Speed Is The New Currency

There are many ways to judge a business and the tools it uses to support its marketing and sales processes: profitability, user friendliness, accessibility, and more. These are all essential and have been for a very long time.

Speed is the currency of modern business. Not only that, it’s the most common differentiation among competitors. Think about your organization’s ecosystem. The most reputable companies aren’t necessarily the biggest. However, they are likely the easiest to work with. The key to this type of maneuverability is simple: automating predetermined decisions, improving organization wide communication funnels, and enabling clear and quick decision-making processes. These are the necessary precursors to avoiding the delays and hang-ups that often slow down impact deals.

Speeding up your operations opens up an entire new world for marketers. If your team isn’t bound to their desks crossing Ts and dotting Is, then they can become much more involved in presentation value, pursuing testimonials, and even building up customer reference programs. The name of the game is agility–you can build your brand in any number of ways with just a small amount of organizational freedom.

But it’s impossible to build up speed without optimizing the rest of your sales cycle. Having a complex approval process for discounts will slow you down. Asking customers to sort through too many irrelevant options will slow you down. The old adage “walk before you run” is thrown around frequently, but think about what it really means: Before you can accelerate, you need to get the basics right.

That’s the underrated value in every organization offering a faster, more efficient process–you can’t run a bullet train on a rickety track. Keeping your configuration, pricing, and quoting systems in order is the first step in a long trail that will ultimately lead to drastic improvements to the sales cycle and higher profits across the board.

Everyone needs to buy in; too many cycles are being spent on business mechanics instead of business decisions. That’s not progress. The goal of every organization should be to act as quickly as decisions are made–for the sake of your marketing team and your own sanity. If a prospect wants to see what a purchase would look like paired with a different bundle, that display needs to be presented instantaneously. If your top salesperson needs to get a discount approved automatically without revising an entire contract, it needs to happen on mobile, in the field, and without breaking eye contact with the customer, if possible. Get the aesthetics right and you’ll be surprised at the opportunities waiting within arm’s reach.