Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 37 - How to Close Sales Faster
Synopsis:
Ever feel like prospects are excited about your content but never actually buy? In this Peaceful Profits episode, Mike Shreeve explains why your sales cycle might be dragging on longer than you can afford—and how to fix it.
Instead of relying on tactics or scripts, Mike shows why the real solution is to restructure your offer so it moves from something people want to something they need. That shift instantly increases urgency, reduces objections, and accelerates sales.
You’ll discover:
The most common symptoms of a long sales cycle (lots of calls, no urgency).
Why rising ad costs make slow sales cycles unsustainable.
How to identify and reframe your offer from “want” to “need.”
Real-world examples: saving a marriage vs. improving a marriage, eradicating back pain vs. feeling more aligned.
The trade-offs between “need” offers (fast sales, needier clients) and “want” offers (slower sales, easier clients).
By the end, you’ll know exactly how to reposition your offer so clients come ready to buy—without you having to push.
👉 Ready to work directly with Mike? Learn more at peacefulprofits.com/call
Transcript:
How to Close Sales Faster
[00:00:00] Hello, my dear friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Thank you very much for listening to today's episode. We're gonna be talking about how to reduce the sales cycle. It's one of my favorite topics. What do we mean by reducing the sales cycle? A lot of clients that I work with, they're, and you may be in this position as well, you are doing some sort of lead gathering process, whatever that process is, right?
So you are going out and you are exposing your offer and what you do to others, and people are giving you some sort of information. I prefer that they give us credit card information to become a customer, but that's another audio for another day. But you have some kind of lead [00:00:30] attraction type of process that you use.
And then from the time those people become a lead or hear about what you do for the first time, that time when that happens, to the time that they actually buy something from you is currently in your business longer than you would like it to be. Okay. Now this will show up as a symptom. When you feel that you are doing a lot of work, you're getting a lot of engagement, whether that's social media engagement or people responding to emails or et cetera.
So you're getting a lot of what you feel like are early indicators of what will be a successful [00:01:00] selling process. The sales aren't coming, right? That's one symptom. Now what is, what's actually happening? It means that people are enjoying your message, they're enjoying you, but there's nothing that's really driving them to the sale, right?
So they feel, what do they feel? They feel that they don't have to buy what you're selling. That's an example of a very long sales process or a sales process that's longer than you might like. Another example. Of a sales process. Another symptom, sorry, of a sales process that's too long is, a lot of people running VSLs and webinars today, right?
So what happens is they, or really any [00:01:30] freebie centered attraction funnel or mechanism. So even lead magnets and content forward approaches and et cetera, like where you are spending money on advertising and then having to wait to recoup that ad spend. And what's happening right now is ads are getting more expensive as they always do, as they will continue to do forever and ever until more and more platforms pop up and they have, as as good of a targeting set up as some of the major platforms do now.
But as long as we are living in this world of, a handful of traffic sources driving the majority of the revenue, then we're gonna experience increasing costs. And what's happening right now is [00:02:00] it's not that webinars don't work anymore. It's not that lead magnets don't work. It's not that Facebook ads don't work, it's that the price that you have to pay to make them work is difficult to cash flow because of the length of your sales cycle.
So if on Tuesday you just spent a thousand dollars on ads and you don't make your first sale until Thursday of the next week, there's not a lot of companies, especially in the startup phase who can afford that kind of cash flow catch up. Okay. So those are just some of the symptoms. You can also see it in another symptom is you are having lots of sales calls, but nobody's buying, [00:02:30] right?
No. Nobody seems to have the urgency to buy now. They always seem to be able to, very logically, hard to overcome, objection wise, come up with reasons why they shouldn't buy now. Okay, so let's fix that. It's really simple. It's one of my favorite things to do, and it always comes back to the offer. So the way you shorten your sales cycle isn't necessarily a sales and marketing related issue except that the offer informs what you should do when it comes to sales and marketing.
