Sales Cycle: 7 Essential Stages for Sales Success

Whether you’re selling steak knives or cell phone service, understanding the ins and outs of the sales cycle is essential for better business.

In our beginner-friendly overview, we’ll explain everything you need to know about the sales cycle, including its stages, why it matters, how to optimize your cycle, and common challenges you might face during the process.

What Is a Sales Cycle?

A sales cycle is a series of stages that a sales rep navigates in order to convert a potential buyer into a client. Sales cycles can differ based on a few factors, but they all involve presenting a good or service and closing deals with customers. 

During a sales cycle, the rep will uncover customer needs, pain points, and concerns, while also building rapport and trust. By the end of the cycle, their goal is to have a new client.

Why do sales cycles matter? 

Sales cycles matter because they help salespeople know how to move through the process with the highest chances of conversion. It’s almost like a roadmap for sales success. Reps can follow the stages of the cycle to know when and how to present their solution to meet the client’s needs and wants.  

7 Essential Sales Cycle Stages

Not all sales cycles will look exactly the same. They can differ by industry, current market conditions, or other factors. However, there are some standard stages that almost all sales cycles share. 

Here are seven essential stages in the sales cycle, from prospecting to nurturing client relationships. 

1. Prospecting

The first stage in a sales cycle is often prospecting or finding potential people who would be a good fit for your product. Once you’ve identified people who might be interested in your product or service, the next step is often lead qualification. 

Lead qualification methods can help sellers figure out who’s the best fit for the solution they’re selling. Plus, when you have limited resources, this step of qualifying your leads can help you better allocate those resources and prioritize leads who are most likely to convert. 

2. Making contact

When reps have a list of qualified leads, the next step is making first contact. For example, sellers will use things like email marketing, cold calls, or even social media to identify potential clients. 

Because that initial contact is so important, it’s crucial to make a good impression. If you’re a salesperson looking to connect with a future client, you want that first impression to be a positive one. Aim to build rapport and spark a relationship with potential clients. This can help build trust and credibility, which is essential for later stages of the sales cycle. 

3. Unearthing customer needs

Once you have a rapport with a potential customer, you can start digging deeper to unearth their needs and desires. The goal in this stage of the sales cycle is to pinpoint what pain points, concerns, and challenges the customer faces so you can best position your solution to fit their needs. 

To do so, pay close attention when speaking with the potential client. Chances are, they’ll share their concerns and needs. Practice your active listening abilities to further establish a rapport and build trust. 

If your potential customer has trouble expressing their needs, you can ask questions to get to the bottom of it. This will help you best identify opportunities where you can tailor your presentation to what they need.  

4. Presenting the solution 

After you uncover the customer’s needs and pain points, you can present your solution — be it a product or service — to meet their specific needs. This stage of the sales cycle helps reps understand how to create a tailored sales pitch that will stand out to the customer. 

For example, imagine you’re selling wifi bundles. Your potential customer is a streamer who plays video games live on Twitch but has been struggling recently with slower internet speeds. The resulting lag during the stream could cost them subscribers, but your internet bundles could prevent that. Thus, you could customize your presentation to address this person’s concerns. 

When pitching your product or service to the client, make sure you use narrative storytelling with elements like anecdotes to make the experience more engaging. The last thing you want to do is bore them to death. However, a solid product or service demonstration that shows the solution’s advantages and features is sure to pique their interest. 

5. Handling objections and customer concerns 

Usually, after a product demo or presentation, the customer has concerns or questions. These objections might revolve around cost concerns, competition, or something else entirely. Whatever it may be, be ready for objection handling. 

Although you can’t predict what a potential customer will have concerns with, you can anticipate common objections. Preparing in this way will help you manage customer concerns when they come up. Instead of being caught off guard in conversation, you can have talking points for when a client expresses concern about the price or alternative solutions. 

6. Closing the deal

After you’ve addressed their concerns, start looking for buying signals. In other words, look for clues that the client is ready to buy. Learning how to recognize these buying signs is key to closing a deal. If the client isn’t prepared to buy, prematurely trying to close the deal could cause them to walk away. 

If the customer has positive body language, asks follow-up questions, and overall seems interested in the next steps, these can be signs that it’s time to move forward in asking for the sale. Depending on the situation, sellers might also look for opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.

7. Following up and nurturing relationships 

The actual final stage in a sales cycle should really be following up and maintaining relationships. Many sales reps mentally “check out” after they’ve closed a deal, but the buyer-seller relationship shouldn’t end there. Make it a point to personally call or write them a note to thank them. 

Nurturing relationships should be baked into your sales cycle. This helps build long-term, sustainable relationships that can lead to future sales. 

How to Optimize Your Sales Cycle With Yoodli 

If you want to shorten and optimize your sales cycle, one of the simplest ways to do so is through Yoodli. 

Yoodli is a sales coach that uses AI technology to provide sales roleplays for reps to build and polish their skills. Any salesperson can use Yoodli to practice new methodologies, strategies, or simply effective communication skills in a safe, risk-free space. Major companies have already used Yoodli’s services to boost seller attainment and slash ramp across the board, including names like Google, Korn Ferry, and Dale Carnegie.

