focus-e1432751428726According to a recent Oracle study, 50% of forecasted sales never close.  That’s mega frustrating for all sales teams who want to shorten sales cycles!

Long sales cycles are a major headache for most companies that are selling B2B solutions.  Customers have complicated evaluation and approval processes, spend significant time evaluating multiple solutions to reduce their risk, and sometimes just go ‘dark’ midway through the process.  This phenomenon drives higher selling costs and can also result in lower win rates.

I was recently working on a win loss analysis project where we were analyzing the win rate of various segments of my client’s business to create a definition of their most viable target market.

In the process, we realized that, based on the highest win rate, the segment that made the most sense to focus on had the following characteristics:

  • The fewest number of competitors serving/focusing on them
  • Some common demographics (company size, type of implementation, # of users)
  • Least likely to require steep discounts to attract the business
  • Most satisfied customer segment after implementation

It’s a great strategy to focus your sales efforts on prospects that have the characteristics that your ideal customer segments have.  This can help shorten sales cycles and ultimately increase win rates.

The side benefit of focusing on a specific segment of your customers is that you can target your marketing and sales tools to their specific needs.  It’s much more effective to focus marketing on a specific segment, its terminology, and its applications for your products than to launch generic messages and tools that may not resonate well with anyone.

I recently met an entrepreneur who started a CRM company.  Instead of going head-to-head with the uber-successful Salesforce.com, he decided to take his insights about auto dealers to target his tool specifically to that segment and their unique needs.  It worked well for him and they have a healthy customer base that can easily make the connection between his CRM solution and their specific needs and ultimately shorten sales cycles.

A great source of information to ensure that you are continually working with the latest insights about any specific customer segment is win loss analysis.  We work with many companies to help them conduct regular win loss interviews with people who have recently evaluated their solutions and deliver a wealth of insights to help them be more competitive.  It’s a lot of fun to get these fresh insights and deliver them, all tied up with a bow to our clients!

Interested in our white paper on how to implement win/loss analysis?