Understanding the Sales Life Cycle

Sales are the lifeblood of just about any business. Successfully selling your product or service to the right audience makes all the hard work you’ve done worth it.

To give yourself the best chance of selling to your audience, you need to understand what a successful sale looks like. And that doesn’t just mean the revenue at the end of a sale — it’s about the journey of turning someone who has never even heard of your business into a paying customer.

To that end, let’s explore the complete sales life cycle. 

What Is a Sales Life Cycle?

A sales life cycle is a sequence of stages that a sales person or team will follow as they identify a prospect and turn them into a customer. Each stage requires the sales person to consider certain strategies to ensure the prospect advances to the next stage. 

At every step, the sales rep is learning more about the prospect and their needs. As they learn more, the sales rep can guide the prospect toward the service or product that will solve their problems, all while building trust with the prospect. 

What Is a Sales Life Cycle Not?

The sales life cycle shouldn’t be confused with the sales process. The sales life cycle is what happens at each stage, while the sales process is the method of ensuring the prospect moves from one stage to the next. 

A sales life cycle is also similar to a sales funnel, but slightly different. A sales funnel focuses more on the prospect’s feelings toward the business rather than sales actions that have been taken. In most cases, the sales funnel can be broken down into:

• Awareness: The prospect becomes aware of the business.
• Interest: Something about the business piques their interest, and they want to learn more.
• Desire: They like what they learn and want the business’s product or service. 
• Action: Final objections are overcome, and they take the conversion action.

While this format may vary slightly from business to business, this is the core of most sales funnels.

The sales life cycle is also commonly confused with a sales pipeline. The sales life cycle informs the sales team what steps have already been taken to acquire this prospect, and what the next stages are. A sales pipeline tells us what kind of lead this is. This will vary for each business, but could include determining whether the prospect is incoming, qualified, unqualified, lost or converted. This pipeline can give holistic information on many different prospects. 

Why Is It Important to Understand the Sales Life Cycle?

To create a successful sales process, you need to understand the sales life cycle. Without this understanding, your sales team is more likely to let prospects slip through their grasp — whether by overloading them with information at the wrong moment, rushing the process or perhaps just appearing unsure about what the next steps are.

By knowing what stage the prospect is in and what comes next, your sales team can take the right action at the right time, without having to decrease momentum. Instead of wondering what they should do next, they can focus on building a relationship and guiding the prospect toward taking that next action. This action could be agreeing to a call, signing a contract or even just replying to a message on LinkedIn. 

They can also focus on selecting the right selling strategy for each prospect. Whether it’s value-based selling that focuses on the benefits for the prospect, or consultative selling that centers around building trust and fostering a relationship, your team can concentrate on choosing the best strategy rather than thinking about next steps. 

The Typical Sales Life Cycle

Depending who you ask, you may get some slight variations of what the typical sales cycle looks like. However, most follow the same rough outline. 

1. Prospecting

The first step in the sales life cycle is prospecting, which is the search for potential new customers. This requires you to know what a potential customer looks like — you should only chase leads with a high chance of conversion.

Recognizing a potential customer starts with conducting customer research and creating buyer personas. This helps you recognize who they are, what their problems are and how you can solve them. 

Once you know what your potential customer looks like, you can begin searching for them. There are several methods and tools available for finding prospects, including:

• Social media: Searching on platforms like LinkedIn by job titles, area and place of employment is a fast way to find a potential customer.
• Networking: Going to events and talking to people likely to fit your buyer persona can lead to new prospects.
• Referrals: Ask existing customers to refer you to people they know who may benefit from your services.

2. Preparation

After you’ve found your prospects, the next step in the sales life cycle is preparing to make contact. 

Effective preparations require researching each prospect. Find out what they’re discussing on their LinkedIn profile, and search for articles or podcasts they may have appeared in. This can tell you their preferred communication style and their pain points. From here, you can decide on the best approach. 

3. Approach

Once all the necessary preparations have been made, you can make an approach. Ideally, you’ll first position yourself where the prospect could come into contact with you organically. You could do this by visiting or even giving a talk at an event they’re attending, or you could comment on a LinkedIn post of someone they regularly engage with. This can build awareness of your services before you even make the approach.

Next comes the direct approach. The goal here is to raise awareness of who you are and what problems you can solve. Whenever possible, you should personalize the interaction. This approach can quickly build trust by showing that you care enough about the person to learn about them. 

A personalized approach could look like:

• Messaging the prospect on social media to discuss their recent post or comment in more detail.
• Emailing the prospect about a podcast they were on and asking for more information on something they said. 
• Calling the prospect about a business update they shared and linking it to your services.

Once you’ve made the connection and built up rapport, you can briefly introduce your services and set up a discovery call. During this call, you can find out more about the prospect’s pain points and decide if they could really be a potential customer. You’ll then have to decide whether to pursue this lead or just mark it as a potential opportunity for the future.

4. Presentation

If you decide that this is a viable prospect, the next stage in the sales cycle is presentation. You’ll present your product or service to key stakeholders and share how it can specifically solve their problems. You’ll also provide your value proposition to show the benefits of your solution.

To do this, your presentation should be tailored to the prospect. Show that you understand why they’re facing their current problems, and then show them how you can provide the solution. 

A basic presentation template could look like:

1. Present yourself and your business. 
2. Describe the prospect’s problem and demonstrate that you understand why they’re having this problem.
3. Present your solution.
4. Show why you’re the one to deliver the solution by providing data, talking about your business’s credentials and sharing testimonials.
5. Summarize the information.
6. Answer any questions and deal with any objections.