Here’s how it works. Sales teams can take advantage of Yoodli’s platform to engage with AI-generated clients in familiar sales environments. That way, reps can practice specific scenarios or skill sets that increase their chances of sales success. Although reps can always practice with real clients, Yoodli’s top-notch roleplay capabilities make practice risk-free, since they won’t risk losing an actual client or deal. 

But Yoodli doesn’t just stop at roleplay. As an expert sales coach, Yoodli assesses the performance of each sales rep during roleplay to offer actionable feedback for improvement. For example, after a roleplay, reps get a report of exactly how well they did, with specific insights on their delivery, speech patterns, and listening. This in-depth, personalized report lets reps skip the guesswork and go directly to improving weak areas.

Plus, for admin, the customization capabilities mean Yoodli can be adapted based on their own company’s methodology. With Yoodli’s enterprise-grade privacy, including SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and more, what’s not to love?

Get started with Yoodli for free to shorten and optimize your sales cycle at https://yoodli.ai/.

Benefits of an Optimized Sales Cycle

Optimizing your sales cycle can be life-changing. A long, lengthy cycle can wreak havoc on your team and company’s goals for the year. It can even impact the experience for your potential customers, too. 

Here are just a few of the benefits you can look forward to when you optimize your sales cycle.

A better experience for the customer

First and foremost, efficient sales cycles lead to a better overall experience for customers. That’s because having a strong cycle provides a level of consistency that clients will recognize. If customers have a positive experience throughout the sales cycle every time, they’re much more likely to be repeat customers. However, if your sales cycle needs some work in, say, the presentation stage, customers might have issues with the inconsistency. 

Sales reps who prioritize the customized pitch approach and really tailor the presentation to the needs of their customers are simultaneously providing a more positive experience. A good sales cycle will also lead to faster response times for customers. When their concerns and questions are addressed in a timely manner, they feel valued. 

Boosted sales success

One of the tell-tale signs of a solid sales cycle is a lack of extra steps. Lengthy sales cycles often have unnecessary steps or processes that can easily be streamlined. 

If your team struggles with a long cycle, take a good look at what’s holding you back. Perhaps some more tedious processes could even be automated. Addressing these issues can lead to more overall sales success, including closing deals quickly. 

Better sales forecasting

When you have a predictable, clear-cut sales cycle, you’ll also see an improvement in sales forecasting. With an optimized sales cycle, teams can set more realistic targets and divvy up existing resources in a way that makes sense. Sometimes, with longer or more complex sales cycles, it can be difficult to allocate resources efficiently, especially when you’re operating under a strict budget. 

Plus, with a solid cycle, reps can more confidently look at past performance data to inform future decisions. 

Most Common Challenges in the Sales Cycle

That’s not to say streamlining and optimizing a sales cycle is easy. In fact, chances are, you’ll run into a few challenges here and there. To best prepare, here are the most common challenges you’ll come across in the sales cycle. 

Inefficient communication

When it comes to problems in the sales cycle, inefficient or ineffective communication is a common culprit. Although many people in sales are confident in their ability to communicate, other aspects of communication (like active listening) are forgotten. 

If you think effective communication might be an issue for your team, take a look at how reps communicate. Do they often use words that customers might be unfamiliar with? Using plain language to ensure a smoother conversation can be a simple fix for a breakdown in communication. 

Are your sales reps passively listening or are they nodding along and genuinely listening to customers when they speak? Even something as simple as following up with customers during the sales cycle can help improve communication. 

Regardless, make sure your team is able to communicate with clients in a clear, concise way before it begins to lengthen the sales cycle. 

Lead qualification issues

One of the most common sales cycle challenges folks face is with lead qualification. When you have lots of leads, it can be tough to find a way to qualify each lead. However, implementing some basic practices — like having a well-defined criteria for lead qualification — can help. 

There are also specific scoring models and lead qualification methods, like BANT, that can transform your lead qualification process. 

Long sales cycles

As mentioned above, a long sales cycle can sabotage a team’s efforts for sales success. If you or your team are faced with lengthy sales cycles, start by taking a look at your cycle’s stages. At what point in the cycle are customers getting stuck? For many teams, it’s the objection handling stage where they find themselves spending more time. 

Once you’ve identified which stages are more likely to slow down the cycle, you can focus your efforts on addressing them. For example, if your cycle often gets stuck earlier on in the process, during lead qualification, you could look for programs or tools that can automate part of that process. 

Prioritizing the highest-value opportunities and deals can also help you shorten a longer sales cycle. 

The Main Takeaway 

Understanding the stages of the sales cycle is just half the battle. Being able to optimize and streamline your sales cycle can completely transform any future business. Tapping into a tool like Yoodli can help you and your team shorten your cycle, improve the customer experience, and boost sales like never before. 

Sources

• Salesforce: “What is a sales cycle?”
• Zendesk: “The sales cycle: what is it and what are the 7 main stages?”