Lemme give you a very simple [00:03:00] example. If you need people to be hungry to buy from you, then you must give them something they need, not something they want. Something they need. Think about all of the things in your life right now that you want. It's probably a pretty big list, right? You want the big TV and you want the time off, and you want the this, and you want the that.
There's so many things in your life right now that you want, but you're not actioning them [00:03:30] if you sell something in the marketplace, in the help industry, right? I'm not talking about e-commerce or any of these other like restaurants or anything like that. In the help industry, if you are selling something that people only want, you can still sell it.
The people are selling all sorts of crazy things. You can still absolutely sell it. You just have to accept that when people are pursuing wants, they procrastinate. They don't really feel like it's a necessary thing, it's very easy for them to talk themselves out of it, et cetera. Now take a look at your own life right now and look at the things that you [00:04:00] need, money, place to live.
Food, all of the things that you need or that you believe you need. 'cause it's not just the core, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs money, food house. It could be you feel that you need to put your kids in this specific school, or you feel that you need to get that promotion or you feel that you, there are things in your life where when you look at it and you realize that when you assign.
The perception of need to an action or to a thing, you are more likely [00:04:30] to action, pursue, and eventually get that thing. So if we know that works for us, it's probably gonna work for our buyers. So what does that mean? It means that when we change our offers to be offers that people need rather than offers that people want, we shorten the cycle, not by improving our sales and marketing, but by improving the motivation of the buyer.
So that the buyer is the one leading the reduction of that time span. They are coming to us faster. They are coming to us more ready. They're coming to us with [00:05:00] fewer objections. Why? How many objections do you have when you think you need something? Not very many. How many objections do you have when you think you want something?
That's when your imagination kicks in and you can make a lot right. So what is, and what are some examples of need verse want? Because as, as simple as this idea sounds it's quite nuanced, right? It's difficult to find the balance between want and need. But I'll give you some examples. Let's say that I'm in the relationship space.
Somebody may want to [00:05:30] improve their already happy marriage, okay? Enjoy the later years of your marriage and retire in romantic bliss. That offer will sell. Okay. Please don't it's a mistake to think that want offers don't sell. It's just they're harder to sell. They take longer to sell, and as long as you're okay with that's fine.
But if you're trying to compress the time by which you can make sales more quickly, more easily, et cetera, then that particular offer will be difficult for you. Same niche, same industry, [00:06:00] very different offer. It would be to shift towards focusing on those couples that have a sincere belief and perception that they need to say, for example, save their marriage.
There's a big difference in perception between enjoy your marriage and save your marriage. So again, this is where I talked a little bit about the nuance, and this isn't a copy. Messaging nuance. This is an offer nuance. The offer that you create, which saves a marriage, is probably quite different [00:06:30] than an offer you would create that helps people enjoy their marriage and write off into the sunset.
There may be some core principles. It still relies on your core expertise, but it's a very different avatar. It's a very different outcome. It's probably a very different set of tools. It's probably a very different set of recommendations and coaching and et cetera. So that would be one example. I'll give you another example.
Let's say that we are in the fitness space. Let's say that we are really amazing at alternative medicine. Okay? Whereas like in not fitness, health, let's just say health in general, alternative medicine, we're very good at that. You have [00:07:00] two different offers. The want offer is feel more aligned and in tuned with the body that you have.
That sounds pretty awesome. I think I would like that. That's something I what something I want. That's a want offer. The need offer in comparison. Very simple. Eradicate the back pain that you have that's keeping you from doing your job, keeping you from sleeping. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and your back hurts so bad you can't sleep?
That is a need. It could still [00:07:30] be the same general set of therapies with slight alterations and adjustments and et cetera, but the offer that you are making, the offer that you are that you're the shifts that you're making in your offer to turn it into a need do end up what? Dictating a different outcome.
