How to stay focused over long sales cycles
You are bound to go up-market, hunt for the large prestigious logos, and get this huge contract? Well, you will have to deal with longer and more complex sales cycles then - here are some tricks on managing activities over a long period of time.
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The larger the deal, the longer the sales cycle. Enterprise deals can range from many months to multiple years. It is a personal challenge to keep up the good faith and focus, but also a business risk to invest in a long pre-sales engagement.
Planning a series of activities to influence the decision-makers whilst not having all the information at hand can be hard. Each sales call will open a variety of follow-up activities, that will need to be planned and organized.
Three Tactics to help you
Build a plan from your target (the close e.g. “x signs y”) backward: what sequence of actions need to happen to lead to that point.
As you progress, come back and review your plan frequently: which assumptions were valid, which did prove wrong? Which circumstance changed since the last time you visited your plan?
Also, as the saying goes: “if you want to go far, go together” for eyes see more than two, so review your plan with your team or your manager whenever possible.
Three Pipedrive Best Practices to excel:
Use the deal activities thread to create an action plan with all the information required for at least the next 3 critical steps
When reviewing your action plan with your colleagues use the mentions function in notes to share feedback
On the vizrm org-chart you can easily see over-due tasks marked in red
