5 steps to drive urgency in a sales cycle

Advice for unblocking a stalled pipeline

DEAR STAGE 2: I am the third AE at a series A startup.  I am opening what feels like plenty of opportunities, but my deals are stalling — they slow down after the first or second demo and get stuck in a holding pattern. How can I create urgency in a deal cycle and start moving these to a decision faster? ~Stalled Pipeline

DEAR STALLED PIPELINE: You’re not alone! This stalled pipeline problem has become more common than ever this year. To help address this question and share some advice that’s working today, I called on Stage 2 LP and Director of Sales at ZoomInfo, Josh Shaw. Josh has a wealth of experience in new business sales and shared a quote from one of his mentors that perfect encapsulates this challenge:

“Retention teams have the luxury of a natural deadline, but in new biz, we are the stewards of urgency for our prospects.”

Josh shares his 5-step process to help drive urgency in a sales cycle:

1. Create a solid quantifiable business plan

Josh advises “In any sales process, urgency begins and ends with building a slam-dunk quantifiable business outcome plan for your prospect.” I’ve written about the importance of building a business case before, and Josh brings this to life with a real world example from ZoomInfo:

“A lot of reps [I managed] would say their prospect's business problem was that they needed better data. And while that may be true, it's not quantifiable and it’s very vague. We need to understand the value of that "bad data." The magic is in the numbers — ‘Mr. Prospect, if you're looking to grow 30% YoY or $5M this year, and you said you're closing about .5% from your email and call campaigns yearly at 50k a deal, that means we need to deliver you 10,000 valid emails and phone numbers this year to get there, right?’” 

When you quantify the business impact AND get agreement from your prospect, you've changed the game — moving from the "nice to have" category to a clear problem-solver. 

2. Stay away from generic feature-heavy demos 

Too often, sales teams get fixated on the product — driving for a demo on the first call, delivering a feature tour that overwhelms the prospect by showing them all the things they could potentially do. This is why Josh leans heavily on call recordings for critical coaching moments — “More times than I can count, I have listened to a rep’s demo, who told me they crushed it, to only hear them speak 80% of the time about how wonderful specific features are.”

Josh advises doing the discovery work to build a business case and using this to inform your demo strategy. “Product features should be shared as support for a business case. Your demo should be focused on value and how features will help you accomplish your specific business goals. In order to do this you must first understand, at a very deep level, the business problem.”

3. Demonstrate an urgency-infused mentality 

Your prospect doesn't know how long your sales cycle is and it's up to you to make that clear — we recommend setting the tone from the first call. Here's a line that’s worked well for Josh’s teams "Hey Mr. Prospect, thanks for jumping on. I'm so excited to discuss how we can help solve for X, like we have for so many other companies, as soon as this week." 

After you’ve set the tone, you need to continue to infuse urgency into your prospect engagement. Josh recommends a few things:

• Always get next steps at the end of each call

• Ask prospects when they're looking to solve for X (be detailed — is it today? This week? This month?) and why

• Consistently sell the value — reinforce how you solve their business problem throughout each demo/call

• Email/follow up quickly and be present. Your prospects read off your energy and will follow suit

4. Understand their buying process

Who is actually signing your contract?

While the marketing coordinator, analyst, or IT administrator will use your platform and will champion it internally, they're not your purchaser — no matter what they say.  

Josh recommends spending a few minutes researching the purchaser before your first call. “Spend a few minutes preparing for the call by writing down the names of the senior-most execs you can find in the department you sell to. Instead of saying, ‘Is the CEO typically the signer for this?’, you can say ‘Is Bob usually the signer for this?’ — that's a huge difference!”

Another way to uncover details on the buying process is to ask about an entirely different software purchase with a question like, "So you use Salesforce as your CRM, who was involved in making that purchase?". Josh loves this approach because you can pick up clues as to what’s coming next for your own procurement and start generating ideas on how to get to the decision maker. You can then dig into the specifics: “Does legal or procurement need to review things?  And how long does that usually take?”

5. Create a mutually agreeable action plan to keep both you and your prospect accountable

The final step is all about how you package up what you’ve learned! When you wrap up the meeting, you need to recap quickly and get your business plan document or mutually agreeable action plan in front of your prospect. At a minimum, Josh advises drafting an email that outlines the business challenge, how you solve it, the timeline to solve it, who's going to be involved to get this done, and a general timeline of steps (another opportunity to set the tone for urgency!). You need to get buy-in on this timeline, and then from there, you are just managing to the timeline — working to keep yourself and your prospect on track. 

Is this process foolproof? Of course not. But, we know these steps can help you “unstick deals” — improving close rates and reducing sales cycles. 

Until next week!