Chances are you would get a fair amount of responses like, I don't really know, We haven't really defined it, or even, We kind of play it by ear. While it won't necessarily be the same for all businesses, there needs to be a well thought-out answer. When marketers clearly understand their company s sales cycle, they are empowered to find the answer to shorter, more efficient sales cycles and increased profitability. For consumer marketing, you need to know that your prospective customer is the right demographic and makes enough money to afford your product.
Companies purchase through distinct processes.
So to effectively sell to them, your sales processes need to match their purchase processes. There may be a room full of decision-makers, each with their own distinct needs and input to the process. Marketers need to understand the sales cycle, not only for the obvious reasons of sales and revenue prediction, but also to improve the overall effectiveness and productivity of the process and to allow marketing to align its campaigns with the sales cycle in order to provide thoroughly qualified prospects to sales personnel. Quickly moving a prospective customer from initial contact to the bottom line is the shared goal of both marketing and sales. But this usually happens through some kind of voodoo and not as a result of following a carefully laid-out process.