Accelerate Sales Cycles by 30% in 90 Days With Proven Tactics from $5B Revenue

my name is Mark Fain I'm the co-founder and CEO of recap and today we are going to talk about accelerating your sales cycle by 30% in 90 days without any new Investments or any new tools which I think is a really key part and these are all things that you can do with your current text Tac and it's from revenue that we have managed through our platform over the last 5 years and so like every other presenter uh everything I show you can be

conveniently done by our platform but again these are all things that you can do for free today and so our platform we have a collaborative deal room that helps bring all everybody together um brings everybody together into a collaborative room right so instead of a million emails and spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides you have a single link or single pain glass that you can share with your buyer share with your seller and with your leadership team right

and the reason for this is because life has gotten more complicated there are more stakeholders in deals there are uh there's just more going on and we have so many more different um platforms that we're communicating through right and so over the last 5 years across 70,000 deals we've aggregated um all of the insights essentially that we'll be sharing today so here are some before and afters

again again all of these principles that we're going to talk about in the tactics can still lead to these exact same results without any Investments so before implementing these three tactics average across 70,000 deals close rate went from 16% to 22% which is about a 38% increase sales cycle went down about 24% across different different segments so how do you actually

accelerate your Sal cycle by 30% there's three major things that we're going to talk about one how to make it easier for your sellers to sell and we do that by standardizing your sales process how to make it easier for your buyers to buy which is enabling them to sell internally for you when you're not in the room which is 95% of the time and how to make it easier for your leaders to lead and to coach and to forecast because they're going to be relying on

actual data and metrics and not gut feeling and emotions crazy concept I know so and since it's late thank you um since it's late it's a Friday there's only a couple of us let's switch this up this might be a terrible idea but if you guys have any questions throughout the uh presentation let's just make this a collaborative um because I I left five minutes at the end but I'm sure we can weave it in so please stop me if you have any questions um there's not 50

people in here so we're we're good beautiful so before we actually talk about the tactics I think there's three major things that you have to internalize because if you don't understand the why nothing else is really going to matter right there's no silver bullets um there's nothing one single thing that you're going to be able to take away and Implement in your process that is going to be this Grand transformational thing you have to um the process and the tools and the automation should come last first you want to make sure that everyone's

aligned so by a show of hands who is who's number one challenge right now is top of funnel and they're all focus on getting more leads okay I'm I expected more hands yeah uh I'm sure you already know this but top of funnel isn't going to save you all right and the I think this is the biggest misconception that people come to us before and the biggest learning that they have after they Implement one of our platforms and the reason for that is it really doesn't

matter how much you put at the top of the funnel if you have a leaky funnel it's going to get really really expensive to acquire those customers right so for example let's say we start with a $100 lead which that would be great for most cases by the time that $100 lead gets through mql SQL opportunity even just becoming a qualified opportunity that $100 lead now costs $8,500 just not even including sales reps time marketing time just in the pure percentages of going through those stage

Gates all right so every qualified opportunity is worth roughly 85 top ofun Elites then to close that you're looking at a 50k deal or 50k cost so that means one bottom of funnel lead is the equivalent of 500 top of funnel leads so if I were yes top of funnel is important but you have to shore up your middle and bottom of funnel first the other two

um sales isn't usually sales right if you're selling a $20 widget if you have transactional sales that's different but if you have anything that's complex $10,000 or more it's project management right and whether you're running a deal whether you're managing a PCC whether you're onboarding a customer they're all projects but as sellers you are we are not the best and we are the most organized at running projects right we we're all cocky you talk to a sales leader you ask them you know why didn't you lose that deal it's every other

excuse right it's oh the lead was bad they timing was bad prospect's dog it's never I screwed up I didn't follow the process I didn't ask the right questions right and I firmly believe that 80% of success in sales is uh it's science it's the blocking and tackling it's the repeatable motion that you can do it's asking the right questions it's setting the next steps it's coming off across as an expert right it's looping in the right people it's updating the right CRM Fields everyone should be able to do this you just need to make it really

easy for them to do it and the third one a little bit of a hot take but show a hands who here has a lot of sales tools yeah so again sorry but if you actually think about it I have the belief that none of those tools actually help reps close deals and that's why we haven't seen Clos rates improve that much in 20 years right we

