leadbloom Blog | How To Speed Up Sales Cycles and Grow Your Average Deal Size with LinkedIn

How To Speed Up Sales Cycles and Grow Your Average Deal Size with LinkedIn

LeadBloom

March 10th, 2019 4 min read

As a sales person, or someone concerned with revenue generation we have all been guilty of engaging with too few people in accounts because we believe we have the RIGHT decision maker.

However, often times, this misplaced focus can impact the size of our deals and the time it takes to close/win an opportunity.

1. Why is that?

For the last handful of years, there has been a consistent trend in the # of Decision Makers involved in a buying decision.

2016 - 5.4 decision makers

2017 - 6.8 decision makers

2018 - 7 decision makers

(CEB.com)

Often times, by just counting on our one decision maker, we lose control of a deal’s velocity. We are put in the passenger seat and allow our prized decision maker to call the shots. We may illusion ourselves into thinking that our deal is the most important thing in the decision makers’ world and that they are on top of it.

However, although our buyers may have never been so well informed in the history of B2B then today:

“57% of the purchase decision is complete before a customer even calls a supplier.”

(CEB)

The upward trend of decision makers involved in a buying decision shows that our buyers have never before been so uncertain and stressed. Purchasing solutions, from enterprise SaaS to warehouse equipment, has never been easy; and now with the wealth of information, range of options, our buyers are more overwhelmed than empowered.

2. What is the impact?

If we don’t understand that a B2B decision now, more than ever, is done by establishing an internal consensus, then we leave our decision maker in the deep, dangerous waters of choice paralysis.

As a result, our deal too begins to float around with more and more uncertainty after every weekly forecast, taking longer to close. Even if our decision maker is able to swim out of the metaphorical deep water to safety on their own, we often sacrifice a bigger deal size by not including other decision makers from other departments.

Here is a statistic showing how our buyer’s uncertainty is dragging out sales cycles:

“Today’s sales process takes 22% longer than 5 years ago.”

(Biznology)

3. How do we solve this?

Although the buying landscape is getting more complex, the solution to keeping strong deal velocity (from sourcing - to closing) and achieving larger deals is to:

Identify All Your Accounts Decision Makers.

That not only means who they are TODAY but who are they going to be TOMORROW, or NEXT MONTH or NEXT QUARTER. Tracking all of these movements in our account’s decision making committee is crucial to make sure you are managing your deals to the best of your ability.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Makes This EASY

Having worked at LinkedIn, I may be biased, but from the sheer ease of use and access to data that Sales Navigator gives us, I can see the entire employee list at an Enterprise Account like: Salesforce or a Medical Device Company like: Medtronic in SECONDS.

And more importantly, these employee lists are always updating as movement is happening.

So, it is no surprise that:

“6 hours - Top sellers use LinkedIn six hours per week to research prospects, connect with peers, interact with industry-related groups, and publish helpful and insightful content. Top guns also tend to have enhanced profiles that stand out from their competition.”

(Jill Konrath)

Most profiles are connected to an Account/Company, so if you can come up with your list of Target Accounts you can just as easily come up with your list of decision makers to focus on.

Click the button below for your FREE 200 customized leads!

Nelson Rony is the Co-Founder for LeadBloom, who partners with B2B organizations to gather and update real-time data so they may plug them directly into their CRM & Outreach systems.