How to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle with Content Management and Consolidation

In business-to-business (B2B) organizations, properly managing the sales cycle is everything. It can make or break a company's performance, projections, and reputation.

A sales cycle is the process a company and its sales team take to turn a prospect into a paying customer. And just like the product and service itself, it requires fine-tuning to optimize results.

For B2B organizations, the sales process can be thorough, prolonged, and complex. It involves multiple stakeholders, "champions" and "decision-makers”, within the customer's organization - each with unique needs and objectives.

These stakeholders must be identified and cultivated throughout each step of the cycle, and without a streamlined system in place, things can get messy fast.

Your inbox - stuffed with emails from various customers and vendors.
Your content - scattered across multiple platforms, drives, and folders.
Your internal team - not aligned on what’s been sent, when, and to whom.

It can weigh heavily on your sales team and end-users, making it challenging to convert a customer in a timely manner.

With the average B2B sales cycle for a customer at 84 days and rising, it's more important than ever to have a handle on the structure of your sales process and the content that supports it available at all times.

Because of the sales cycle’s increased complexity as self-supporting Millennials take over decision-making and procurement roles, reducing it by just a day or two can significantly impact your company's bottom line.

While there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for every organization, there are best practices that can help you accelerate your sales cycle and close more deals.

Content management and consolidation may seem a heavy lift, but it will help your team expedite the sales process and make it easier for those involved to find content with minimal effort.

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Shortening your sales cycle with content management and consolidation

It all starts with the organization of your sales process. If the process is mismanaged, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to keep track of the various touchpoints, stakeholders, and content used in each exchange.

As complex deals with multiple tiers of stakeholders, champions, decision-makers, and boards of directors require more touchpoints, the sales process can quickly become a tangled mess of scattered content and communication.

A sales rep usually shares tons of collateral: whitepapers, flyers, proposals, non-disclosure agreements, presentations, and more. 

When this content is spread across silos like email and shared drives, it’s a distraction for sellers and customers to find the most up-to-date and relevant information.

Making content management easier for all stakeholders

The first step to reducing your sales cycle is to make it easier for everyone involved by consolidating all related content and materials into one place.

A centralized, searchable, sortable repository for all sales-related content makes it easy for sellers to find the most up-to-date and relevant information quickly and efficiently.

It gives customers, and their entire group of stakeholders, a single source of truth for all information related to the sale, making it easier for them to make decisions and move forward in the process.

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Removing the back-and-forth emails

Consolidation also eliminates the need for back-and-forth emails, which takes up valuable time during the sales cycle.

Over the past several years, selling into business organizations has become more of a dance than ever. 

If it takes an average of 8 touch points to get an initial meeting with a new prospect, one can only imagine how much communication is needed to close a complex deal.

Enter the new world of content management and consolidation tools.

Tools like Mutual Action Plans, digital workspaces, and customer collaboration platforms allow both parties to view and share content quickly, provide feedback, communicate, and make decisions in one place.

They reduce the time spent on content searching and communication and give both sides the time back to focus on what matters.

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Access to insights you can't collect via email

Customer collaboration tools like Recapped offers a digital workspace to track the entire sales process from beginning to end. They provide valuable insights to refine your sales process by monitoring content and conversations.

Tracking real-time activity and content usage enables sales teams to better understand what content is interesting and what is just noise to the customer.

The data helps identify content gaps, effectiveness, and bottlenecks in the sales cycle. It provides the critical analysis that often goes unnoticed in manual sales efforts, giving you the ability to determine where content needs improvement or adjustment for future prospects.

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Taking action to shorten your sales cycle

When buyers feel they have all the information they need at their fingertips, and sellers can quickly find and share the latest and greatest content, you're well on your way to reducing your sales cycle.

But there's more to it than that.

When you make it easy for everyone involved in the sale to find and use the most up-to-date information, you're also creating the expectation that you're easier to work with. It creates a sense of trust and confidence in your brand and organization that content is being managed effectively.

Giving all stakeholders the confidence that they have all the content they need to make informed decisions and that it's accessible in an intuitive way builds trust and encourages them to move forward.

By consolidating content, automating content searches, and giving everyone access to real-time data action items and deliverables, you can accelerate your sales cycle, build trust with customers, and quicken the time to close.

An all-in-one platform to consolidate and manage the entire sales deal

At Recapped, we make it easier to manage your sales process through our all-in-one suite of tools. Our platform helps you streamline, organize, and access the content and conversations related to any sale in one place.

Why wait days or weeks to get your customers the information they need when you can have what they want precisely when they want it?

Accelerate your sales cycle, save time and money, and close more deals with Recapped's all-in-one customer collaboration platform. Get your personalized demo today.