Understand what the sales cycle is, what all the stages are and how to shorten your average time

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What is sales cycle?
What are the stages of the sales cycle?
1. Prospecting
2. Initial contact
3. Qualification
4. Presentation
5. Evaluation
6. Closing
7. After-sales
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How to shorten a long sales cycle?
Know the market demands well
Study your competitors
Empower your team
Invest in the right tools
The sales process is the foundation for any business’s success. From marketing to customer service and product delivery, it’s important to maintain a good flow of customers to obtain resources and create growth opportunities. A good first step to achieving this goal is to understand what the sales cycle is and how it works in your business.

Because it is a fundamental concept in business management, it is important that you know how to use it to maximize your results. Ideally, each stage of this product sales cycle should be short, so that your team is quickly freed up to meet new orders from your customers and bring more profitability to the business.

To help you better understand the subject, we’ll talk a little more about what a sales cycle is, what its stages are, and what you can do to transform a long sales cycle into a short one. Check it out!

What is sales cycle?
As the name suggests, it is a set of steps that your company goes through when making a sale, ranging from prospecting to after-sales . It is a very useful tool for guiding your actions and planning your service processes .

The idea is that, with this division, it will be easier to identify which tasks need to be carried out and analyze your business's performance metrics .

What are the stages of the sales cycle?
Now that we have a better understanding of what the sales cycle is, let’s take a look at all the steps involved in this process. Each company may establish different steps in the sales cycle, but most businesses tend to follow the same basic seven-step structure. Check out what they are here!

1. Prospecting
Of course, the stages of the sales cycle begin here. Regardless of whether we are talking about a b2b or b2c sales cycle, the goal during customer prospecting is to attract new leads , making them aware of your products and interested in doing business.

To achieve this, investments are made in marketing , showing your brand on channels with a good audience and that are more focused on the target audience that your company wants to reach. Without prospecting, it is not possible to close any sales.

2. Initial contact
If you’ve been successful in prospecting leads , then some of them will follow your channels and get in touch, either to ask questions or to place an order. However, this doesn’t mean that the lead is ready to become a customer.

During the initial contact, the most important thing is to listen, record the contact and find out what the next steps are to facilitate your conversion.

3. Qualification
To understand everything about the sales cycle, we also need to look at the qualification stage.

At this point in the product sales cycle, your job is to prepare the lead for the purchase. To do this, they need to acquire more knowledge about your product, the demand itself, and how it can be met. It is important to complete this step well before starting to talk about the product itself, as this is where the lead builds confidence in their request.