The Research Playbook

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Sales cycle analysis is a powerful tool to help you better understand your markets. Gaining a strong appreciation for the good and bad news about your market positioning in relationship to your competition isn’t always easy to do. Moreover, if there’s bad news it’s difficult to hear. However, not knowing where you stand is, at best, dangerous and could prove fatal.

Understanding why you do or don’t get on the short list of your prospects (or stay on the short list of your customers) is critical and sales cycle analysis helps to answer this very important question.  You need to know what will facilitate or impede your progress toward becoming a preferred supplier – the position we obviously all want. If knowledge is power than sale cycle knowledge is supremacy.

Clearly, there is more than one approach to achieving insights related to sales cycle dynamics and how customers and prospects perceive a business. We won’t try to explore the options here.

However, it is worth noting that a commitment to exploring these dynamics is not a one shot deal. If you and your company are serious about sales and the factors that propel your sales, you will be well served by tracking the metrics required at least annually.

We all know markets continue to evolve quickly. A very good way to stay informed is to track market activity systematically. Creating a baseline of information and measuring against that is a great starting point and an essential part of sales cycle analysis.

You can structure sales cycle studies to help maximize your reach tactics. Knowing how to best reach your audience is a function of understanding how they search for information. More precisely it is about how customers and prospects search for information at each stage of the buying process. In addition, the new reach equation includes social networking and social media, again fast moving targets.

In addition, studies on sales cycles, almost by definition, provide competitive insights. It’s not enough to know if you’re on the short list you need to know who’s on it with you.

Combining information on brand and product positioning with a continually updated view of reach dynamics is a powerful tool in the hands of a savvy marketing professional. What are you waiting for? Get started!

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