How long is the sales cycle?

Sales people and managers alike think they have an idea of the length of their sales cycle, but do they really understand the dynamics of time and movement on their pipelines?  Some people envision the sales pipeline like a funnel with the large end up. Lets simplify this image for the sake of our discussion and assume that its a straight tube.  We assume that it takes a certain amount of time to develop an opportunity if we do everything right and then, like a Thanksgiving turkey, the little button pops up and its ready.  That sounds nice.  Its orderly and logical, but couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality, opportunities go in one end of the tube, but don’t all travel at the same rate.  Over all of the opportunities that a company develops, there is a spectrum within each opportunity falls.  Some develop quickly and others more slowly.  So items within the tube are hopefully all moving in the same direction, but at different rates.

Why?  For starters, regardless of how big our egos are, there are factors that are simply out of our control.  Each prospect has their own priorities into which you should feel luck to fall at all!  There are bumps along the way, like unforeseen requirements that you could not anticipate.  As you delve into new markets you may discover these requirements and you might have to go back to the drawing board or tweak your product offering.  There are certain buying behaviors that are more pronounced with some clients than others and these may affect the rate at which they are willing to progress.  Forget not, that the pace of progress is not just about your desire to close the business.  It is truly a two way street.

Of course there are averages.  When you read what constitutes a normal body temperature or blood pressure, these are averages, but individuals vary.  And so it is with sales opportunities.  So when you put a lot of opportunities in the tube, what naturally develops are wave patterns that mean that what comes out the other end is not a steady stream.  This is almost a natural phenomenon to which many things in nature, and elsewhere, seem to adhere.

So what’s the problem with reliance on averages?  You might predict that if a particular opportunity doesn’t close around the average, that it’s not worth continued effort.  We never have a problem with opportunities that develop quickly.  We say that they were on a “fast-track”.  So what about the slower ones?

I once had an opportunity that took an inordinately long time to close.  Many of my peers had given up, but I knew that I was making progress.  I wasn’t being told “no”.  I just had a lot of steps and a lot of selling to do.  I had to prove that I was reliable, determined and honest.  I had to prove that I was willing to bring value to the client to win their trust, even when I wasn’t getting the business.  It was a courtship, not a one night stand!  I was told to give up and not waste my time, but I persisted.  When the opportunity finally closed, much to the surprise of quite a few within my company, a few things became clear:

1   It was the highest margin business in my territory.

2.  The barriers to taking the business away from me were as high as they could be.

3.  It was the easiest piece of business to maintain.

If I had judged my probability of closure solely on the distance between the average selling cycle and how long it was taking to close this one opportunity, I would have flushed it away and would not have enjoyed the profits for the company and the commissions for me!

So getting back to the tube, what does the output from the other end look like?  If ever you talk to someone in retail, they will tell you that customers come in and buy in waves.  The same happens in B2B sales.  We may not like it, because we are programmed to like things that are linear, even though almost nothing in this world really is.  It’s life’s little way of giving you a breather from the manic phase of closing opportunities.

So load your pipeline with as much as your bandwidth will allow you to work.  Don’t get frustrated by times that are thin, as long as you know there are times of plenty to come.  Work them all at the pace that is agreeable to everyone.  The same amount of work spread over a longer period of time actually expands your bandwidth, giving you more capacity.  If every opportunity required a full court press, you would have to work one at a time.  The resulting business will be more diverse and more sustainable in the end.

By David Phillips
Connect to me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlphillips