How to Get Strangers to Buy Faster and Shorten Your Sales Cycle

Earnings Disclaimer: You have a .1% probability of hitting million-dollar months according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As stated by law, we can not and do not make any guarantees about your own ability to get results or earn any money with our ideas, information, programs, or strategies. We don’t know you, and besides, your results in life are up to you. We’re here to help by giving you our greatest strategies to move you forward, faster. However, nothing on this page or any of our websites or emails is a promise or guarantee of future earnings. Any financial numbers referenced here, or on any of our sites or emails, are simply estimates or projections or past results, and should not be considered exact, actual, or as a promise of potential earnings – all numbers are illustrative only.

If your sales cycle is long and drawn out, keep in mind sales cycles are personally defined as advertisers.

In almost all instances we’re gambling. We’re fronting cash on credit cards, fronting cash in some instances on net 30s when we have monthly invoicing available from the platforms themselves.

However sales cycles are personally defined, it’s whatever you’re comfortable or uncomfortable with that makes you seek out information like what we’re going to cover today.

I’m going to be going through five of the top ways that you can condense your sales cycle. These will hit pretty hard in the instance that yours is just too long and drawn out.

My name’s Jeremy Haynes for all those who are unfamiliar. Welcome. We talk about hitting million-dollar months around here. 40 different times so far and ideally growing.

We have taken businesses to million-dollar months, not singular ones, plural.

If you are already following along, welcome back. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’ve got another piece for you. Let’s dive in.

If your business is already generating $100k+ per month, My Inner Circle is where you break through to the next level. Inside, I’ll help you identify and solve the bottlenecks holding you back so you can scale faster and with more clarity.

How to Use Sales Assets and Trust Content to Shorten Your Sales Cycle

First point in how to shorten a sales cycle is this concept we call sales assets and trust assets.

These are very important. I did an entire piece here on my site dedicated to just this one topic from how influential this specific piece of advice truly is.

Sales assets and trust assets, I put them in the same line with a little slash in between it because they are essentially one and the same.

They’re resources that help people prior to the call get questions answered, build trust and familiarity with your business and the people they’re going to be buying from.

Sales assets can be as simple as your sales rep sending a selfie video from an iPhone prior to the call, ideally as soon as the call gets booked, introducing themselves, looking good, somebody that you would want to talk to if you’re going through your own sales process.

Right away that alone can act as a sales asset.

Spending some time building out documentation, videos, anything really can be considered a trust and sales asset no matter what form of consumable it’s in.

Consumable meaning videos, audio, written text, long form, short form, etc. All these things are consumables and sent prior to a call they can make a substantial difference for somebody showing up well-framed and more willing to buy sooner.

Let me give you some very specific examples from different niches that we work in.

In the info product niche we have a big trust issue in most instances. It’s notorious that most education companies that sell these types of information products generally don’t take it serious.

It’s a side business for almost all these people. And regardless of whether it’s a side business meaning it doesn’t make the majority of the income for that person, they should still obviously take it seriously.

Well unfortunately for you if you operate in that space, a lot of people don’t and they create a tarnished type of buyer out there in the marketplace who’s just been through the ringer.

They’ve had a lot of courses they’ve bought that have just been poor quality. They’ve had a lot of masterminds that they’ve attended and gone to that have been awful.

They’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars in some instances, most of the time low thousands of dollars and just gotten burned.

So right away as an example if you’re selling information products, let me give you two quick ways that you’d have the ability to overcome that type of frame if you have buyers, which you likely do, that have that type of issue.

Number one, show your refund rate. Show your dispute rate.

Literally go into your payment processor and demonstrate how many people have done business with you and how many people have had to have a refund.

Demonstrate how many people disputed the transaction. Literally show the payment processor. That’s a great example of a trust asset.

What’s a faster way to build trust than that by literally just opening everything up and saying here, look at this, I haven’t wronged people.

And if you go watch that trust asset and sales asset piece that I’ve dedicated to this entire topic on my site, you’ll see me give that for my own education company as a great example.

That’s a great way to cut through the noise immediately. It’s not some weak email that you create that’s just one-sided and selfish, which is what most people do.

The biggest problem that creates long drawn out sales timelines in almost all instances is that you have an extremely selfish, no information at all type of sales process until the sales call occurs.

That’s why most of your sales calls end up being education calls.

If you really just reflect on your current process, if you don’t do things like what we’ll talk about later on for one of our future points such as the hammer them strategy where you take a monumental amount of content both short and long form, target the people who just book calls as an example, target the people who just opted into a webinar, target the people who just bought that low ticket product you’re trying to upsell, target the people who just DMed the business with an aggressive amount of content in an extremely short duration of time.

You give them significantly more information prior to the call. Therefore by the time the call occurs, if it was the right type of information and executed correctly, the buyer becomes much further along in the sales process.

It’s not rocket science.

You having a person showing up to the sales call too early, treating it as an education call, will draw your sales process out.

So simply put, at almost all, moral of the stories of each point I’m going to give you here, you have to conclude as well that you need to give people more information prior to these calls.

