How to shorten your sales cycle and increase your revenue?

The topic of this article is one everyone’s familiar with. Every single company wants to shorten the sales cycle and increase revenue. It’s related to their goals and their core existence.?

What can we do to get relevant clients faster and, at the same time, increase the size of our deals to increase revenue?

Today, the mystery is being revealed.

I’m gonna explain to you how I work, and, by doing that, I wanna show you how you can do it, too, for your company.

My main focus is on LinkedIn. We’re in B2B, and it’s kind of an obvious choice. This is where our target audience spends most of their working hours.?

LinkedIn, as a platform, is focused on people, on individuals. The mission of LinkedIn is simple: to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

It’s a no-brainer what you need to do to be successful there.

So, we go in two ways.

From a personal perspective

We build personal brands of the people from the company. In most cases, those are decision-makers (including the CEO) and members of the marketing and sales teams.?

It’s important to involve the CEO from day one because motivation comes from the top. If the CEOs are not in from the very start, it might not work, and you can quit at this point.?

Ok, ok, you can involve someone else that people consider a leader. But someone needs to guide people and lead by example.

My recommendation is to only work with people who are aligned with your thinking and understand what it takes for your strategy to work. It makes life easier.?

So, what’s the process for shortening the sales cycle?

We do a monthly interview with each person involved in the strategy. That’s how we find out who they are, what they do, what they struggle with, which problems they solve, etc. We find out who they are as a person and the way they communicate.. Are they funny??

We use interviews and we use existing content from the website, at first.?

A lot of B2B companies have good content on their websites, created over keywords, and focused on SEO. Ok, being focused on SEO instead of people is not great, but it is the content we can use to distribute. In most cases, this content has been seen by 14 people (employees and their relatives), and shared only once on the company pages.

We mix personal stories with hammering over pain points.?

After all, the goal is to get results, right??

No matter if you’re selling beer or enterprise software, all marketing is ultimately person-to-person. That’s why authenticity, collaborative storytelling, and brand purpose have such currency in B2B marketing.

B2B buyers are looking for a compelling “what the fuck is there for me” reason to buy.?

And it goes beyond features. Beyond functions. And beyond price.

Pretty much every business software application increases efficiency or improves operations in some shape or form. I’m generalizing for the sake of context.

Those things aren’t differentiators. They are a basic requirement for market consideration.

Implementing a new business solution, in most cases, requires change on the part of employees, and unless the current pain is very great, people generally resist change.

Successful B2B marketing is about explaining how the new solution will make life better, not only for the product champion but for all the other users and stakeholders as well.?

Thaaat’s where it gets complicated.

To not end up standing alone in the corner at the party, skip the explanations of marketing automation processes, the intricacies of content marketing strategy and craft, and data-driven marketing.

Focus on customers and tell a damn good story.

So personal stories, results, testimonials, reviews, processes, experience, and sharing knowledge—this is what we invest in, from a personal level perspective.?

We produce enough content to hit all the stages in their buyers’ journey.

We create personal brands for the people involved in the strategy, and we start making thought leaders out of them.?

That’s why, when we work with B2B companies, we check if they have a good culture and established values.

Trust = brand. In 2024, you build a brand post by post.

Steve Watt from Seismic has a great overview of this, and I recommend you listen to what he has to say using the link below.

Why do we want to invest in content and distribute it to our employees?

As a company, we surely want to:

• Generate demand for your services and products
• Prove niche expertise
• Position yourself as a trusted advisor
• Nurture target accounts.

So what kind of content are we talking about? Do you know that not everyone can be a thought leader?

Yup, I know that. And for a long time, I was looking for the right content formula for LinkedIn. Then, my buddy Casey Hill from ActiveCampaign joined me on the Funky Marketing podcast and shared it with me. Find the episode and the knowledge below.

Degree of content for LinkedIn posts:

1. First Degree: directly related to what one sells, like a product launch or feature update.
2. Second Degree: content that supports the first degree, such as customer stories or how the product solves problems.
3. Third Degree: broader industry trends, offering insights into the market or technology related to the business.
4. Fourth Degree: leadership lessons or personal growth experiences, sharing professional development insights.
5. Fifth Degree: personal stories or hobbies that humanize the poster, helping to build connections with the audience.

