Peddle harder to speed up the sales cycle

One of the biggest challenges for a fast-growing business is to get more customers, more quickly. But how do you accelerate the sales process?

One person who believes he has some answers is Sam Phillips, founder and chief executive of Glide Technologies, which provides web-based marketing management software for large companies aiming to manage their brand online.

His business, whose customers include Sony, Ebay and Barclays, increased its revenues from £2m to £3.5m last year and is aiming to double it again in the next few years - so any blockages in the sales cycle are a big concern.

However, Glide has managed to cut the time it takes to close a deal from an average of seven months to five months by following a few basic rules.

First, its focus has been on ensuring that the sales team knows all the keypeople involved in the buying process. In Glide's case, this is often just four people: the sponsor, the financial buyer, the procurer andthe user.

"The classic mistake people make is to think they gave a good relationship with one person involved in buying their product and then not think of the other people," Phillips says.

It is more than just building a relationship with these key people, according to Phillips. "It is nutsand bolts things like knowing when these people go on holiday. All it takes is for someone to go away for a deal to be delayed."

Another strategy that Glide employs is to keep a careful note of why potential customers have failed to buy. It might be that they expressed an interest, but were unable to buy at that time. Glide's sales team notes this, and then finds ways - when the time is right - to re-engage with the contact, perhaps by inviting them to an event Glide organises.

The company is also very hot on staff using Glide's customer relationship management system with client- meeting notes.

One of the challenges of any system, of course, is getting people to use it. It only takes a few people to resist to render a new way of working redundant.

At Glide, this issue is resolved by having weekly sales meetings, where all members of the sales team have to go through their particular sales pipelines.

"We don't believe insending pestering e-mails around the office," Phillips says. "It would be pretty obvious if someone wasn't following the system."

Phillips himself has to lead by example since Glide also has a social networking strategy complete with Twitter tweets, Facebook messages and a blog from the chief executive.

"That is a challenge for me because it means me stepping back from being a hands-on manager to do these things," Phillips says.

Sales processes can be further improved - and speeded up - by having members of a sales team work together more often, according to business owners. This was a strategyemployed by Fourth Hospitality, another web-based software provider, which specialises in human resources systems for the hospitality sector.

Sales people are notoriously individualistic, soco-operation was notnecessarily an easy option, admits sales director James England.

However, putting sales executives into teams has enabled the whole operation to challenge its actions more often, allowing itto drop certain leads and focus on the more productive ones, according toEngland.

"We don't incentivisepeople to say no," he says. "It is simply a by-product of meeting and challenging each other to ask the right questions or qualify out the opportunity."

An important change at Fourth has been encouraging the sales teams to use web-based conferencing tools rather than face-to-face meetings with clients - particularly in the early stages of discovering whether a company is interested in buying or not.

This saves the company a couple of thousand pounds a week per sales person, in train fares and wages, according to England.

One of the advantages of serving the hospitality industry, England notes, is that, even with this way of working, Fourth's salespeople are seldom short of other opportunities to get out and meet clients. It is, after all, by its nature, a very social industry.

Sales people in other sectors, however, may be less willing to spend more time behind a computer rather than out on the road.

But Roger Harrop, an independent consultant and business adviser, claims that profitable growth is actually very easy to achieve by following a few simple rules.

His first rule is only to sell to people who have money.

"Despite the recession, there are a lot of people doing very well," he says, adding that he has a list of 31 market sectors that are growing at the moment.

Harrop also believes that you need to make it as easy as possible for people to buy from you.

"People often forget what they can sell to existing customers," he says.

"If someone bought 1,000 items from you a year ago, send them an e-mail with a pro forma invoice for another 1,000.

"It won't work 100 per cent of the time, but it might work 40 per centof the time."

This is not to say that shortening the sales cycleis easy. Sam Phillips at Glide admits that even with his company's successes,it is a constant struggle.

"The procurement process now is tougher than it was in the thick of the recession," he says, adding that, in the past six months, many large companies have greatly slowed the process of completing deals by introducing procurement teams into the process.

Phillips estimates that, without such changes, Glide might have shaved another three months off its sales cycle. The quest to sell faster continues.

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