Table of Contents
- Key Terms
- What Is a Sales Cycle?
- What Are the 7 Stages of the Sales Cycle?
- How Do You Excel at Stage 1: Prospecting?
- How Do You Excel at Stage 2: Making Contact?
- How Do You Excel at Stage 3: Qualifying?
- How Do You Excel at Stage 4: Nurturing?
- How Do You Excel at Stage 5: Making the Offer?
- How Do You Excel at Stage 6: Overcoming Objections?
- How Do You Excel at Stage 7: Closing?
- How Do You Measure Sales Cycle Performance?
- Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Cycles
- How long is a typical sales cycle?
- What is the difference between a sales cycle and a sales funnel?
- Can you skip stages in the sales cycle?
- How do you shorten the sales cycle?
- What is the most important stage of the sales cycle?
- How many follow-ups should you send before giving up?
- What tools help manage the sales cycle?
- How do you handle prospects who go silent?
- What happens after the sales cycle ends?
- How do you calculate sales cycle conversion rate?
Key Terms
Sales Cycle: The repeatable series of stages a salesperson follows to convert a prospect into a paying customer, from initial contact through closing.
Prospecting: The process of identifying and finding potential customers who might be interested in your products or services.
Lead Qualification: The process of evaluating whether a prospect has the budget, authority, need, and timeline to make a purchase.
Lead Nurturing: Building relationships with prospects over time through consistent communication and value delivery until they’re ready to buy.
Sales Objection: A concern or hesitation raised by a prospect that must be addressed before they’ll commit to a purchase.
A sales cycle is the series of stages that unfold as you convince prospects to buy your product or service. The seven stages are prospecting, making contact, qualifying, nurturing, making the offer, overcoming objections, and closing.
Every business has a sales cycle. This guide teaches you how to excel at each stage and overcome the most common obstacles that stand in your way.
What Is a Sales Cycle?
A sales cycle is a shorthand term for the series of stages that unfold as you convince people to buy. These stages occur in the same order every time, though timing varies by individual.
You might skip stages as necessary from time to time. The most commonly accepted model includes seven core stages, though your business may not follow that model precisely.
What Are the 7 Stages of the Sales Cycle?
The seven stages are: prospecting, making contact, qualifying, nurturing, making the offer, overcoming objections, and closing the sale.
1. Prospecting: Everything starts with prospecting—finding people who might be interested in your products and services.
2. Making contact: Once you have viable prospects, you can reach out for an initial introduction.
3. Qualifying: These people might be interested, but are they really? Qualifying is the next step.
4. Nurturing: Qualified leads must be nurtured gradually, building trust and brand familiarity.
5. Making the offer: At some point, you’ll introduce the real offer—what are you trying to sell?
6. Overcoming objections: There’s usually back and forth after the initial offer. What are the prospect’s objections and how can you overcome them?
7. Closing: Finally, you’ll move toward closing—finalizing the sale.
How Do You Excel at Stage 1: Prospecting?
Develop customer personas, use reliable leads databases, go through initial qualification, and automate everything you can.
Success begins in the prospecting stage. If you’re not reaching out to the right people, you won’t close the right sales.
Develop customer personas—and use them: Customer personas are character sketches of people most interested in your products. They’re great tools for researching customers and fueling prospecting efforts.
Use a reliable leads database: Focus on reaching as many qualified people as possible. Use sources like Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. What’s most important is using a source that’s robust and reliable.
Go through initial qualification: Don’t chase every person whose information you find. Which customers are the best fit? Which red flags would disqualify someone immediately?
Automate everything you can: Automation can drastically improve your sales results and reduce stress. Use it during prospecting for less manual effort and more consistent results.
How Do You Excel at Stage 2: Making Contact?
Use the right channels for your audience, differentiate your message, hook them with something compelling, and be persistent with follow-ups.
The next stage is making contact with prospects who passed initial qualification.
Use the right channels: Call? Email? LinkedIn message? Consider your strengths, your demographics’ preferences, and the pros and cons of each channel.
Differentiate your message: Your prospects receive dozens or hundreds of sales messages weekly. How is yours different? If it doesn’t stand out, it gets ignored.