How Giving Buyers Full Transparency Speeds Up High Ticket Sales

Let’s talk about point number two, due diligence best practices.

So along the same theme, what we’re currently seeing right now making a big difference to shortening sales cycles are helping and being extremely transparent and informative about everything related to what you offer and sell.

So as an example in this particular niche, I’ll use anybody who’s selling some type of high ticket service.

For this specific niche there are obviously a lot of questions when it comes down to having a service-based business.

In most instances there’s something as simple that you could talk about as what’s required of the person who’s buying to actually see results with what you’re going to sell them.

How long does it take to get a result? How easy is it to get the result? Is it hard?

Sometimes you hire a service business and it’s not necessarily the easiest thing to go about doing.

Let’s say that you had a high ticket construction company where you’re doing custom pool projects or custom remodeling projects.

There might be permits that take months to acquire give or take the specific jurisdiction that you’re operating within.

There might be materials that you have to source from different parts of the world give or take the client’s requests that could take months just to show up to the front door.

In addition to that, tariffs here in the United States could additionally further complicate timelines and cost to getting certain goods in.

You see what I mean? Just something as simple as setting a proper expectation when somebody is initially going through the booking process.

I’m in the process right now of attempting to schedule a wedding. It is miraculous that this industry is as inefficient in most instances as it is.

Every single person you seem to talk to in these spaces, and let me just be clear by the way, I’m not the one going through the process trying to do all this for the wedding.

In almost all instances it’s my fiancée, a wedding planner, and an executive assistant. However, I hear about it.

Oh my goodness, do these people withhold almost all information until you actually get into the showroom or get onto a sales call.

And that doesn’t lead to a higher close rate.

That’s the biggest difference for why most businesses withhold all the information until the sales call occurs. Research shows that 57% of the purchase decision is made before a buyer even talks to a supplier, meaning prospects who receive information early are far more likely to close faster. 

They think if I can just get this person in conversation with me I have a higher probability to close them.

In reality, that’s not true.

Those same businesses are the ones right here right now reading this type of content, whether they’re self-aware of it or not, and they’re starting to realize, my goodness, I’m withholding all the information.

So no wonder somebody shows up to my sales call and treating it as an education call. No wonder it takes so long to close because all of the little things that they figure out after they talk to your rep before they close are only learned after the sales call.

You see where I’m going with this?

Doing something as simple as giving the person as much research type information, that’s why we call it due diligence best practices, you are aiding the person in their buying journey.

And you’re also, and this is really important to understand with this specific point, influencing the frame for how they consume the different pieces of information they’d otherwise find anyway outside of your business.

So if people can’t find answers, do you think they just stop?

Some of them do and that’s why they’ll drop out of your sales process or not show up.

Other ones will find the answers elsewhere. Google, YouTube, TikTok, ChatGPT, any other LLM you want to name, friends, family, social media posts where they get feedback, Facebook groups as an example, communities.

People still find the information when they’re committed to the buying process. Studies indicate that B2B buyers conduct an average of 12 searches before engaging with a specific brand’s site, demonstrating how actively prospects research independently during their decision-making journey.

That’s another reason that people might not be showing up to your calls. That’s another reason that people might have longer sales cycles because you gave them an opportunity to find information elsewhere.

Think about this. Where do you strategically get information from that relates to buying something that you might sell?

Do you get it from random third-party organizations who are untrustworthy? No, they get the information from your competitors.

So then what generally happens that can lengthen a sales cycle when you aren’t the one giving them the research and helping them frame the information that you’re giving them?

They’re still finding out the information but they’re now being introduced to other companies.

And guess what? A lot of people, you may be included, will like to buy from companies who help them in doing their research and helping them get information and just helping them period.

You on the other hand, you might have an extremely selfish organization where people show up to your sales calls and you get upset when they treat it as an education call.

You don’t give them anything to consume for information before the calls. And even if you’re that type of business where you’ve got one little email that has a link to some resource page, it’s a poorly written email.

And if you just actually took the time to look at your email click-through rate for those kind of statistics, you would realize nobody’s consuming this stuff.

Oh yeah, you got a confirmation page video. Are people consuming it? When’s the last time you looked at the video analytics?

This is why you need people like me. It’s important to understand.

We have an offer called Jeremy’s Inner Circle. Twice a month one-on-one calls, weekly group calls, quarterly in-person masterminds, and we have a group chat full of rich people trying to get a lot richer that you can be a part of if you’re making enough and if you have the right kind of frame going into it.

We would love to accelerate your progress. That’s all an offer like that does.

Here in my free content, if you can’t tell, I have so much more that I would love to tell you but I only tell you when you actually give me money.

I’m not going to make you extremely successful completely for free. A piece like this will absolutely help get you additional results.

Most of you who are consuming this, obviously you’re very smart people. You’re likely already doing somewhere in the couple hundred K a month range and you’re reading content about trying to hit million-dollar months.

I don’t undermine your intelligence. Let me be really clear when I say this.