5. Handling Objections

Whether it’s during the presentation or after, you’ll almost certainly hear some objections to buying your service. Whenever they come, you have to be prepared to deal with them. 

The best way to do this is to anticipate what those objections will be and turn them into opportunities. For example, one of the most common objections to any purchase is the cost. Rather than explaining why the cost is what it is, you can point out the value you’re providing. This could be demonstrating how your service cuts costs, increases revenue, streamlines operations or saves time and money in the long run. 

To identify other objections likely to arise, think back to the issues that previous prospects raised. If you face any objections that you hadn’t prepared for, remember what your value proposition is, and use it as a guide to provide a reassuring answer.

6. Closing

The penultimate stage in the sales life cycle is closing the sale. However, after overcoming any objections, you still have some work to do before you can seal the deal.

In many cases, the prospect will want to negotiate on the terms, particularly if it’s a large value deal. This won’t always happen immediately after the presentation, as many businesses will want to weigh up the options and have their legal teams check the terms of any agreement. 

However, the deal can sometimes be closed immediately after the presentation. Even if you don’t get a signed contract there and then, you may get a handshake, which is the next best thing. To improve your chances of closing the deal right then, you could:

• Create a sense of urgency by putting a limited-time discount or availability on your product or service.
• Offer financing suggestions based on their situation.
• Act as though the deal has already been agreed to and make it harder for them to object — without coming off as pushy.

7. Follow-Up

The final stage in the sales life cycle is the follow-up. This is a key stage, but it’s one that salespeople often overlook. They see making the sale as the end goal and fail to take a longer term outlook. 

If you follow up with the now-customer, you provide a sense of reassurance and build a stronger relationship with them. This allows you to deal with any concerns and answer any questions. Providing this level of service will encourage your customers to stick around and perhaps even buy more of your services or products.

How to Improve Your Sales Process

Understanding the sales life cycle plays a key role in a successful sales process optimization, but there’s much more to improving your sales methodology than that. Here are some of the most effective tips for boosting your sales.

Analyzing Sales Data

Your past sales data can be a treasure trove of useful information. This data can tell you:

• Which types of prospects were easy to convert.
• Which were difficult to get over the line.
• Which turned out to be unsuitable or unwilling prospects.

With this information available to you, you can more easily find prospects worth approaching and enjoy a higher conversion rate.

You can also use your sales data for your account-based marketing, allowing you to upsell to existing customers without having to worry about going through the early stages of the sales life cycle. 

Aligning Sales and Marketing

Marketing and sales are often seen as two sides of the same coin. The primary goal of both is to bring in new customers and increase revenue, each in its own way. By working together, they can create an average of 32% revenue growth annually. 

Unfortunately, these two sides of the same coin rarely face the same direction. While your sales team’s focus is probably on making sales and increasing revenue, your marketing team will be focused on boosting brand awareness and generating leads for the sales team to chase. There’s often a lack of inter-department communication too, meaning insights and strategies aren’t shared. 

All of this can result in the two teams targeting different audiences, chasing different goals and achieving stunted success. 

To align your team, the first step is to open a dialogue between the two. Schedule regular inter-department meetings to share information and create joint goals. They can also decide on a consistent brand message and buyer personas, so that regardless of how a customer is won, their journey from prospect to customer is seamless. 

Sales AI and Tech

Sales teams that aren’t using AI and other technology to streamline their sales process are at a disadvantage. When you use sales AI and other technology, you can:

• Gain insights without spending hours manually collating and analyzing data.
• Create sales tools such as frameworks, planners and calendars.
• Receive streamlined teachings and coaching exactly when you need them.

All of this can give your sales team the tools and information they need, precisely when they need it.

Sales Training

While it can massively boost the performance of any sales team, AI can’t replace your sales team. It will be up to your sales reps to build the relationship with the prospects and use their best judgement to select the right strategies at the given time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give your sales team the help they need to make the best decisions.

Sales training is a great way to give your team strong sales cycle management skills. It can give them the knowledge and confidence they need to find the right prospects, nurture the relationship and close the deal. When seeking expert sales training for your team, make sure your provider has the necessary expertise. Signs of a reputable provider include:

• A track record of helping businesses increase sales
• Awards
• Reliable data on measurements of success
• Testimonials
• Personal experience working in sales

If a training company has all of these, they’ll likely be able to help your team improve their overall performance. 

Support Your Sales Team With Janek Performance Group

Understanding the sales life cycle can massively improve sales performance, but that’s just the beginning. If you want to give your sales team everything they need to deliver great results, you have to give them the tools and knowledge they need to succeed. 

Janek Performance Group has helped businesses of all sizes improve their sales performance. From one-person startups all the way up to Fortune 100 corporations, we’ve consistently delivered tangible results for businesses of every nature. 

Whether you’re interested in our comprehensive sales training program or you want to give your team AI-powered coaching and sales tools, Janek can provide everything your team needs. To find out more about how we can support your sales team, contact us today. 

Justin Zappulla

Justin brings over 20 years’ sales and sales leadership experience as Managing Partner of Janek Performance Group. Justin’s career has been highlighted by remarkable performance and is considered one of the top authorities and thought leaders in sales training, sales consulting and sales performance improvement. Justin co-authored the highly acclaimed sales book, Critical Selling and was a key contributor to the sales book Mastering the World of Selling. An often-quoted authority on sales and sales management practices, Justin has widely been recognized as one of the biggest names in sales.

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