Hook them: You’re not just reaching prospects—you’re engaging them. A critical piece of information, surprising statistic, or discount promise could be that hook.
Be persistent: Most people won’t respond to the first message from a stranger. Send follow-up messages and be persistent to develop the conversation.
How Do You Excel at Stage 3: Qualifying?
Know what disqualifies someone, prioritize quality over quantity, and integrate your sales and marketing teams.
After contact, you’ll qualify leads and filter out people who probably won’t buy.
Know what makes a person unqualified: What stops someone from buying? Lack of budget? Team too small? Satisfaction with a competitor? Define your terms and know when it’s hopeless to pursue someone.
Go for quality over quantity: More leads always seems nice, but better leads are… better. You’ll spend less time, have better results, and won’t bug uninterested people.
Integrate sales and marketing: Qualification often falls to marketing, especially with multiple lead generation strategies. Align your sales and marketing departments to work together efficiently.
How Do You Excel at Stage 4: Nurturing?
Focus on building trust, be consistent in your approach, prove your value, and know when to advance to the next stage.
Most prospects won’t go from strangers to loyal customers overnight. Nurturing relationships is essential.
Focus on trust: When prospects trust your brand completely, they’ll listen and buy. 82% of U.S. customers claim to stick with a trusted brand even if a trendy competitor emerges.
Be consistent: Stick to your values. Be available when prospects have questions. The more familiar you become, the more likely they’ll buy.
Prove your value: Serve as a temporary consultant, give whitepapers or eBooks, share reviews and testimonials from happy customers.
Know when to advance: Push prospects through the next stages gradually. Too soon feels pressured; too late misses critical opportunities.
How Do You Excel at Stage 5: Making the Offer?
Customize each offer to the prospect, emphasize benefits over features, and get creative to stand out from competitors.
After warming up prospects and building rapport, you can make the offer.
Customize the offer: Don’t copy/paste a generic proposal to every prospect. Include different additions and framing based on the person you’re pitching.
Emphasize the benefits: Instead of focusing on objective product qualities, focus on benefits. How will their life change for the better?
Get creative: Your prospect has seen many sales pitches. If you’re not original or interesting, even a good relationship will fall apart.
How Do You Excel at Stage 6: Overcoming Objections?
Know your competition, understand internal conflicts in the prospect’s organization, and address objections proactively before they stop the sale.
For detailed strategies, see our full guide on overcoming objections.
Know your competition: Figure out what competitors offer and how those offers contrast with yours. You’ll need a distinguishing factor that makes your company’s offer better.
Know the internal conflicts: In B2B sales, you might deal with committee-based decisions. Know the conflicts that could stop a deal—limited budgets, committee disagreements, reluctance to change.
Be proactive: Get ahead of objections before they stop your sale. Predicting objections proves your knowledge and keeps you on offense instead of defense.
How Do You Excel at Stage 7: Closing?
Secure any meaningful action, experiment with different closing techniques, avoid desperation discounting, and follow up consistently.
Closing is the last and arguably most crucial stage. Your final job is securing the signed contract.
Secure an action: You don’t have to close right away. Get prospects to take any meaningful action—signing up for a webinar, trying a free trial. Any action pushes them forward.
Experiment with different techniques: There are many closing techniques to try, including direct and indirect approaches. Experiment to find what works for you and your demographics.
Don’t get desperate: Some salespeople gradually lower prices or sweeten offers when desperate. Studies show offering a discount can lower your chances of closing by 17%. Negotiate, but don’t let desperation cost you.
Follow up: If prospects are indecisive or need time, put a system in place to follow up consistently—eventually moving them closer to a closed sale.
How Do You Measure Sales Cycle Performance?
Track email outreach activity, conversion rates between stages, average response time, and sales cycle length to identify areas for improvement.
What gets measured gets improved. EmailAnalytics helps you calculate your average response time, busiest times and days of the week, and dozens of other important metrics.
Sign up for a free trial to see how your team’s email habits affect your sales cycle performance.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Cycles
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University, and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics and OutreachBloom.
