How do you improve your sales cycle?

For a business owner, your sales figures are your bread and butter. After all, a business lives or dies on its sales.

Who are your most valuable customers?
With your customers being the most important part of the equation here, it’s obvious you should know who your most valuable customers are.

Research shows that a mere 5% increase in customer retention rates could result in a jump in profits from 25% to 95%. The conclusion is clear — keeping your current customers is just as important, if not more important than seeking out new ones.

Your sales data can identify your most valuable customers. Some questions to ask yourself include:

• Do you know their lifetime customer value?
• What is the main factor driving retention rates?

Understanding your customers’ needs and wants should be part of your business model, and data can answer your questions. For example, click-through rates to articles can tell you where your customers’ interests lie, whether you send them email newsletters or track them on your website via Google Analytics. Shopify can also show you your top-selling products, so you know what your customers are after.

Understand and improve your sales cycle
Another way to maximise your sales is to understand your sales cycle. Do you know the average time it takes a potential customer to complete a sale? Are you aware of your business’ pain points within each phase of the cycle?

If you didn’t answer ‘Yes’ to the previous two questions, then you don’t understand your sales cycle deeply enough — that’s a problem. You’ll need to dig into the data to figure out: the stages of your company’s current sales cycle, whether you can cut down a stage or two to minimise complications, what key metrics you can include to measure performance at each stage, etc.

Of course, marketing tools like Exsalerate, Google Analytics, or Mailchimp can also help to keep track of which stage each deal is at, or identify potential customers and which products they are most interested in based on open and click-through rates for email marketing campaigns.

If you did answer ‘Yes’, then it’s an opportunity for improvement. Ask yourself how you can shorten the sales cycle and overcome the pain points. For instance, apps like Vend can help speed up the sales cycle of retail businesses through its mobile point-of-sale payment features.