How Can I Shorten My Sales Cycle And Close Deals Faster? | Donald C. Kelly - 1978
Episode
24 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Relationships, Leadership
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Mutual Action Plan (MAP): Introduce a structured buying process during the discovery call, not later. Most buyers, like an HR manager purchasing software for the first time, have no internal acquisition roadmap. Present a step-by-step timeline aligned to their stated deadline, then ask them to confirm or adjust it. This alone eliminates months of directionless back-and-forth.
- ✓Buyer Education as Consulting: Treat yourself as a $160,000-per-year consultant, not an order taker. Explicitly walk champions through how similar companies have purchased your solution over 30 years of deals. Explain that failed implementations typically stem from disorganized internal processes, not product quality — then position your MAP as the fix that protects their job.
- ✓Multi-Threading via LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Build direct relationships with all seven to eight committee members from the first meeting, not through your champion. Use Sales Navigator's org chart feature to map stakeholders, connect on LinkedIn, engage with their content, and open parallel conversations. Sixty-day free trials are available at linkedin.com/tse for podcast listeners.
- ✓Stakeholder-Specific Value Mapping: Each committee member holds a different definition of value. IT wants zero environmental risk. The champion wants a promotion. Leadership wants measurable output gains like a 30% reduction in hiring speed. Open every subsequent meeting by restating the organization-wide value, then address each individual's specific concern separately to maintain momentum across all decision-makers simultaneously.
- ✓Usage-Based Pricing to Reduce Entry Risk: When budget becomes a stall point, propose consumption or credit-based pricing instead of full license packages. A buyer who cannot psychologically commit to a top-tier monthly fee can start at lower usage, experience value firsthand, and self-upgrade — removing the financial risk that delays final approval without requiring discounting or contract renegotiation.
What It Covers
Donald Kelly addresses why B2B sales cycles are lengthening — citing committee-based decisions averaging seven to eight stakeholders, economic uncertainty, and risk-averse buyers — then delivers four concrete strategies sellers can implement immediately to compress timelines and close deals faster.
Key Questions Answered
- •Mutual Action Plan (MAP): Introduce a structured buying process during the discovery call, not later. Most buyers, like an HR manager purchasing software for the first time, have no internal acquisition roadmap. Present a step-by-step timeline aligned to their stated deadline, then ask them to confirm or adjust it. This alone eliminates months of directionless back-and-forth.
- •Buyer Education as Consulting: Treat yourself as a $160,000-per-year consultant, not an order taker. Explicitly walk champions through how similar companies have purchased your solution over 30 years of deals. Explain that failed implementations typically stem from disorganized internal processes, not product quality — then position your MAP as the fix that protects their job.
- •Multi-Threading via LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Build direct relationships with all seven to eight committee members from the first meeting, not through your champion. Use Sales Navigator's org chart feature to map stakeholders, connect on LinkedIn, engage with their content, and open parallel conversations. Sixty-day free trials are available at linkedin.com/tse for podcast listeners.
- •Stakeholder-Specific Value Mapping: Each committee member holds a different definition of value. IT wants zero environmental risk. The champion wants a promotion. Leadership wants measurable output gains like a 30% reduction in hiring speed. Open every subsequent meeting by restating the organization-wide value, then address each individual's specific concern separately to maintain momentum across all decision-makers simultaneously.
- •Usage-Based Pricing to Reduce Entry Risk: When budget becomes a stall point, propose consumption or credit-based pricing instead of full license packages. A buyer who cannot psychologically commit to a top-tier monthly fee can start at lower usage, experience value firsthand, and self-upgrade — removing the financial risk that delays final approval without requiring discounting or contract renegotiation.
Notable Moment
Kelly reframes why deals stall by pointing out that champions often stop following up not because they lost interest, but because they feel embarrassed asking the seller the same questions repeatedly — a dynamic that quietly kills deals that had genuine budget and organizational need behind them.
Episode Transcript
This episode is brought to you in part by the following TSC sponsors. You don't become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident. Angel City Football Club did it with a little help from HubSpot. When it started, data was housed across multiple system. HubSpot unified their website, email, and fan experience in one platform. This allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days. Three days. The results? Nearly 350 new sign ups a week and 300% database growth in just two years. Visit hubspot.com to hear how HubSpot can help your team grow better. Finding the right lead can feel like an endless search for sellers. What if you could get to the right conversations faster? From finding new leads to strengthening existing relationships, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is your strategic AI powered partner. It cuts through the noise with real time data and insights backed by LinkedIn's network of over 1,000,000,000 professionals. Try it for free for sixty days at linkedin.com/tse. Terms and conditions apply. Your sales cycle is extremely long. You're not getting the deals closed in the time that you first anticipated, and now it is affecting the bottom line. What should you do about it? I got an answer for you. Stay tuned. Hey. Hey. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald c Kelly, the sales evangelist. And I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. On this episode, we're gonna be talking about yes. You guessed it. You saw it in the title already, so it's all gravy. We're gonna be talking to you today about how you shorten that sales cycle because that long sales cycle, it's becoming a fad. Right? It's becoming common, and there's several reasons why, but I'm gonna give you some ideas of how you can shorten it. If this is your first time listening to our podcast, please subscribe, and we'll make sure to notify you every time we drop a new piece of content. The goal here of this podcast is to help you to be able to build pipeline, to generate money, and to be able to become the best salesperson you can possibly be. And, I wanna assist with that. Let's go ahead and dive in and let's not waste too much time. The first thing I wanna talk about is just the fact that it's just case. Yes. Sales cycle are becoming longer. There's several reasons that we've seen. One is because people don't wanna mess up. It's just the way it is. The majority of the situation right now, or push back to this, that people don't wanna lose their jobs. And because of that, they don't wanna make a improper decision that it that if negatively affect the company, and their job is on the line. So it's a concern for people. Number two, what I find …
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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode
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Tools
- LinkedIn Sales NavigatorRecommended
by LinkedIn
“Multi-Threading via LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Build direct relationships with all seven to eight committee members from the first meeting, not through your champion. Use Sales Navigator's org chart feature to map stakeholders, connect on LinkedIn, engage with their content, and open parallel conversations. Sixty-day free trials are available at linkedin.com/tse for podcast listeners.”
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