In the high-stakes world of B2B sales, there’s a common misconception that quickening deals requires an aggressive, pushy approach that places closing over everything else, including the experience of the customer. Sales people tend to think that they don’t have a lot of time when trying to hit quota and building real relationships takes time — so one of two things happen — you wind up with less trust as things move to quickly, or you have a longer sale process that fails to meet target. But the most successful Account Executives know one fundamental thing: velocity doesn’t come from pressure but from clarity, structure and strategic enablement of the buying process. The truth is buyers actually do want to move fast when they are confident in their choice, clear on what to do next, and aligned as a team about what they’re buying. This comprehensive book investigates tried-and-true approaches that the best of the best salespeople employ throughout the sales process, to shorten sales cycle duration, develop deeper relationships with and acquire commitment from buyers, and ultimately enhance their levels of success and open the door to consistency in growing sale value, deal value, and long-term customer value.
Why Buyers Stall—and Why You Can’t Force It
Knowing why your sales cycles are sluggish in the first place is critical for eliminating hold-ups instead of relying on ineffective pressure tactics that can, at best, have no effect and, at worst, prolong the sales cycle even more. Misalignment internally is a major cause of the deal stagnating and results when the multiple departments in the buyer’s organization don’t see eye to eye or can’t agree on the buyer’s solution. You’ll have legal concerned about contract language; finance worried about budget spend and ROI calculations; IT folks worried about integration issues previously overlooked in earlier conversations…and the list goes on, so that many sales become the proverbial “fixed fight” with the customer’s reps all against the seller. Another frequent factor is no sense of urgency or an absence of a clear ROI, where buyers see the value of the solution, but have yet to put a number on the price of doing nothing or not identified compelling business drivers to move immediately. Decision fatigue is also prevalent, especially for complex multi-stakeholder buying groups, where too many options, long evaluation processes and analysis paralysis can all halt momentum.
The detriments of trying to hurry people when they would naturally resist are great, and usually worse than allowing a longer sales cycle. Building resistance or skepticism with hardball strategies not only risks the present sale, but it can destroy the seller’s creditability within the buyer’s company and industry, rendering negative references and loss of future opportunities. Rushing past those important validation steps in the name of speed often leads to poor product-market fit, implementation hurdles and the overall customer churn that’s much more expensive than an initial sales cycle that was months longer. Worst of all, by focusing on driving short-term closing pressure, and not attention to long-term relationship development, you can ruin potential partners that could have provided years of ramping expansion revenue, referrals, and strategic—both to sales and marketing—value between the two companies. Savvy salespeople understand that they win in the long run by adjusting their timing to the natural rhythm of the buyer’s assessment and convenience while discreetly eliminating barriers and establishing clarity that speeds the rejection/farewell process.
Principles for Increasing Velocity Respectfully
In the end, the foundation for respectful deal acceleration is aligning early on a high impact business case that directly ties your solution to measurable business outcomes as opposed to honing in on product-oriented capabilities that may not resonate with the people who matter. This requires deep discovery to uncover who the buyer is (not just what they do, but why they do it, what success looks like at their organization, and how your solution plugs into their broader strategy). By pushing conversations to be about impact, instead of features, sales reps will generate urgency born of the buyer’s business imperatives — not manufactured urgency made up by the sellers. The economic case must measure both the value that will be derived from the implementation of the solution and the cost of doing nothing, providing an economic urgent that naturally compresses decision timelines. It allows all future discussions to refer to common objectives and agreed-upon measures of success, contributing to easier progress through the inevitable bumps in the road.
Clarity beats control is a fundamental shift from traditional sales tactics that coerce or manipulate buying decisions to a more collaborative approach that illuminates a path for everyone involved. Instead of guessing what comes next, high-performing sales professionals inquire: “What has to happen internally to move this forward?” and “Who does this decision take?” This way the seller respects the buyer’s process and finds the roadblocks before they become insurmountable. Collaboratively mapping the internal process: This not only gives the sales rep great intelligence about decision dynamics, but it can also help the buyer to think through steps they may not have initially put on the list – thus avoiding surprises that may delay progress later in the cycle. With an emphasis on clarity vs. control, sellers become a trusted advisor who genuinely wants to help the buyer navigate through evaluation and make the right decision.
Establishing agreed upon timelines with tools such as Mutual Action Plans is a step up from the original unilateral seller deadlines to a more collaborative management of milestones that takes into account the needs and constraints of both sides. Instead of creating artificial deadlines around quarter end or quota, this process engages them in assigning an attainable timeline based on their own internal processes, resource capacity, and business objectives. MAPs are for people in the two organizations to co-own progress toward common goals. They create accountability driven by engagement, not judgement. It’s an approach that also creates natural chances to raise issues and expectations, and to keep the lines of communication open during the sales process, thereby mitigating the misfires and disconnects that often cause deals to stall at the finish line.
Tactical Strategies for Moving Faster Without Pressure
Adopting milestone-based discovery changes aimless sales dialogue into intentional, result-oriented conversations that move the deal forward in a logical way that you need to help drive the outcome the buyer wants. Instead of getting trapped in potential endless demo loops or those repetitive discovery calls that go nowhere, successful salespeople condition each interaction on a clear, predetermined outcome — “success criteria validation,” for instance, or “stakeholder alignment confirmation” or “initiate implementation planning.” This methodical process ensures dual-sided progression toward a mutual decision during every meeting, preventing wasted time and keeping your busy participants engaged. Discovery with milestone-based learning and performance also can be a powerful tool in managing complex sales cycles because you are breaking down this complex process into segments, which provides regular opportunities to determine where you are, identify barriers and make adjustments along the way.