had yeah good question so immediately when I say this people are like well I have Salesforce right I have CRM your CRM is a internal reactive system of record it's an expensive database at the end of the day right and trying to treat that as a tool to help reps close deals they're not pulling up their CRM when they're in a deal right they're barely pulling up their CRM in the first place all right so the other example that people think of is like oh I have gong I have a conversational intelligence tool that's fantastic but again like most of

these other tools they're reactive and after the fact and so they are incredibly helpful but only if you go through and you listen to your call recordings and in the demo right but in the moment when you're trying to execute these actions none of these tools actually help and I'm sure AI will change that and but great question well do you see that sucess they're more so in the U on the marketing side right on the ABM uh basically what it does

ites yeah yep but which is great for getting top of funel and getting leads right that's kind of the idea but it's supposed to be more yeah yeah exactly which again right so all of these tools are either top of funnel internal reactive or manager focused right and so that's why my my belief is that they don't actually help

you close and manage deals right cool great question all right so first thing that you need to do in order to accelerate your sales cycle you need to make it really easy for your sellers to sell the way you do that is by making your sales process first off you need to standardize it and it doesn't have to be perfect um but you need to standardize it and when you do standardize it you need to make it brain dead simple and easy to follow really interesting um quote CSO

they have a whole insights report a lot of really interesting data in there only 133% of organizations adopt a well defined sales process and of those 133% it is nowhere near even 50% adoption from reps on that right how do you standardize your sales process there's three ways first you need to make it really really simple so having something that's simple and easy to follow is 10 times better than having something complicated and really well

thought out that is really detailed that no one is following right so you'd rather take 80% execution on something bad than z% execution on something really really good one of the ways you can do this is removing all friction so I would give uh I guess show hands how many Founders do we have in the room okay Revenue leaders okay uh enablement Ops investors okay what do you senior count

okay cool uh so this helps me Taylor so one of the ways you can do this is do a secret shopper of your sales process go through put yourself in the customer shoes and literally go through fill out a demo requests fill out five of them see what the Varian is between your reps how long does it take to get an answer back right all of those little points of friction are where you're killing your sales cycle one day here 30 30 minutes here a couple hours here a week there um

so remove all points of friction um for example someone so shows puts in a demo request on your website instead of having a bdr followup four hours later just give them a calendar link with chili Piper or one of these other tools and there's a lot of little gaps like this um you also want to just make it really really simple so that the Reps have the process with them even if it's something that's laminated in front of their desk you want to make it easy and accessible and you also want to make it as client facing as you can which we'll cover in a little bit

here on that note you also want to make it buyer Centric so what you want to do is go from your sales process and you want to think of it from the buyer Journey or the buyer life cycle right for you it might be proposal for them it might be uh vendor validation right and so you need to treat how you conduct your sales process to the way that they buy ultimately and too much important data is internal and living in your Salesforce or your

CRM instead it should be client facing so I fully believe that you should expose almost all of your CRM data to the client to get Buy in with them and help them have your prospects actually help you fill it out because first off it's going to help make sure that there's nothing that's missed and I'll show you how you can do that the other way is you need to make it actionable so again uh make it so that while La rep is in a deal they're able to go in and

leverage the process it's not this amphibious crazy ambitious thing that nobody knows or ambigious thing that nobody knows it is something that um they actually very concretely are able to follow and execute on the other big piece is you want to cut down on as many tools as you possibly can so if I'll pick on you you're probably jumping through six seven eight different tools at a given time again if none of them are helping you close deals try and focus right so as a leader as a Founder when you're thinking about your

sales team what what would my really great manager ask my rep to nudge them in the right direction as they're executing these deals what questions would they ask what um how would they qualify this deal what would they give recommendations for reps to do make that a part of your process in standardize it all right so try and be try and use the process as a way to be a manager on the shoulder of reps every single given

time so here's an example we have sales process right Discovery demo proposal but instead if you think about it from the buyer Journey there are variable differences for some organizations the differences could be really really drastic so the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago the second best time is to do it today uh so when you think about your organization yes these stages are in there but I would highly recommend reviewing things from the buyer perspective and I'll share an example of this afterwards you

