How to Sustain the Customer’s Interest in a Long Drawn Sales Cycle

If you have been selling B2B (Business-to-Business), you’d realise that almost all of your sales are not concluded within 1 sales meeting. In fact, typical industrial solutions sales cycles could range between 6-18 months. In some cases, it could be as long as 3 years.

Yet, almost all the sales methodologies kind of omit the things the sales person could or should do to follow through with customers. Very little has been discussed about how to sustain the customer’s interest in a long drawn sales cycle.

Most sales methodologies would put the sales process similar to the following 6 steps:

1. Prospect for your next potential customer. ...
2. Make initial contact and client interaction. ...
3. Qualify the prospective customers and needs analysis. ...
4. Win over the prospects with your presentation and influence. ...
5. Address the prospective client's or customer's concerns. ...
6. Close the sale.

What we’d like to do is to compress the 6 steps into 4 key steps as follows:

1. Prospecting and qualifying for new customers OR new sales opportunities within existing customers
2. Meeting with customers (including discovering needs and presenting solutions)
3. Follow through with customers
4. Negotiating for the deal

Today, we shall explore a bit deeper into the 3rd step: how to follow through with customers. 

How Long is Your Sales Cycle Going to Be

The average length of the sales cycle will vary from industry to industry. In some cases, it could be 3 to 6 months. In others, it could be around 1 year.

What could be determined though is how early are you entering into the customer’s buying process.

 Sometimes we approach customers when their need is not very clear. They might like your ideas and solutions, but it will be a while for them to define a need and perhaps raise a Request for Proposal (RFP). The good thing about entering early in the sales cycle is you have a “first-mover advantage” in shaping how the customer perceives could be an ideal solution, or even influence the way that they map out their RFP.

The disadvantage of approaching the customer very early in the sales cycle is it will take a much longer time before you can get the sale, even if the customer is really interested to buy from you. Your greatest challenge will be then how to sustain the customer’s interest throughout the sales cycle.

5 Key Aspects to Focus when Following Through 

Perhaps the worst way of following through with customers is to ask them “are you ready to sign the contract now” every single time you follow through with them. While asking for the order is important, it is just as important to guide your customer to the purchase throughout the sales cycle. 

So here are the 5 key aspects that you could and should do in the meantime.

1. Strategic Business Developments
2. Project Specific Developments
3. Technical Aspects
4. Personal Relationship Development
5. Organisation Mapping

Here are more details:

1. Strategic Business Developments

When you approach the customer at the early part of the sales cycle, you may want to focus your communications on broader issues rather than the specifics of the purchase. This is because the customer might not have defined their needs, is exploring various possibilities.

Hence, you could take this opportunity to understand a bit more about the customer’s business as well as their strategic developments for the next 1-3 years.

2. Project Specific Developments

When you are nearer to the customer’s buying decision, you could now go into the specifics of their needs, particularly on how your solution could be made to deliver results for the customer.

You can help the customer compare the costs, benefits and risks associated with the different options, and guide the customer along so that they can make a decision they are comfortable with.

In this aspect, you could:

• Summarise what you had been discussing with the customer so far
• Address if there are changes or additions to the customer’s needs
• Address any concerns the key stakeholders might have
• Suggest ways to make your solutions work better, etc.

3. Technical Aspects

Depending on how early you enter in the sales cycle, there are various technical details you can discuss with your customer. If you find that you meet a customer in the earlier part of the sales cycle, you can discuss about technological trends and emergent developments. This will allow the customer explore what could be optimal technical solutions to their needs.

On the other hand, if you are at the later part of the sales cycle, you then need to focus on specific technical issues. You probably need to do technical demos, tests or analysis to provide some proof that your technical solutions work. 

4. Personal Relationship Development

While a B2B purchase is likely to be more rational than a B2C one, there will always be an emotional aspect when it comes to buying decisions. Besides the technical and business aspects, customers want to feel safe about the buying decision. As such, they would want to buy from someone they trust, i.e. someone whom they feel is reliable and that they can count on. 

Hence, regardless if you are at the earlier or later parts of the sales cycle, it definitely makes sense to cultivate trusting relationships with customers. This could be done through fulfilling promises you made or proposing solutions that are truly beneficial to the customer.

In addition, the more you know each other on a personal level, the higher the level of personal trust. So, if you could take time to know the customer’s personal history, family situations or outlook on life, it will help in building mutual trust. Similarly, the more a customer knows about you as a person, the higher likelihood that the customer will trust you more.

5. Organisation Mapping

Besides having a longer sales cycle, the other key difference between B2B vs. B2C sales is that there are more people involved in the buying decision in the former.

If you foresee that it will be some time before you can complete the sale, one good way of following through is to find out more about who are the key stakeholders in your customer’s organization. 

You could find out:

• What roles do each key stakeholder play in the buying decision?
• What are some things each of them wants to achieve, and some things each wants to avoid?
• What is each stakeholder’s attitude towards you vis-à-vis the competition?
• What are the internal relationships between the stakeholders?
• What sequence should you approach your stakeholders so that you improve your chances of success? Etc,

Will It be Worth Your While?

As you can see from the above, there are quite a few things to do when following through with the customer. The next question then is: would it be worth your while spending precious time and resources to do all these follow-through actions with your customer?

One critical step to take is to make sure you continuously qualify the customer or the sales opportunity. Sometimes it can be very difficult to make a good assessment if the sales opportunity is worth pursuing when you are in the very early part of the sales cycle. If you do feel that it’s not an opportunity worth pursuing anymore, perhaps you can respectfully tell the customer and see if they have other sales opportunities sometime in the future.

On the other hand, if you find that this is one sales opportunity you need to follow through well, then you will need to leverage on as many aspects to sustain the customer’s interest throughout the sales cycle.

Get Your Free Sales Map Assessment Today!

I have just co-authored a Sales Map sales proficiency assessment, and we need testers before launching it later. The assessment consists of 51 situational questions covering all 4 sales stages as mentioned above, and then you can diagnose your strengths and weaknesses throughout your sales cycle. Pls. do message me or e-maill [email protected] if you want to give it a try. 

Connect with me to find out more! I. can be reached at my LinkedIn page here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/cydj001/