If this sounds too complicated, or you don't have a team and want to do it on your own, here's a much simpler version that you can use.

1. Past: experience, role models, projects you've worked on, education, etc.
2. Present: what you do every day, daily activities
3. Future: your POV (point of view), what you know and see, and what others don't know and don't see

Why is the company culture important?

If the company has a good culture, people will know its purpose. And they are willing to talk about it.

So we create a sort of hub inside the company. It can be just a Slack or WhatsApp group.

This is where people are:

• getting educated about LinkedIn and personal branding
• getting feedback about their LinkedIn posts
• sharing thoughts of what they want to share
• engaging with other people’s posts and suggestions

We can tell if a post is going to get traction before it is posted or scheduled because we’re seeing it in the hub. People involved with it in the hub will be involved on LinkedIn, too.

Introverts, people not used to sharing, want to dominate too when they see their colleagues dominating. To get there, they receive help from their colleagues even before they go out to LinkedIn and post.

CEOs and decision-makers are involved, too, so it’s not an easy thing to do. But remember..

LinkedIn is just an extension of what’s already happening inside the company. And it all starts with leadership.

On the other hand, engagement is highly important. We connect with the right people.?

What does it mean to “connect with the right people”??

It means connecting with people from your target group and creating the right content is not enough. We grow their LinkedIn engagement by applying the same principle Facebook algorithm uses.

How to use Facebook Ads Algo principle for LinkedIn?

On Facebook, you create a campaign based on one goal you want to achieve.

For engagement – Engagement Campaign.

For conversions – Conversion campaign.

When you choose Engagement, Facebook finds people already engaged with other Facebook pages and posts. Those who are reacting, liking, commenting, and sharing.

People already engaged with other people’s posts are more likely to engage with your posts than any other people.

Logical, right??

Let’s move to Linkedin.

In each niche or industry, you have people with hundreds of likes and comments on their posts. They aren’t necessarily your target audience, but they are your colleagues, interested in the same content as you are.

Apply the same logic as the Facebook algorithm does.?

People already engaged with other people’s posts are more likely to engage with your posts than any other people.

1. Find relevant professionals in your industry
2. Follow them
3. Comment on their posts giving value and in-debt insights
4. Go through likes and add relevant people

They will make your posts more visible.

But let me go further and give you all 4 types of audiences you should connect with on LinkedIn.

4 types of audience you should connect with on LinkedIn

1. Engagers: highly active people who love your content, but will never buy from you.

2. ICP (ideal customer profile): people who work for a relevant company and fit your ICP. Usually, they’re decision-makers or report to the decision-makers.

3. Event organizers (events you want to speak at).

4. Co-pilots: people who have the same audience but sell different solutions to your ICP.

This is a LinkedIn ecosystem that helps to:

• Regularly appear in the newsfeed of the target accounts
• Build a strong brand & real relationship with the target audience
• Generate and capture the demand
• Educate & nurture the target market

My friend ???? Andrei Zinkevich helped me get all of them, and I have to give him credit for that. Find out more in THIS POST, and make sure you follow Andrei.

To make all this work:

• Post relevant content regularly
• Make people think
• Give value without hesitation

This personal perspective results in a few things:

1. Getting messages on LinkedIn
2. People going to the profile, check the Featured section and schedule a call
3. People go to Google, search for the person’s name, find the website that way, and schedule the call

We build a company’s brand by creating personal brands for the people working in the company. I said this back in an article about Employer Branding back in 2017.

From the company's perspective

Besides using a blog, I suggest starting a video or audio series. The best option is to do both. It can be an interview series, or it can be a podcast.?

We select several people from our target group (but only those who are active and have an audience) and invite them to be guests.

Everyone likes to talk about themselves for an hour. We prepare a set of questions, ask all that we need to find out the way they’re working, and the way they’re investing in new products or services, and we take them through the buyers’ journey.?

