Creating a Sales “Speed Path” to Close your Prospect

At MindStorm, we have the best sales strategy consulting that is out there. Our team has designed the most effective and efficient ways to close your prospect. We have created the ultimate speed path to sales. What if you could design a path that you lead your prospect through during their buying journey. Just like in real life, there are many routes one can take to reach a destination. Our goal is to create the shortest and smoothest route the prospect can take to reach the destination of making a purchase from you. I call this the Speed Path. It’s not just a fast lane designed to speed right through the journey, but it’s also the shortest route. It’s designed to help the prospect get everything they need, to be comfortable with making the decision to buy from you, in the shortest amount of time. Anything outside of this path increases the time it takes to get the deal closed, and leaves money on the table. If you don’t have a route like this established, you can’t possibly offer any help in the buyer’s journey. You would just have to hope that they find their own way.

If you fail to provide direction for the prospect, you risk them taking a long way, the more scenic route. This lengthens your sales cycle as you wait for them to take all those extra and unnecessary steps before they end up choosing you. Even worse, while they’re taking the scenic route and visiting all of your other competitors, “just to see” what they have to offer, your prospect may end up taking direction from someone else along the way, ending up at a completely different destination. Hint: It’s not buying from you! This is the importance of guiding your prospect through this process and having a path for them to follow. By knowing in advance what the Speed Path is, and establishing its boundaries, you can see when they’re following the path perfectly and when they make a wrong turn.

To create a Speed Path, it’s important to break up your sales process into very small steps. Expecting a client to take a big step will require them to make a large commitment on their end and take on more risk. At best, this will drastically slow your prospect down in moving along the path. At worst, if asking a prospect to take too big a step too early in the process, you risk losing them completely. Our strategy is simple, break up your process into as many small steps as possible so that no single step is too big or too scary. It’s simply one small step. This will allow your prospect to run through them, getting to your destination faster. In the beginning, it may be at a crawling pace but with a few steps, they may start walking, then taking bigger steps, then jogging, then running, and finally sprinting through the finish line. It’s all about confidence.  Confidence in you, your product, your company, and themselves, that they will be successful with your offering. Each step they take and each milestone they pass makes them that much more confident that this is the right decision and that they’re moving in the right direction. As humans, we’re driven to be consistent in all areas of our lives — our values, beliefs, the words we speak, our opinions, and actions. Once someone performs an act, a decision has been made and a stance has been taken on a subject. He or she strives to make future behavior match this past behavior.

It becomes increasingly hard to break this consistency as more commitments are made. Each step your prospect moves along the Speed Path makes it easier and more compelling to continue down that path. This reinforces a couple of things for us. First, if each step helps us, why would we want to have big steps in the process? We wouldn’t because that would only mean we had fewer. We’d want to break each big step into many smaller ones so that each action your prospect takes increases the likelihood that they will continue down the path. Secondly, this also confirms the benefit of having a controlled path for your prospects to follow. Without proper direction, they can easily take an action that is not conducive to reaching the destination you hope for.

Say that your prospect has an initial conversation with you and then says, “Let me do some research and get back to you”. A seasoned salesperson would make sure that there was a follow-up meeting with a date and time set before that conversation ended. She or he also would send case studies, testimonials, white papers, and other marketing material so that the prospect had the right material to read when doing their ‘research’. An inexperienced salesperson might leave that call without knowing if they’ll ever speak to the prospect again, or any idea what the prospect will be looking for to help with their decision. There’s a lot of hoping in this scenario. What happens if the prospect’s approach to research is having conversations with your competitors to compare you? They may engage in conversation with a more seasoned salesperson who then takes them down their own Speed Path. It only takes one action to change your client’s direction, which is why it’s so important to have a well-thought-out path that guarantees the best experience for your buyer on their journey. A path that deters your prospects from getting lost, because one step out of bounds can easily become a slippery slope that leads to purchasing from your competitor!

Once you have such a process that stacks all the odds in your favor, follow that process with stubborn discipline. The probability of your sales process converting opportunities to sales is directly tied to the revenue you generate over time. Think of a casino’s revenue, which is generated by the probability of the house’s edge. In Blackjack, the casino has between a .5% to a 1% edge over people using basic strategy, depending on the version of the game. Many people try to follow ‘the book’ (basic strategy) but either don’t fully know it or make emotional decisions. This means the average player is actually playing at a 2% disadvantage to the house. Although a casino may lose on any one hand, they generate revenue by pumping as much money they can through that .5%-2% house edge. Odds of winning X the opportunity (in dollars) X # of transactions= revenue. This goes for both you and the casino.

The house edge in slots can be anywhere from 3%-17%. Do you see why there are more slot machines than blackjack tables? If you owned a casino, which would you rather more people play? Which is why if you have a process that has a 30% win-rate and another one that has only 10%, wouldn’t you want to take everyone down the 30% path? Once you realize that this is nothing more than a math equation, your revenue will skyrocket.

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