Step 3: Transforming your sales cycle from hunting for customers to manufacturing them...

No matter what you do, no matter how specific your market focus, competition for your buyer's attention, resources and budget is at an all-time high.

Even companies who may not be directly competitive are drowning your target buyers with solution announcements, special offerings and broad-based attempts to educate the market to the value of their products and services—all of which has clouded the overall marketplace resulting in wide-spread tuning out and avoidance of these types of marketing and sales approaches.

Combined with access to instant information about your business, your solutions and your track record, buyers now largely have the luxury of only embracing the vendor market only when they become active buyers; when they themselves have determined a pressing need—further hampering marketing and sales efforts to reach them, inform them and shape their needs and expectations of value.

Once they've become self-activated to identify a solution, your opportunity to control the situation is lost; limiting your ability to build value solely on the strength of your features, benefits, experience and price.

As a result, companies must evolve their sales models away from shotgunning the market to hunt for active customers, to one where they manufacture customers by engineering need across their entire addressable market—prospects with latent, dormant, repressed and even premature need for your value proposition and the strategic destination it will lead them to.

Buyers need to be led not sold; and they need partners offering strategically aligned solution-based relationships to get them there.

Shorter Cycles has developed a simplified framework for engineering need and buying alignment into your target markets...

Because our approach works from the top-down and from the inside-out through back-door access to top strategic decision makers, tremendous intelligence is gained about the need for your solution, how and where it fits within current organizational priorities and how best to position the value and returns it can deliver accordingly. We leverage this inside intelligence to develop a segment-optimized market relationship strategy that is capable of building similar levels of buying alignment with cold, lower-level prospects and departmental decision makers.

From this relationship strategy we design specific communications and recommend changes to current marketing, sales and lead gen programs to mass-educate the market about the ideal destination your solutions enable, to progress them through your pipeline and to establish market-wide momentum for your approach to market.

By speaking to an ideal and a relationship offering that delivers a prospect to that ideal, versus touting features and benefits and pushing solutions, you'll not only more effectively reach active buyers who are already searching, but you'll be able to reach, inform, incent and ultimately compel the much larger latent, dormant and even premature segments of your entire addressable market—and in doing so transform your sales cycle from hunting for customers to manufacturing them.

Contact us to learn more about how we can transform your sales cycle from one of hunting for customers to one of manufacturing them.