Speeding up your sales cycle through Sales Ladder design

Speeding up the sales cycle.

Growth takes a lot of mechanics. Like any engine, there are a lot of moving parts. There’s also a whole load more planning that has to go into a scaleable model for growth for it to work. A sales ladder doesn’t appear out of thin air, and neither does the engine that feeds the pipeline that brings leads to your ladder. Phew. What a mouthful.

What you’re about to read is a bite-sized version of something that isn’t a silver bullet to growth … yeah, sounds weird doesn’t it? But seriously, these are some key thoughts from a larger piece of thinking that we’ve collected over many years of scaling, growing, and exiting. What we’re about to delve into are the nuts and bolts of engineering a scaleable model for growth.

Creating a viable sales ladder.

First up, a sales ladder.

I talk a lot about giving value at Friday Solved, and we believe that creating a sales ladder is just the same.

Give value at every turn, and don’t forget your gateway products. Your final offer, or premium offer, might feel like your saviour and key to growth, but never forget how you’ll get your clients to that stage.

It’s all about easing them into your final offer, and for that, there are a few critical nuggets to remember:

• Ease your clients into your final offer, offering value throughout the journey. Genuine value, too. Not just a whitepaper that collects email addresses.
• Super gateway products like free trials of products are more valuable than you think.
• Gateway products such as audits take money off the table while working on the sales pitch from the inside, instead of breaking the door down.
• The sales cycle is far too long to wait around for, so your gateway products are critical in ensuring that you still earn money while you wait.
• Your core offering is your bread and butter and is characterised by smaller retainers or project-based work.
• Premium offerings do what they say on the tin but are typically strategically orientated relationships.
• Your sales ladder should be fundamentally designed to nurture clients towards the premium offering – but you can’t do that without gateway products.

Building a sales pipeline.

Building a sales pipeline is fundamentally a numbers game, the idea being that you keep a steady yet generous flow of leads heading towards your nurture phase. 

With a dry or trickling pipeline, you’ll never be able to close enough sales cycles to stay afloat, let alone grow.

• See your pipeline as a wedge of cheese.
• The thick end should be maintained with leads.
• The middle of your cheese is your nurture phase. Place your best sales team here. Not your marketing team, as some do.
• The thin end is the close. Place your founder here to close the sales. The founder is irreplaceable so position them at the most important stage.
• Positioning the right people in the right place of your pipeline is critical. We see so many businesses get this wrong, with marketing teams in sales positions and vice versa.
• Don’t sell, give. Give value at every stage of your pipeline and you’ll reap the rewards.

Scale the pipeline and build an engine.

The big question now is your next move. If you’ve got the fundamentals in place and the structure, how do you grow? 

The question is this: how can you stimulate potential interest at scale, and what are you doing en masse to get yourself in front of people?

More than a few automated services will allow you to message at scale to bring leads into your funnel, but the key is having an organic engine. So, next up, building your sales engine.

• One person isn’t an engine. You need a role that distributes messaging at scale to capture leads, someone creating a voice and content that’s useful, someone to nurture the leads that do come in, someone closing deals, social media management, and bodies overseeing the operation.
• Who’s your persona? You should be building your engine around a persona, in most cases, a founder or CEO.
• The founder should have people in different role pumping out messaging on their behalf to nurture deals, doing sales outreach, and putting in the hard yards for them.
• The founder then plays their part by closing the deal at the thin end of the cheese.
• The key is in the scale. The more personas you have, the faster and further you can scale. If you get the engine right, it becomes infinitely scaleable.

Let’s leave it there for now.

This was a brief run through some key points, but if you want the full rundown of our tips for a scaleable model for growth, fire over an email or book a meeting and we’ll send you the full paper.

If not, just remember that your ladder can’t exist without your pipeline, and your pipeline can’t exist without your engine. 

They should all exist in harmony, working side by side to produce a constant stream of qualified leads and, with the right person at the thin end of the cheese, sales.

Would you like the full version? 

Drop us an email at insights@fridaysolved.co.uk and we can send it over to you.

I’m always up for a coffee

Fancy a chat or want to bounce an idea off us?

Feel free to drop us an email or pop something in my diary. 

Thanks for reading.