clear set of definitions as to what constitutes a quality opportunity that has the highest probability to close. Otherwise, the AE will waste time and sales cycles delivering below par results.

The most successful AEs use a qualification method with clear definitions of what makes a quality lead ready to work to close. For example, MEDPICC has a precise qualification process to help define a standardize approach to qualifying all prospects.

Once you have qualified opportunities, continue to nurture potentials leads with personalized messages to move them closer to the next step on a regular basis.

As an AE experiments with various prospecting messaging they will realize some patterns in what is generating quality opportunities. They will usually see the trends in the opportunities that win and the timing it took for them to win the deal. These are important findings to share with the Marketing and Leadership teams on what is working and what is not working to help make the correct modifications to content and messaging to support their future outbound marketing tactics.

Discover Stage

This is my favorite stage. Here is where the deal really comes to life and an AE will have the information to more accurately predict a close time frame. It is actually a very important stage to utilize to create the Launch plan and compelling events to drive a prospect to close sooner rather than later.

Getting to know your Prospect

I recommend the following types of questions to ask in the Discover process to provide more insightful information about the prospect before you dive into the specific problems you solve:

1. What are their top strategic initiatives for the year?

2. What are the challenges they are most concern with that could block their ability to deliver on these initiatives?

3. How do they operate today and what are the challenges with executing with quality and an increase in velocity?

4. What is the current organizational structure and are their near term plans to change that structure?

5. Any acquisitions in the future?

6. Do they consider this problem to be a critical business process or a feeder to a critical business process?

7. What do they consider to be their top problem areas that are critical to their future growth and innovation?

8. Then start the more detailed questions about the specific problems you solve and how they operate today.

9. What is their timeline to solve the problem?

10. What are the compelling events that are driving the timeline?

Getting answers to these questions is what will help you develop a Launch plan with the prospect to help them not just see HOW you will impact their business but WHEN the impact can happen. The Launch plan creates a compelling event for the prospect to realize they need to move the decision process along faster in order to get the project started quickly to hit their Launch date. The secret is to present an easy step by step plan that can guide them from where they are today to the vision by the launch date.

The AE will want to document as much information as they can get from the prospect in this stage to be able to show them in the presentation/demo the difference between how they operate today and how much better they will operate with your solution in place.

With all this information the AE can provide an in-depth deal risk assessment. From the Launch plan the AE will develop a close plan that allows them to conduct a weekly deal risk assessment and use the plan to put pressure on the prospect to move to the next steps faster.

Bring in Services Early and Often

If you have a Services team with seasoned experts in the industries or business processes the solution is focused on, then I recommend bringing in these folks early and often in the sales cycle. The Discover stage can be a good stage to introduce your Services team member to help vet the requirements, outcomes, goals and objectives along with the required timeline. Services folks have credibility due to the fact that they are the ones implementing the solution daily and understand the problems the prospect is facing first hand. Prospects trust the information they receive from these folks and like to see the plan for how the SaaS company is going to deliver on their goals. Sales teams can train Services team members on what talk track to focus on and what not to say before each meeting.

Research and Be Prepared

The most important element to remember is to do the research on each prospect and learn more about their business, competitive landscape to help you articulate a more specific approach that is meaningful to them. Impress the Prospects with your knowledge and understanding of who they are and what they do. It will help you ask more intelligent questions to get them to confirm the problem(s) they have that you can solve.

The last thing I recommend is to schedule time to prepare for every meeting. Don’t just go from call to call and realize you are jumping into a Prospect call or a customer call and have no idea what the agenda for the meeting is and what your role is supposed to be in the meeting. This is a horrible customer/prospect experience. They know the difference between the meetings they have with vendors who are prepared with a plan and ones that are not. I promise you, they will not think highly of your company if you show up and throw up or wing it.

Presentation & Proposal Stage

Preparing for the presentation is critical in shortening the number of prospect/customer meetings required to close. As we discussed earlier, the more information you gather in the discover stage the better prepared an AE can be in architecting an effective presentation and demo that hits the key points the prospect needs to hear and see to move to the next stage.

I have experienced many AEs having to schedule multiple demos without ever really understanding what the key topics and agenda items are that are most important to the prospect. It is very important to LISTEN to the prospect and ask questions to understand how best to meet their needs.

If you answer all the questions in the presentation or demo for the various roles because you prepared with the Prospect on an agenda and the roles in attendance and key questions to answer, then they can move to the decision step much faster.

A Concise Demo

Demo a concise storyline that shows 3 main business impacts the prospect can relate to that are compelling. For example, show a story of how they function or operate today that they relate to and then how they would operate with your solution that shows a streamlined, automated and/or concise process with a sexy report or dashboard to show results. DON’T GET INTO FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS. The ideal demo gets them hooked because they see the efficiencies and effectiveness of the solution.

Tell an impactful ROI story

Prospects and customers want to know how they will achieve an ROI on their investment. For a New prospect, they want the reference customers to share the high value outcomes and business impact that they have realized. For Existing customers that you want to upsell, they want to confirm they have realized some ROI on the first phase. They also want to know what kind of continuous ROI they can expect on future phases. These can be soft or hard ROIs as long as the customer confirms the business impact.

Here’s an example of a good ROI Customer story that you may want to share:

Use the Customer Success Stories to prove the 2X or higher ROI:

If the Sales team partners with the CS team, the CS team can help build a library of Customer Success Stories that the Account Executives can work from anytime they need. These stories can be tagged with industry, size, process types, etc. for easy retrieval of stories that would be most interesting to your prospects or other customers who may be interested in expanding.

Contract & Negotiation Stage

Things can slow down when it gets to the negotiation stage and getting the Terms and Conditions agreed to and signed. One of the most effective ways to get through these stages quickly is to setup video conference calls with the right folks from each side and work through each item to get quick decisions and resolutions. When you allow the negotiation of T&C changes to take place via email between legal teams, the process usually takes 3 to 5 times longer.

Creating internal SLAs for turning around contract changes quickly is also helpful to shorten the cycle times for getting the contracts through the legal team within the SaaS company.

Close Stage

Schedule the prospects Project Kick-Off Meeting as they work through the final steps. This will create a sense of urgency and commitment to get everything signed and ready for the Kick-Off date.

Keep in mind that getting the project kicked off within a week of the close will help ensure the Launch is completed by the expected date, which will setup the next phase and the additional expansion opportunity within the first year.

A great plan, well executed will deliver the fastest and best results.

Additional Resources that may be helpful:

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