So we get recorded long-form content that we can post on YouTube (YouTube is great for building a brand)—video version—and to Spotify for Podcasters (which then spreads it to all the leading podcast platforms)—audio.?

We then repurpose the content into smaller pieces of video content or audiograms (3-8 pieces out of an hour of long-form content), add headlines and transcription, and use it primarily on LinkedIn.

We send all the versions to the guests, so they can share them on their profiles.

We use pieces with guests on our company page, where we practically build our company brand on the personal brands of our guests.?

We tag them and quote them, so their network can see it. Also, at the same time, we’re connecting with respectable people from the company, to make our content more visible.?

The pieces of content about which we’re talking refer to the personal profile of the person hosting the podcast.

That’s how we educate potential clients with content that hits all stages of their buyers’ journey, and, at the same, time, we start a long-term relationship with them. After the podcast, we nurture that relationship and move slowly to the conversation where we can show them the way we help them solve their problems (they already know we can, at this point).?

This is how it works on LinkedIn, in short.?

If you wanna learn more about how we create content, specifically, check the last edition of this Newsletter called How to create a B2B Content Machine.?

But.. it takes time for content to work, you say.?

Yes, it’s true.?

When you’re hiring a salesperson, you give them at least 3 months to close the first sale.?

When you’re hiring a marketing agency, you expect to get results right away.?

It doesn’t make sense.

We tell people that, if their sales cycle is 3 months long (for example), they can expect marketing to bring results in 6 months, so double the time of your sales cycle.?

Now, I know it’s a struggle. In case a client wants to get results faster, we add advertising to the equation.

When I say advertising, I mean Meta and LinkedIn (depending on the budget).

We don’t use them to get leads. Or to get sales.

We use advertising to accelerate content consumption.

We use content such as news articles, case studies, research, and testimonials and distribute it via ads to our target groups. We’re targeting decision-makers, on the one hand, and we target people who are going to use the product or service, on the other hand.?

The only thing we want them to do at this stage is consume the content. Each person has 3 minutes per day to consume content. This is what we’re aiming for, no matter if it’s the decision-maker or someone else. Platform's gonna deliver it to them exactly when they’re most willing to read/see it.?

We’re watching if the right people are reacting on a channel level, and, if they are, we’re tracking how much time they spend consuming it on the website. If they’re consuming it, then we wait.?

Depending on the length of the decision-making process in the company, it’s gonna take more or less time for them to come and convert. Sometimes, a person from the company that will lead the implementation sees it, and he needs approval from the CEO, so the CEO comes and converts.?

We’re only seeing it in the number of scheduled calls, demo signups, or whatever is the CTA.

These days, we call it a Dark Funnel. I wrote an article about it for RevGenius called Marketing Strategies That Don’t Scale: The Dark Funnel Case Study.

This is the process.

Now, let’s zoom out.?

If you do this as a marketing and only send sales qualified leads (SQLs) to sales those people who click or say: "Yes, I want to talk to sales!", what will happen?

Sales will say: "Wow, marketing is finally doing a good job!" Yes, we’re getting fewer leads, but those are actually qualified leads that we can work with and close.?

When they have qualified leads, they will be able to close them. And to close them faster.?

So when this is the situation, the company doesn’t need 10 people in sales. They need, let’s say, two. Two experienced people who know their jobs.?

With 10 of them, you've gotta have people who don’t have all the experience. If you have two instead of 10, it means that the experience of each buyer will be amazing.?

That’s how you grow your revenue and get the money back to the product, for example.?

Also, when salespeople are getting educated and highly interested buyers, they’ll be able to increase the deal size, which will additionally increase revenue.?

And because deals are closed faster, sales can do something additional and different from what marketing does, like going outbound.?

This is what we do for you and your business.?

If done right, it increases the revenue, the personal brands of the people involved in the strategy, and it increases the company brand.

Now, if you feel like you’re ready for that step, don’t hesitate to visit my Pricing page and get a free assessment.?

And if you found value in this edition of the Marketing with a bit of funk newsletter, please like, comment, and share, even outside LinkedIn (remember Dark Funnel?). ;)

Cheers and keep it funky!