The full cycle sales experience refers to all of the different steps a customer goes through with a business – from discovering their products to completing their purchase.
Sales teams must have a solid understanding of each stage of this cycle. Beyond simply finding leads and closing deals, sales teams need to know how to strategically nurture leads, manage customer relationships, and ensure they get the most potential value out of each sale.
To help optimize this process, here’s a breakdown of the full-cycle sales experience and how you can streamline each step.
Prospecting
The full sales cycle experience starts with prospecting. Without this, you won’t have anyone to go into the start of your sales pipeline.
This stage involves identifying and researching potential customers or leads. It can include activities such as cold calling, networking, using social media, or utilizing databases to find individuals or businesses that might be interested in your offering.
Prospects are all different, and some are far more likely to become customers than others. However, at this stage of the sales cycle, simply establishing a large base of prospects is enough.
Initiating Contact
Once potential leads are identified, the next step is to initiate contact with them.
This could be through emails, phone calls, personalized messages, or connecting via social media platforms. The type of communication method you use depends on who your target audience is, how your business operates, and which channels your sales team prefers. Over time, different businesses will discover how their audiences respond best to different communication and outreach methods.
The goal of this step is to start a conversation and establish rapport with your prospects. Of course, many prospects will not be interested and ignore you. This is okay, as it sets you up for qualifying leads.
Qualifying Leads
Not every lead will be a good fit for your product or service. This is why it’s important that sales teams properly qualify leads so that they know who to spend their time and effort on.
Qualifying leads involves assessing their needs, budget, authority to make a purchase decision, and their timeline for buying. This step helps prioritize which leads to focus.
By doing this, sales teams save time and effort across the full sales cycle experience. Proper lead qualification can help boost your win rates, as you spend more time focused on leads that matter.
Communicating With the Prospect
Even if a lead has a good chance of becoming a customer, they probably won’t just buy from your business right away. Instead, they’ll need to be warmed up.
Salespeople need to communicate consistently with prospects, answering their questions and positioning their product as valuable. This often involves sending the lead content and making sure that your website is informative enough.
Once the lead has been warmed up enough, they might want to hop onto a product demo.
Sales Presentation or Demonstration
This stage involves showcasing your product or service to qualified leads. It could be through presentations, product demos, or providing samples.
The focus is on highlighting the value proposition and addressing the specific needs of the potential customer. By doing a live product demo, you can personalize the demo to your lead and make sure they can imagine themselves using your solution in their daily lives.
This is one of the most important steps in the full sales cycle experience, as it’s generally when the prospects make a purchase decision. A good, interactive product demo can make an enormous difference to your sales success.
Handling Objections
Prospective customers may have concerns or objections that need addressing before they commit to a purchase.
Sales professionals need to listen attentively, understand objections, and offer solutions or explanations to alleviate concerns. This is an essential part of any sales cycle, and being prepared for common objections will help sales teams speed up the process and close more deals.
Closing the Sale
You’ve done all of the hard work. Now your last step in the sales process is closing the deal.
This is the crucial stage where the deal is finalized. It involves negotiation, agreeing on terms, and getting the customer’s commitment to make the purchase. Effective closing techniques and persuasive communication play a significant role here.
Follow-up and Support
After the sale is made, providing excellent customer service and support is vital.
Follow-up involves ensuring customer satisfaction, addressing any post-sale concerns, and nurturing the relationship for potential future sales or referrals.
When you do this properly, you can generate greater customer satisfaction and ensure your customers get the most value from your products. This is important for longer customer relationships and gaining more value from each sale.
Upselling and Cross-Selling
Once you’ve closed the deal with a customer, it doesn’t mean their sales journey is over. You can still increase their customer value through strategic upsells and cross-sells.
This stage involves identifying opportunities to sell additional products or services to existing customers. It could be by offering complementary products or upgrades that enhance the value for the customer.
Feedback and Improvement
Gathering customer feedback about their experience with the product or service can provide valuable insights for improvement. This information can help refine the sales process, enhance offerings, and strengthen customer relationships.
Think of your full-cycle sales experience as ongoing. By continually refining the experience, the more revenue you’ll be able to generate over time.
Conclusion
Salespeople should approach each deal and customer with a full-cycle sales experience mindset. Forget about quick deals and wins. Instead, sales is often a long game that involves many steps. By going through each of these steps properly and strategically, you should be able to build a far more effective sales process.
If your sales team wants to optimize its sales experience, then focusing on offering more interactive product demos is insanely important. Check out Saleo to see how the platform can take your product demos to the next level (helping you close more deals and enhance your entire sales process).
