Closing prospects: how long should it take?

Over the course of the year, I’ve been lucky to have a number of potential deals fall into my lap (and I know I’m lucky because up until recently my biggest marketing effort has been to install a phone and wait for it to ring.)  To the new business owner, it’s a euphoric feeling; similar to triple entry accounting, a potential sale, no matter how vague, is almost like money in the bank!

And then the waiting begins.  Invariably, even with high-urgency, imminent deadline work, I’ve found that it takes longer to close a deal than I first think it should.  It’s not unlike my early days of estimating coding effort to program a feature, where everything should take an hour, and since that’s pretty common in my former industry I’m going to make the leap and assume that the concept of ridiculously short closing times is part of many starting entrepreneurs’ first missteps.

So what’s to be done about this?  I’ve picked three strategies:

Adjust expectations. If deals consistently take 2 months to close, that’s a valuable metric to learn.  Your forecasts should be based on this reality, not the “this should close in a week” mindset you started with.  Over time, you can work to shorten this timeframe but a lot of things get a lot easier when you have accurate expectations going into a deal flow.

Work on the offer. If things are taking too long, there might be some institutional issues at play in your prospect’s organization, but your offer might need some tweaking.  Is the value being presented clearly?  Is there a real or artificial deadline that can be used to push things over the fence, or are you set up with a “yeah, you can do this whenever” kind of arrangement?  Are you educating your prospects clearly enough over why you are the best choice over any other option, including the option of doing nothing?

Avoid hard dates in the proposal. Once a deal is closed, those initial proposals can look a bit silly if they include timelines.  Obviously dates need to change to meet the new reality, and it’s good to put some dates in the proposals to help the prospect form a clear picture of their new future, but if you create too many anchors, on a subconscious level you’ll be late on the project before you even start, regardless of the reasons for the delay to closing.

That’s my plan so far, any other tips?  Let me know in the comments!