How to Shorten Your Revenue Cycle
If you are like many sales and marketing professionals, you are looking for ways to shorten your sales cycle and increase your Return on Investment. If you are not, maybe you should be looking for a new line of work. While there are many tools out there, such as marketing automation and social CRM applications to help you achieve this, the fundamental best practice still lies in satisfying basic human needs.
Way back in 1943, long before there were even computers, Abraham Maslow wrote a paper (not a white paper, but a true paper in every sense of the word) entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” whose premise holds true today as it did then. In it, Maslow describes the five levels of human needs and how we must satisfy each level of needs before we can progress to the next level. Therefore, if you want to shorten your company’s revenue cycle you need to target the lowest level possible.
In the modern business world, we meet many of our physiological needs by earning a paycheck. For many of us, the days of living off the land, building our own homes, growing our own food, and overall fulfilling the needs to survive are long behind us. Today, our paychecks allow us to pay rent or a mortgage (shelter), buy groceries (food), and pay the heating bill (warmth). This allows us to meet most of our physiological needs, so naturally we turn our attention to the next level: safety.
What’s the one thing we must have in order to protect our physiological needs? Job security and a paycheck. If you are looking to decrease your business-to-business revenue cycle, this is the level you should target with pinpoint accuracy. An example of this would be if you sold data security solutions. Instead of a message of ROI or self-recognition to information technology professionals, you should target the ability to achieve freedom from fear or risk to Chief Financial Officers of your target companies. Let’s look closer at this and evaluate both options. A self-esteem message to an IT professional means that you are targeting a lower priority issue to an individual who holds a set budget. In contrast by targeting a safety message to a CFO, you are not only targeting a high priority need, but you are also targeting an aspect of the company that can create budget as needed.
Another example of this is our own company. We typically don’t target marketing departments, but rather sales executives of our desired companies. That is because by targeting sales rather than marketing, we are targeting a revenue generating aspect of the company rather than a budget-holding department. If we can show a sales executive how what we have to offer him can deliver on their most basic need of job security, we are able to generate greater interest and shorten the sales cycle. We don’t have to worry if they have budget, they can create it. When you consider that the average sales executive lasts about 18 months at their company, they are always looking for ways to secure their future. Sales has one of the highest turnover rates, in contrast marketing has one of the lowest. Therefore, we target sales with a safety message, instead of marketing executive with self-esteem. While most marketing executives would love to talk about self-esteem and self-actualization messages, when looking to shorten sales cycles and increase revenues we have found that targeting sales with a security and stability messages delivers the greatest results.
While marketing automation and social CRM are the latest buzzwords, and are able to help greatly in delivering measurable results, we must not forget our customers are ultimately human beings. Moreover, as Maslow pointed out way back in 1943, the more basic the need we can satisfy, the greater the chance of success for our sales and marketing initiatives in motivating our customers to buy.
Want to learn more about lead generation tatics check out these free resources:
SALES AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT
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HOW TO CONVERT INBOUND LEADS INTO SALES PERFORMANCE
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