Discover how prolonged sales cycles hurt the chances of closing business by eroding the impact of subjective differentiation.

To understand the current selling environment, and the challenge to closing good new client deals. consider how an elongated sales cycle will affect the differentiation created by a sales advisor, and how delays threatens the chance of completing a successful sale.

Almost anything that happens during the time between a sales meeting [where subjective differentiation is established] and the closing of the deal, carries a risk of decreasing the likelihood of a successful transaction and implementation. It doesn't matter if it is a distraction, interruption, or competitive communication, time undermines the impact of the subjective differentiation created by the sales advisor in the mind of the prospect. That's just how things work. 

And with increasing complexity in the employment world come unavoidable requests for more information, more "i" dotting and more "t" crossing. This prolongs the time required to complete the deal. 

When increasing competition becomes involved, the messaging becomes even more distorted. Confusion enters the picture. It begins to not matter what's true anymore. All the claims of all the parties involved become equally valid or invalid at the same time. 

The prospect either freezes, or in a knee jerk reaction [just to get this off the plate,] they sign with whoever is there at the right time. And who can know what will trigger that. Once things move into into this arena, your only hope is to pray. Or try anything and everything you can imagine to get get in front of your prospect [without being a pest.] Good luck.  

The longer the sales cycle, the more the unique image of the PEO fades in the prospect's mind. This renders the hard work of our top PEO reps ineffective. As sales cycles extend, the advantage of subjective differentiation diminishes, threatening to render even our most successful reps as ineffective as their less successful peers.

What if you could make the lengthening sales cycle an advantage? What if slowing the deal actually increased your chanced of success? Learn more in our next Blog Post: Tangible Differentiation.