guys will have a nice little artifact cool so the second way so we talked about how you can make it easier for your sellers to sell now we want to make it easier for our buyers to buy and the way you do that is by enabling your Champions to sell internally for you when you're not in the room right you're all founders you're salespeople you are really great at what you do your Champion has a completely other job they'll remember 5% of what you told them

yeah we we'll talk about that in just a second yeah so this again CSO insights Champions armed with a tailor business case increase win rates by up to 50% just by giving them a business case and this doesn't have to be a 20page thing this could be something that's a single page and you can have GPT automated for you and I'll show you how to do that uh this is a really great graphic from Gardner you guys have all probably seen this uh the single biggest challenge today of selling isn't actually selling it's actually our customer customer struggle to buy so in

Enterprise sales this came out I think four or five years ago um this is the typical buyer Journey for Enterprise B2B purchases I personally think this is outdated and I don't think it even applies to Enterprise anymore I think it applies to mid-market if not almost some complicated SMB deals we have customers with 10K acvs um ARR that are going through something that's similar that looks like this stakeholders double digits so this is what you're battling against this is also why almost 40% of

deals end in no decision right because they don't know what they're doing and so as a seller your job isn't to sell your job is to First make sure you're the right fit for them but then you help them consult and make the right purchase you want to come off as an expert and a consultant not just someone that's selling them right so the three ways you can make it really easy for your Champions to buy and for them to sell internally first off you want to consolidate everything in one place uh raise your hand if you like digging through your emails trying

to find that one email thread for that case study testimonial that's exactly it right again if we go back to what we're talking about this is what you're fighting and you're fighting against 400 un red emails so I don't care if you do this a notion Google Drive docs whatever consolidate every single thing that you're selling for them in one single place right including the business case and everything else remember that your Champion is not a professional seller and they're not a professional seller at your organization so they're going to take two-hour demo

that you did into a couple sentences and they're going to go to their boss and they're going to say hey I need $50,000 for this really expensive tool and it's going to help me CEO's going to say nope sorry have you seen the economy right so you need the process to speak for you when you're not in the room and that can include um success criteria if you're running aof of concept it could be neeps timelines content pretty much anything a really other big piece that you want to drive in here is to have a simple business case that is focused on

the business objectives Not Your solution right ultimately nobody cares what you're doing nobody cares about your product they care about getting a promotion making more money looking better in front of their peers and solving their business problems right that is what you need to be focused on the way we do this um I get off a call I take my transcript I throw in a CLA I have a little prompt it spits out a onepage business case and I just tweak that and tailor it and I share it with my Champion early and I say hey in order for us to get this deal across the Finish Line we're going to need to work

on this together right it's a project I want to be on the same side of the table if they're not willing to do that with you you probably don't have a real Champion get them the hell out of your pipeline and go focus on deals that are actually serious right and then include that again in a Consolidated place where everyone can be if you take nothing else away from this talk make it this create a mutual action plan with your prospects again if we think about sales as projects you need to have a project plan and one of

the ways that you come off as an expert is by creating clear timelines and setting the right expectations right hey if you have a go live date of November 1st we actually have two weeks of security that needs to happen before then we have two weeks of senior leadership we need Executive alignment and we need to run a one week POC that means we need to get started tomorrow does that timeline fit for you no then we need to be more accountable and we need to be more realistic right and so I'll share an example here this

is a sample business case of a customer again doesn't have that they used to get recap approved internally uh doesn't have to be anything really crazy we helped them build this out it was a collaborative effort this took I 45 minutes to put together and one is the one of it was what the executives read when they looked at this investment and here is an example of a mutual action plan I have a template

I'll give you guys afterwards but it's really I don't know how to point but essentially you're just building out all of the next steps that need to happen on both sides of the table to get this deal across the Finish Line really important here you don't want to stop at just the deal being signed you'll notice it's about halfway through you want to stop when the customer sees success with whatever solution you're sing which is the go live plan or the go live date in most cases all right so we talked about

making it easier for sellers to sell we talked about making it easier for buyers to buy now we need to make it easier for leaders to be able to do their job as well right lead coach inspect and be be able to forecast based on execution and not hopes and prayers so based on our own data um the number one predictor of forecast accuracy is shocking sales process adherence number two is engagement from buyers right they're