Pre-arming champions with first-rate tools enables them to be effective advocates selling the vendor inside their company, essentially growing the salesperson’s influence in the buyer’s company exponentially. This is where you arm champions with only-internal-use case content: executive summaries, ROI calculators, competitive comparison sheets, implementation discussions, and objection-handling sheets, which are used by various segments of the buying group. The trick is to anticipate the questions and resistance champions will receive from their colleagues, and provide them with potent answers that underscoring the value proposition AND cover department specific concerns. Pre-enablement also entails coaching champions on how to deliver information effectively, helping them identify which benefits are most compelling to specific audiences and how to frame the solution using language that’s important to each group of stakeholders.
Breaking that minced-meat process by front-loading legal and procurement processes is what prevents last-minute showstop delays that can stall the deal for months and sometimes kill deals in flight when legal or procurement issues surface that weren’t vetted earlier. This has sellers early in the process, often after having qualified the opportunity as serious, setting up contracts, security documentation, and procurement requirements. It includes exchanging redlined contracts in early stages of the discovery process, and tackling issues such as data security and compliance before they become deal roadblocks; and involving procurement in pricing discussions long before final negotiations. “You can get the less-than-fun stuff out of the way at the beginning, tap relationships that sellers have, quickly find what the deal killers are and deal with them when everyone can be a little more flexible and a little more friendly with each other, rather than with timing and gamesmanship,” the investor says.
By delivering content relevant to the buyer at exactly the right moments during the sales cycle, you can be confident that all of the right decision makers have access to what they need to make a great decision, without being inundated with irrelevant content. This approach also entails an understanding of the buyer journey and a mapping of distinct content assets to various stages as well as the specific need of the stakeholder, ie. technical overview for IT evaluators, financial justification tools for procurement and strategic summary for executive sponsors. Learners can either be sent content to work through on their own–either in the form of personalized microsites, via email sequences, or through a document repository–enabling time-poor stakeholders to consume information when and how they want whilst tracking engagement to see which content is landing or potentially causing concern. It’s all about honoring people’s time (nobody’s got time for unnecessary work) and ushering in the evaluation journey with embedded, timely information to answer natural questions and concerns — before they become barriers.
Metrics and Indicators to be Monitored
Tracking velocity in new numbers signals early warning indicators of the health of the deal and progress that can provide actionable intelligence prior to reaching crisis level. Among the key details: the length of time between meetings, which can indicate changes in priorities or rising concerns they need to address, and the frequency and quality of interactions over email, including response times and the depth of questions being asked. Tracking document and asset engagement through sales enablement platforms shows whom among these key stakeholders is consuming what, and what content pieces are resonating most – which means your sellers can better predict where to focus or areas to double down on (and perhaps areas in need of more clarification). Champion responsiveness can be used as a measure of internal momentum, as changes in cadence for communication may reveal changes in priority, budget issues, or other competing initiatives that may slow deal progression.
Knowing WHEN to Pause – Re-Qualify – or Move on from, deals requires a FEARLESS perspective on Deal Reality (as opposed to Pipeline Optimism), reducing wasted resources chasing deals that will never close within an acceptable time-frame. Anyway, typically ghosting behaviors on the part of a potential buyer doesn’t mean an immediate move to closed-lost status, but it does necessitate smart follow-up, one that includes a balanced amount of persistence and an understanding of the buyer’s circumstances and timeline preferences. Great salespeople have a framework to know when to invest in deals that have stalled temporarily versus being permanently derailed, so they can apply time and energy on opportunities with the best chance of succeeding. Pipeline hygiene is absolutely vital for making accurate predictions and maintaining focus on what actually matters (the deals you can close in the current period), without being weighed down by opportunities that may be nowhere near closing, but diluting insight and resource allocation.
Real AE Examples
Sarah Martinez of a major marketing automation provider changed how she accelerated her deals, HP style, and reduced her team’s average deal cycle time by 35% — without sacrificing close rates or deal size — thanks to mutual action plans that cover the entire customer lifecycle and a strategy for internal enablement that executed such a well-synchronized sales process. Her process starts as soon as she’s qualified an opportunity, and it starts with her working with primary contact to map all internal stakeholders, their criteria, and her company’s typical decision-making timeline. Instead of hashing out ways to speed up decisions, she partners with the buyer to figure out where there might be bottlenecks and find ways to address them before they become a problem — like offering security reviews at the early stage and giving legal teams pre-prepped contract templates before they’re asked for. Sarah’s success comes not just from the way she can position her company as a true strategic partner that knows, understands, and respects the complexities of the buyer’s internal situation, but because she can provide the structure and the resources the buyer needs to move efficiently through their evaluation process.
“The best salespeople realize that trust and velocity are two sides of the same coin, and take a very disciplined approach to bringing them and using them together in the sales cycle.” Instead of seeing time as the enemy, top sellers understand that investing time on good discovery, getting the stakeholders to agree, and relationships actually move deals faster by preempting the roadblocks, stalls, and internal politics that otherwise stretch sales cycles out forever. “Playing the long game; Guiding, rather than pushing; Long term success vs Squeeze success.” When you employ this strategy, you create sustained success instead of a single success transaction — referrals, introductions, deals and partnerships that compound over time. The strategies in this guide, from Mutual Action Plans to pre-enabled champions and front-loaded procurement processes, are proven methodologies for honoring buyer autonomy while systematically draining friction from the evaluation process. Sales organizations that are serious about evolving their approach should start by deploying MAPs with existing opportunities, doubling down on champion enablement, and running hard-hitting sales process audits to identify and eliminate root causes of frictions that slow down deals and add zero value for all parties.
