“Sales Velocity” - it’s a new buzzword in town and I’ve just commented on another decent sales blog at Sales Excellence about the very subject.
So what actually do we mean by sales velocity?
Well, it’s how long the sales cycle is for your particualr product or service.
In other words “How quick do you close a sale?”
Now a lot of sales training books and the techniques that you read about always talk about generating new leads, farming your existing accounts etc to build sales but an often overlooked area is that of increasing how quickly you MAKE your sales.
It makes plain out common sense that if on average it takes you 11 days to win a piece of business that if you can reduce this down to 7 or 8 days then you’ll have more time free to prospect and sell.
So how can you do this?
Well, firstly you need to get together as a sales team and map out your sales process.
List and draw up every single activity in your sales process and for each stage put down the best case and worse case time period that it should take.
Now, after you have done this you need to add up all of the best and worse case time periods so you’ll get a range like:
WORSE CASE - 33 DAYS
BEST CASE - 2 DAYS
AVERAGE - 10 DAYS
Now find out who is the best performing sales person at each stage of the sales process and work out what they do and how they do it. Map this out across the sales process map in some way or link to it via another document.
And then go to work on implementing what they do and how they do it. Keep evaluating and measuring how long each stage takes to see the impact.
It will make a huge impact on your sales.
So going forward look at your sales velocity figures as well as your ratios and your activity.
By increasing your sales velocity you will free up a lot more time to sell which in turn will lead to more sales naturally!
Happy Selling!
Sean
Sean McPheat
MTD Sales Blog
MTD Sales Training
Telephone: 0800 849 6732
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