A sales process is a little like a fingerprint. As much as you hunt, you’ll never find another company with an identical one

How to speed up your sales process

 

A sales process is a little like a fingerprint. As much as you hunt, you’ll never find another company with an identical one.

Whether short, long or somewhere in between, there are always areas you can focus on to reduce the time prospects spend in the buying process.

We’ll get to those tactics shortly, but first, let’s examine some definitions and differences in the world of sales.

What is a sales process?

The sales process is the steps a sales agent takes to move a prospect from initial awareness through to becoming a customer. The sales cycle is essentially the same thing but focused on the average time taken to move each potential client through those steps.

From the customer’s perspective, the sales process is their journey with the brand. From a salesperson’s perspective, it is a roadmap: a repeatable series of actions that are optimised to achieve the best results.

 

Sales pipeline, sales funnel, sales velocity…

While we’ve got the sales encyclopaedia out, there are some other related terms that it might help to clarify.

Sales pipeline: a representation of the internal stages a prospect goes through to become a customer.

Sales funnel: a representation of the number of prospects who make it through the marketing and sales stages, diminishing at each stage.

Sales velocity: how quickly a prospect makes it through the sales pipeline.

Short sales cycle vs long sales cycle

Businesses with expensive, high-risk and high-impact solutions will typically experience a long sales cycle.

Their solutions represent a larger investment that will be considered by more stakeholders as they review potential ROI across many departments and processes.

Those with a shorter sales cycle, however, do not necessarily have it easy. 

Deals can be lost in an instant if your eye comes off the ball, and the compressed timeframes make it harder to truly understand the pain points your potential customer needs solving.

Let’s define both the long sales process and the short sales process and consider their advantages and disadvantages

What is a long sales cycle?

A long sales cycle is a client acquisition process that takes an extensive amount of time to complete. The amount of time can easily extend to over a year but is affected by a number of factors. 

These include:

• The complexity of your solution
• The price of your solution
• The number of decision-makers involved in the sale
• How well known your brand and solution is 
• The quality of content about your solution available

The advantages and disadvantages of long sales processes

Long sales cycles will typically:

• Have a high payoff as they involve expensive items and big deals with larger companies
• Lead to long-term partnerships (rather than a one-time sale)
• Allow for a better understanding of the customer to emerge as the sale progresses
• Enable greater personalisation and tailoring of the solution

On the other hand, they will also usually:

• Require a heavy investment in time and resources to make the sale
• Involve more competition for each sale and more lengthy review process
• Be hard to map to selling stages as they move back and forth with each decision-maker

What is a short sales cycle?

The stages in the short sales cycle are much easier to plot – and there are usually significantly fewer of them.

Typically spanning between a month and three months, most will involve customers who understand what they want and are already familiar with your brand and solution. 

The buyer’s research required for these sales can be easily digested online with minimal input required from a salesperson.

The advantages and disadvantages of short sales processes

• Short sales cycles allow you achieve a higher volume of sal

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24 March 2025