How to Speed ​​up the Sales Cycle and Close Orders Faster?

Astragraphia Document Solution - Do you want to speed up the sales cycle and close order transactions more quickly? If your Marketing & Sales department spends too much time gathering, tracking, and managing quotes, contracts, and information, they may not have enough time to forge strong relationships with potential customers. In the following, Astragraphia Document Solution will share how to speed up your sales process by quickly creating sales orders, quotes and invoices and getting all the data you need to improve your sales strategy for better and faster sales.

What is the Sales Cycle?

Every business adopts a sales process to meet its revenue-generating goals. This process involves generating leads and converting them into paying customers. Let's explore what a typical sales cycle looks like below!

Sales Cycle

1. Find Prospects

The first step of the sales cycle begins with creating customer interest, attracting prospects to your business, and increasing their interest through nurturing.

2. Create Opportunity

When prospects are interested in knowing more about your product, a sales opportunity is created.

3. Sales Invoices

Once the seller completes the deal, the quote will be sent to the customer.

4. Sales Orders

If a customer finds a reasonable offer, they will submit a purchase order. Your company will then submit a sales order and pass the order details to the logistics team. This is where the warehouse staff comes into play – to complete picking, sorting and packing.

5. Delivery

The goods are then transferred to an approved logistics partner who will ship the products to your customers.

6. Invoice

An invoice will then be generated and sent to the customer so that your company accepts the payment.

7. Accounting

Payments are sent to the account team so they can consolidate reports, complete the sales cycle.

What Happened To The Current Sales Cycle?

Any company that does not use an automated system has to manage the sales process manually thereby slowing down the sales cycle. Based on research data from Forbes reports that 35.2%1 of salespeople's time is spent on active sales, the rest is spent on administrative tasks, internal approvals, and internal policies.

Manual processes such as recording prospects and managing opportunities through Microsoft Excel extend the time it takes to close deals. Using paper, email, or fax to manage sales orders, shipping orders, and invoicing is time-consuming because of the need for multiple rounds of amendments with customers. The lack of an all-in-one workplace platform increases the time it takes to share deal status with multiple stakeholders across departments.

Employees who manually enter information into Microsoft Excel increase the chance of human error such as entering the wrong amount, price, invoice, or shipping address. Data is not portable in paper based documents so data cannot be reused easily. And a seller will be asked to re-enter data manually whenever needed. It's challenging to manage data when you need to retrieve multiple documents.

As we know, excel and paper-based spreadsheets are not the easiest tools to manage large amounts of data. It also takes a long time to pull data for reports and analyze purchase history. Besides, sales reports are tedious to generate. This makes it difficult for sales leaders to make fast, informed decisions in real time.

 

How to Speed ​​Up the Sales Cycle?

To speed up the sales cycle, you need to speed up the sales process. This will help you close deals faster and generate income faster.

Here are the best ways to streamline and automate your sales process.

1. Identify and Target the Right Prospects

One of the reasons sales cycles are long is because the salesperson is selling to the wrong people. To close the gap, better target your prospects by creating custom forms relevant to your sales process to reach customers and understand their needs better. This way, you can collect important data and focus your efforts on the prospects most likely to convert.

2. Simplify the Sales Process with Automation

Automate recurring tasks like sending follow-up emails and scheduling appointments with your customers. This can free up your time to focus on the more important aspects of the sales cycle.

3. Strengthen Relationships Stay Warm

Once you've qualified prospects and provided a free trial or consultation, proceed to schedule follow-up meetings and send relevant information to answer any questions in a timely manner to keep prospects engaged.

4. Sharing and Collaboration

Once the prospect is ready to buy, close the deal as soon as possible. Generate sales quotes and sales orders automatically using low code business apps and notify all parties about deal closing.

5. Measurable Prospects

Take a data-driven approach to your sales process by measuring how long it takes to close a lead and looking inside your process to continually optimize it. Create custom reports and dashboards that can help you analyze sales data. You can use this data to gain insight into your sales process and further optimize your sales cycle.

Manual insurance process: Employees must use paper forms to register customer information, and the approval process is done manually. It is difficult to know customer status, and management has no visibility of customer information due to a lack of reporting tools.

Data legacy: Sales data is managed using Microsoft Excel and shared via Dropbox, and updated by employees daily. Even though data is managed in a shared digital format, important information gets accidentally deleted when multiple employees work on the same document simultaneously.

Source:

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2018/02/15/why-sales-reps-spend-so-little-time-selling/?sh=1c5d1ea91051

2. FUJIFILM Business Innovation Singapore