How To Shorten Your SaaS Company's Sales Cycle

October 15, 2019 | 3 minute read

You might be surprised to learn that your SaaS sales team is spending less time than you think on actual sales. An average sales representative spends up to 66% of their day on administrative tasks, which divert their attention away from sales development, according to data from Salesforce.

Your sales team is getting bogged down with tasks like writing emails, creating demo presentations, and going back and forth trying to book meetings, when they could be talking with prospects. By identifying the things your team is losing time on, and developing more efficient processes and new goals, you can shorten your SaaS company’s sales cycle and get your team selling more, faster.

Focus on Your Time Traps

Start simple: consult with your SaaS sales team and find out where they feel they’re losing time. Are there particular tasks they feel cut into their actual sales time?

Brainstorm ideas to free up more of their time, by asking the following questions:

Can you shorten demo presentations?
Can you use presentation templates?
Is your sales process documented?
Do you have customer personas?
Do you have contact information stored centrally?

Take a look at these easy wins first and help your team come up with ways to eliminate, delegate, or streamline these tasks.

Overhaul Your Sales Cycle for Efficiency

With your team, have a look at your sales pipeline to identify where they’re spending most of their time. Are they making lots of cold calls and spending time qualifying leads? If so, consider improving your inbound marketing strategy to better warm up leads for your sales team.

Find ways to automate part of your sales processes. Once your inbound content has brought you a qualified lead, in the form of an email signup or creating an account for your SaaS software, you can automate the nurturing process. A set of timely emails with relevant content will help guide your new lead through the buyer’s journey. By the time your new lead contacts your sales staff they’ll be much closer to purchasing your SaaS software, and your sales staff will have enough information about the client to deliver tailored service, delighting your new customer.

Centralize your data so the whole team can access it in a customer relationship management (CRM) system. A CRM like HubSpot will allow your team to easily share contact information, sales processes, and templates.

If you don’t think your team has the time to focus on producing inbound marketing content, you could consider outsourcing inbound marketing. A growth agency will develop and deliver regular content that is relevant to your ideal customers, warming up leads for you, so that you have support in shortening your sales cycle.

Encourage a Culture of Constant Learning

Finally, use the data you have and build a culture of constant improvement and learning. Have your sales team always ask a prospect why the email they received was intriguing and why they booked a demo. Gather data on the types of customers that purchase more, and see if you can better tailor your sales process to them. Help your team spend less time prospecting for leads that are unfit, and more time on qualified leads that want your product.