If you find that your sales cycles are longer than usual for your marketplace you may need to look at how you manage what the customer has to do in order to place the order.
While sales people understand that a customer’s pain has an implication that needs to be solved, they also need to understand that the decision to purchase and implementing their solution involves managing a number of factors that also need solving.
Those factors are typically: inertia, status quo and internal politics, rules, policies and history. For the sale to happen they all have to be aligned.
Most sales people will try to find a coach to guide them through this alignment process; usually it’s whoever shows first interest in the solution. Occasionally, the selling team will align themselves with whoever is best positioned to help them.
Either way, this approach doesn’t take into account one key factor.
This prospect may never – or only rarely – have bought a solution like yours before. But you have sold it (hopefully) many times. Which means that you should know more about how it is bought than they do.
What you need to do is to find a mentor – someone who can open the doors, smooth the way and facilitate actions – while you, in turn act as their coach.
So while they are managing the internal relationships and handling the rules and policies, you need to be using your experience to help them identify the points of inertia, the reasons to resist change and the blockages that need overcoming.
The earlier in the process you can get your prospect to address the internal issues that will need to be navigated, the sooner you can deal with them and the shorter your sales-cycle will be.
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