When you have a different outcome, you're saying different things in your messaging, you're saying different things In sales, you're targeting perhaps different audiences, right? And so you can see how somebody who shows up on a call and wants to be more in tune with their body and feel good in their body, they're probably not [00:08:00] rushing to solve the problem.
Yeah, that would be nice. Let me shop around a little bit. The person who is in so much back pain that they can't even go to sleep at night, it's affecting their performance, et cetera, et cetera, then what do you think they're gonna do? They're looking to solve the problem yesterday, and so we could go on and list example after example.
Hopefully these are sufficient enough. The idea here is that oftentimes we get stuck in this idea that a marketing strategy or a sales strategy is what's going to fix the length of the sales [00:08:30] cycle. Or another way of saying length of sales cycle is to say, essentially the intensity of our prospect to want to actually buy from us.
How much is our prospect leading the charge, and how much are we having to just pull them along just to get a sale? Yes, there are sales tax, and yes, there are marketing tactics that can improve that slightly, but the big improvements come from these kinds of changes to your offer, from need to want. Now, there's one last thing that I'll say in today's episode, and it is that you have to understand that there are also consequences for shifting from want to need [00:09:00] The consequences occur in fulfillment.
In fulfillment. It's easy to for example, I could go out into the marketplace right now and I could make an offer that says, do you need an emergency? A thousand dollars this weekend. Click here, buy now. Now that is, there's a lot of people in the world who could really use a thousand dollars this weekend, like a lot.
The problem is, yeah, that's an easy to sell offer. Yeah. People are gonna be banging down your door to sell it. The problem is the fulfillment, and that's an extreme example, but it's something that's worth noting that as [00:09:30] you move towards more need, you get what more needy customers and clients and if you're okay with dealing with that, totally fine.
And this is where you have to find that balance. This is where working with other people, getting feedback, testing the market, et cetera, can really help you. So conversely, if you don't care how long your sales cycle is, but you're tired of very needy clients, make your offer more of a want rather than a need.
So instead of saying, get your very first client because you need to pay your bill next month, and if you don't pay your bill next month, you're gonna be homeless. Shift it to say, Hey, do you have an existing business? Are you wanting to start to work yourself [00:10:00] outta that business? Are you looking to et cetera and et cetera?
And what you'll find is that the people who are attracted to that message, they may be a little bit harder to sell, but they are easier to work with. So again, it's one of those things in business where you have to find the sweet spot for you. There are times and seasons for both. Sometimes you just need to get stuff selling, so you rely on the need, and then sometimes you're at a point where you don't have to do that anymore, and you can set on the other side of want.
Okay, so that's it my friends. A quick reminder, here's my plug for today's episode. If you would like to work directly with me in my private consulting year long [00:10:30] program where we focus on four things. Number one, we help you to double your revenue. Number two, we help you to double your margin. Number three, we help you to create three months of cash reserves as operational cash flow so that your business could run for three months without you selling anything everybody would get paid on time, including and especially yourself.
And then lastly, we reduce your weekly workload by at least 15 hours. That's all guaranteed. Takes about a year for us to do it all. But if you would like to be a private consulting client of mine, please go ahead and reach out to support at Peaceful PeacefulProfits.com. [00:11:00] We've got a bunch of, we've got brochures and all sorts of fancy stuff, but please know that I'm only able to take on 10 to 15 clients per year.
This is the annual sort of promo. It's a very soft promo. We typically fill those slots very quickly. We will not be opening this up again for at least a year if we opened it up again which we hopefully we'll cross our fingers, but we didn't do it last year and we didn't do it the year before just because everything that was going on in the world.
There's a bunch more benefits and stuff that go along with it. But if you are interested and you'd like to have me work directly with you, again, support@peopleprofits.com we'll have a conversation. Run you through an application, you and I'll have a chat, see if we wanna work together for a year, [00:11:30] see if we wanna accomplish those things, if those things are possible with your business as it currently stands and then we can go from there.
Okay, my friends, that's it. Hope you have a wonderful day and we'll see you the next one.