Here’s the chronology:
- 11/25/04 – Initial telephone contact with company president
- 12/17/04 – The one and only face-to-face meeting (…with the president mainly, plus a brief conversation with the founder)
- 12/21/04 – Original proposal for a Sales Excellence Council
- 01/10/05 – Opportunity recorded in my CRM as “Closed-Lost”
- 01/10/05 through 04/18/11 – Not a single conversation or e-mail for over 6 years
- 04/18/11 – Phone call from president
- 04/24/11 – Proposal for Sales Excellence Council
- 05/06/11 – Opportunity recorded in my CRM as “Closed-Won“
That’s a sell cycle of 2,353 days. Let’s just call it 6 years, 5 months for clarity. That’s a new record! (Hurray!!!! or Ughhhh…..?) (FYI – 80% of these things close within 13 to 17 months)
Or can I call this an 18 day sell cycle?
As I recall, I did a pretty good sales job on this opportunity back in the November ’04 through January ’05 time frame. The timing just wasn’t right. Then my h-Rep (i.e., me personally) initiated execution of a really lousy sales job from February, 05 through the first half of April, ’11.
My e-Rep, however, was hard at work that whole time.
That company president received 88 issues of The YPS Group’s Ideas! e-newsletter through that 6+ years. Starting in the Fall of ’09 he was also exposed to 366 blog posts, 98 videos, 49 podcasts and who knows how many e-mail forwardings, Google searches, tweets, re-tweets, LinkedIn postings, etc. My trusty e-Rep was out there pluggin’ away 24 X 7 X 365 beating the old Sales Process Engineering drum.
No, my e-Rep didn’t have the wherewithal to close the deal. So what? Between the two of us, we won.
How many deals are you not getting because building an e-Rep is too much trouble?
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