Marketing Automation Can Reduce Sales Cycle Times

I’ve convinced many sales professionals and managers that marketing automation is their under-appreciated, hard-working sales assistant who knows a lot and can help them. All sales needs to do is ask for its help.

Lead and customer data captured by marketing automation platforms can tell sales which customers and prospects are most engaged, what they care about most and how long it may take them to make a decision. Unambiguous data – presented with all collection methods explained – separates problems from personalities and builds the foundation of trust and dialogue between marketing and sales.

Shortly after joining a large, well-known chemical manufacturer, I dove deep into its customer relationship management (CRM) system and marketing automation system to establish a baseline of numbers which we could use for discussion, planning and measurement. One of the baseline statistics was the sales cycle, the number of days from contact to sale by salesperson (see below).

Rick and Brandon, two of our sales professionals, agreed to share their results with the group. 

On average, it took 87 days of nurturing to get a lead sales-ready and a nearly identical amount of time to actively sell and close the sale. At face value, Rick seemed to be most efficient. While true, other data told us he had smaller deals – thus he could turn them around faster. It turns out that Brandon had much larger opportunities – thus his selling time was longer.

So what? Who cares?

We then asked another question. What marketing, CRM, and marketing automation could do to get more qualified leads, shorten qualification periods and help sales nurture these leads?

We set collaborative goals and codified them into signed service level agreements (SLAs):

·       Reduce the qualification period by 15% through more focused messaging and nurturing.

·       Reduce the average active selling time by 10%.

·       Increase the number of leads through investments in digital marketing.

Our aim was to increase the velocity of our sales process while adding volume to our pipeline. Beyond increased pipeline volume and sales, we attained a more collaborative way of working – no more, “you do your thing, and I’ll do my thing.” We had a codified, yet work-in-progress, process for achieving goals – and we were better for it.