Shortening Sales Cycles By Focussing On The Social Buying Process

One of the main advantages of word-of-mouth marketing is that it shortens the sales cycles, according to George Silverman. Or better: it speeds up the buying process. The reason: people increasingly rely on advice form their peers, which is regarded as more “trustworthy”. And trust is a crucial element in the purchasing decision. Shortening the sales cycles is important because it leads to higher profit but also because sales cycles (certainly in B2B) appear to be longer than before.

Last year, OneSource, a company that delivers business information solutions for sales and marketing professionals, and belongs to Infogroup, released its B2B SalesPulse Survey.

The survey contained some interesting data regarding the way, social networks and Sales 2.0 impact pipeline growth and sales cycle lengths and the use of social media for lead generation. For the record: this survey asked the opinion of B2B sales professionals and NOT marketers.

An interesting finding was that 59% surveyed said that sales cycles were longer than the year before and only 16% reported shorter sales cycles.

In other words: it takes B2B sales people longer to “close a deal”. Maybe the economic recession played a role (although the previous years were not exactly great either) but my guess is that sales cycles are getting longer because we are moving from a seller to a buyer situation whereby sales and marketing paradigms are shifting: people increasingly want to buy instead of being sold to and they want to control the process.

It’s time that sales professionals increasingly get access to tools that enable them to better track the digital footprints of their customers and prospects and that marketing needs to have a supporting role in that, providing the necessary tools and content.

Faster sales cycles = word of mouth, customer-centricity and social

Given the fact that word-of-mouth shortens the sales cycles and the customer is “empowered”, real-time and cross-channel, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the report stated that “use of information from social media sources and web mining is growing as sales professionals are looking to leverage every piece of intelligence they can find to help progress deals.”

Now, progressing deals can surely be helped by using Sales 2.0, web mining, social listening and having a more holistic view on the customer, but in the end it’s still the customer that decides. And he is more informed than ever. The trick is to identify and inform him by using the proper content and channels at the right time. And of course, a shift in mentality from selling to facilitating buying…

Sales 2.0 still has a way to go and the human factor of the buyer and the power of approaching him via a combined marketing and sales effort, based on social CRM, web mining, listening, and facilitating the buying process, is still not known enough.

The basis is a customer-centric cross-channel approach with less silos. The means are a single view and nurtured relationships. The goal is known.

So, social media and sales is really about much more than having new sources of qualified opportunities or using networks such as LinkedIn for sales prospecting and research, as the survey showed.