HOW GREAT SALESPEOPLE CLOSE DEALS “INSANELY” FAST

“Can I pencil you in for next week?” I was wrapping up a sales meeting with a new account. Even though they seemed interested, they were hurrying to get off the call. They all had other meetings to get to, and I was holding them up. “Sure,” said my main contact, feeling rushed. “Send me an invite for Tuesday afternoon.” That short moment haunted me for seven months. Although the deal eventually closed, it was a slog of a sales cycle. So what went wrong? The answer is more complicated than just one thing. But, it turns out, there is a “key moment” during your first meeting that strongly impacts how short or long your sales cycle turns out. And if you get it wrong, your deal is at a high risk of “going dark.” [newsletter]

Key Patterns of a Short Sales Cycle

The team at Gong.io analyzed the factors that lead to a short sales cycle. They analyzed recorded sales meetings from 28,833 closed deals that were executed over web conferencing platforms. Every call was transcribed and analyzed with AI to isolate the seller and buyer behaviors that correlate most strongly with a short sales cycle. The team focused on deals in the top 20% in terms of velocity and compared them with average and slow sales cycles.

Here’s what we learned.

This “Moment of Truth” Dictates Your Sales Cycle

The fastest-closing deals have one major thing in common: Securing “next steps” played a major role in having a short sales cycle. Take a look at the below image of an analyzed sales call. It illustrates how the AI can identify discrete topics of discussion throughout a sales call. Including the topic of “Next Steps.”

In the fastest deals, the seller spent a whopping 53% more time discussing “next steps” during the first meeting in the sales process than deals with a slow sales cycle.

Before you brush that aside as seeming obvious, know this: Spending a good deal of time discussing next steps only matters this imperatively on your first meeting. The duration of time spent discussing next steps in later calls in the sales cycle has no impact on sales cycle length. (So long as it happens. But the time duration has no impact).