buyer intent signals but very few people actually forecast on those two things what do we forecast off of oh this deal sounds great they were really excited they loved their solution it's it's all so the way you do that again you want to incorporate the mutual action plan that we talked about earlier as part of the process hey we we say we're in stage five which is negotiation but really we

are only on step three out of 20 on the mutual action plan something doesn't the line uh you can also create a weighted score in your CRM you can just make really easy uh formulas that will help you with qualification on this so one of the big misconceptions that people think about this is you know they look at their CRM they have five stages oh that's it all we need to do is do these five things each one of those stages might have 10 20 30 different steps and micro actions that need to be done throughout that process right so if you

have five deals in proposal two of those deals might not even be real and then the other three could look drastically different because the micro steps that need to happen within those stages they're different and Vary on a buyer by buyer basis so if you need help with this J is a great resource she runs go nimbly there revops organization she can help you with all of this engagement uh you want to track buyer engagement are they looking at your resources are they clicking and sharing content with others

how long are they looking at it what are they looking at how many stakeholders are involved who's not involved who needs to be involved in order to get this decision these are all things that you need to be thinking about as you forecast deals the other thing uh that a lot of leaders really struggle with is when they're doing deal reviews they come in they focus two hours a week on their two biggest deals that are closing that quarter and then the other 28 deals by the other 28 reps go by the wayside so

it is much better to instead go as wide as you possibly can on deals then going all the way deep if that makes sense so you want to go 80% deep on 10 deals then going 100% deep on two deals so as you're uncovering and the way you can do that is by making this asynchronous and automated so set up zapier um automation setups automations in your CRM there's a lot of really easy low hanging fruit that you can do for

example here is a sample um Salesforce report I threw this together in about five minutes this tells you engagement score Med pick um methodology adoption um that you can use to better forecast what this looks like here are also some automation examples we have a lot on our website if you want to check it out more than happy to give you some recommendations here but um create a slack channel for every single deal that's in stage two for

example so that everyone can rally together and swarm and collaborate um if a deal is late stage but they're missing the economic buyer and we know that that where that's required in order to make our purchase you might want to be alerted about that if there's no engagement in seven days if there is new engagement if new stakeholders are added or missing again all of these things can just be automated you want to you want reps to be focused on selling not doing manual tedious automated admin

work cool so I threw this in last minute uh we were going to stop with three but I think this is a really core tactic as well um who's familiar with what Google did to email tracking two weeks ago okay surprised just one uh two weeks ago Google pretty much killed Email tracking uh pixels in your emails so you know when it says if they viewed your email or not now when a prospect looks at the email at the top there's a really scary alert Banner that says hey this has

images that are going to track you so essentially in the next couple weeks I think Email tracking as we know it is going to be dead I don't care if you invest in recap or not go look at a competitor whatever invest in a platform that helps you track the engagement from buyers so you can actually focus on what content they're looking at how long they're spending on it um who's involved Etc all right

so we talked about how to accelerate your sales cycle by 30% uh in 90 days without investing in any new tools first you need to make it really simple for your sellers to sell and you do that by simplifying the process making it as buying buyer Centric as possible and making it actionable we talked about how to make it how to enable your buyers to buy by giving them an easy way to sell internally when they're not in the room when you're not in the room and that's by consolidating all the resources in

one place so it's easy to digest for executives creating a business case that aligns to business outcomes and creating a mutual action plan which again process and mutual action plan if you take nothing else away from that please dear God incorporate that in your sales process it'll it'll change and three uh forecast with actual data not Feelings by incorporating the sales process and the buyer engagement and just making it as automated as possible and here's recapped so again

you can do every single thing that we talked about today uh it's free you can use your existing platform uh there are pitfalls and it is a lot of work so you can go that route or if you want to schedule a call and we can do it for you in two weeks but uh really essentially we help you standardize your process enable your buyers and forecast accurately surprise here's a QR code uh there's a bunch of resources in there for you guys uh including the mutual action plan and a couple other templates if you want to

find time more than happy to give just consultations um on average our customers cut about three to four tools out of their Tech stack when they Implement us and a lot of times we just give them recommendations and we talk to them a year from now um based on how to tailor their sales process and their Tech stack so I love this kind of stuff more than happy to help you guys on any of this um I really appreciate your time