If you feel like deals are dragging on far longer than they should and you aren’t able to close them quickly – you’re not alone. Many businesses struggle with a lengthy sales cycle that takes up resources, stops you from focusing on new opportunities, and eats into your revenue.

If you want to tighten things up and shorten your sales cycle, here are 4 useful tips that can help:

• Focus on the Right Leads

Not all prospects are equal, and you need to carefully evaluate your leads to make sure you focus on the ones that matter. The BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) criteria is often used to quality leads upfront and determine whether they have the money, are able to make decisions, require the solution you are offering, and need it soon.

In time you should be able to build an ideal customer profile and streamline your sales cycle to target them.

• Track How Much Time is Spent on Sales Activities

With the help of an employee time tracking app such as Controlio you can monitor exactly how long is spent on various sales activities and note how effective they were. It will let you check how long employees spend working, what apps or websites they use, and track a wide variety of other metrics related to employee activities and behavior.

All of this will let you identify ways to improve and shorten your sales cycle. Via Controlio’s insights you can improve your resource allocation and direct your sales team to focus on high-value activities that produce better results. It can also help identify workflow bottlenecks that may be slowing down your sales processes.

• Increase Brand Awareness and Establish Partnerships

Efforts to increase brand awareness can build credibility and make it easier to attract new leads. It can also help you to establish partnerships with other brands that can help build a stronger sales presence.

Aside from the normal strategies to build brand awareness, you may also take the time to learn what’s an IPO and how going public can help you access a wider customer base.

• Shorten Response Times

Momentum is important when dealing with sales prospects. Ideally you should respond quickly when a prospect messages you – and strike while the iron is hot instead of letting them ‘cool off’.

Prioritizing fast responses can dramatically shorten your sales cycle and improve conversion rates at the same time. Try to shoot for a 1 to 2 hour response time for most inquiries.

Conclusion

As you can see it really isn’t all that difficult to optimize your sales cycle. All it takes is the right approach and strategy to make improvements that shorten it and make it more effective.

If you really want to make an impact however, you need to keep at it. Always look for ways to optimize and improve your sales cycle and over time these changes will stack up and your revenue will skyrocket.