Jeremy’s Inner Circle is intended to help accelerate your progress, progress that you’re otherwise probable to make anyway. But look at it like this, you’re paying not just for those things that come with it, you’re paying to speed up the timeline to the result that you can achieve.

I have so many resources and assets I can provide to you in depth and literally go through them with you, review them with you, help create them with you when you join into an offer like that.

The link’s available. I would love for you to check it out.

How to Use Your Confirmation Page to Pre-Sell and Shorten Sales Cycles

Let’s go on to point number three.

Point number three is what we call confirmation page best practices.

So most people, well not everybody to be fair, sometimes we actually still see people that don’t even put confirmation page videos onto their confirmation pages after somebody does something as simple as opting in, buying something, and/or booking a call.

You have to have a great video there. And it’s no longer one of those simple, super simple, “Hey, just make sure you show up. You just booked this. Hey, there’s a lot of information that we’re going to talk about on our call. We’re excited, make sure you show up. You might get a text, respond to that and let us know that you’re going to show up.”

Those videos don’t work and they do not work. They’ve never worked.

You’ve got to have right then and there that due diligence process, those sales assets, those trust assets there to start consuming.

A lot of you, just like you as a buyer potentially for our organization, will go through my content and binge a lot of our content prior to purchasing.

Imagine after you book a call if we just start the research process for you right then and there on the actual confirmation page.

That would play into shortening a sales cycle timeline because again, it all comes down, every single thing I’m talking to you about comes down to the simple conclusion.

I increase consumption prior to a call and I get them the answers that they’re otherwise just going to ask on an education call.

I can then turn that call they booked into a sales call. I can then turn that webinar that they’re going to show up to into a sales conversion event where they’re actually probable to buy something from me.

So my point being, confirmation page best practices include having a well created video that immediately delves into all of the different research that they’re otherwise going to do anyway.

Search your company in a search engine. Search your company with the word scam or review in the search engine.

Address things like potential Reddit threads that exist about your organization. Address and walk through your review platforms that you have.

Don’t just show the five-star stuff. Talk about the one-star stuff. Address these kind of things.

Have a page that has multiple videos below it, below that confirmation page, what we call breakout videos that individually address common questions.

And again, just to reiterate, I’m happy to help you create those specific questions that likely need answered and ensure that you have literal examples from people who have show rates in the 70% to 80% and sales cycles less than 7 days consistently when you join into an offer like our Inner Circle program. 

Industry benchmarks show that the average sales appointment no-show rate ranges from 20-40%, making 70-80% show rates significantly above average and indicative of strong pre-call engagement.

There’s a link available for you to check that out.

To continue, outside of just those common questions, a really well-built confirmation page video, some testimonials also really help.

But it’s very important you understand testimonials should be from the place where they were captured and ideally these people are somebody that can be contacted.

If you are in any way, shape or form going to pay somebody off if they get contacted and influence a close, you have to disclose that to be clear on that exact area where the person is enabled to contact those individuals from a compliance perspective.

Just to mention that, don’t do the reach out to somebody and pay them thing again without disclosing it.

But people want to know. People want to know who these people are and they want to hit them up and say, “Hey, do you actually get results with this?”

There’s one particular sales agency out there that I absolutely despise. They’re one of the most unethical organizations in the history of sales agencies and they consistently turn every business they work with into an FTC compliance liability.

They are truly one of the worst organizations and I’m not going to name drop them due to not wanting to get into legal complications or trouble with them myself. But I will never take on a deal with these specific people from how awful they are from an FTC compliance viewpoint.

The point being, this particular sales agency, they have an Instagram page where they only have posted client testimonials.

And these people are typically and surprisingly not small people in most instances. They’re notable people that you can go and research. And that’s the thing with notable people, they know other notable people.

And most of these people are one text or one DM away and they’re happy to answer about their experiences.

So this sales agency is so awful at their job and they so consistently turn businesses into huge liabilities. But yet every client in the first couple weeks of working with this organization will get a testimonial.

Happily, these people, again, before you listen to their sales calls and you just look at the statistics, they’re getting upwards of 30% to 40% close rate.

But they’re putting people into extreme debt and doing just a whole bunch of unethical stuff I won’t sit here and bore you with.

I digress. The point I’m attempting to make is if you contact literally any one of those singular people, and I’m not exaggerating, any singular one of the people that they’ve posted a testimonial for, and you just say, “Hey, how’s working with so and so?”

The client immediately says, “Yeah, they are the literal worst. They’re awful people. They turned my business into a tremendous liability and I had to do a lot to clean it up. My refund rate kicked up, my chargeback rate kicked up, everything went to hell. But in the short term it was really awesome and that’s why I shot them a testimonial.”

But that sales organization doesn’t take those testimonials down. They leverage them heavily.

And my point is, when you as a person have gotten to the position where you’ve asked somebody that you may have known or that you know through a mutual and you say, “Hey, can you hit that person up?” or you hit them up directly and say, “How was your experience with that?”

And they tell you something like that, what’s that make you think for every testimonial that you look at in the future even if it was captured in real time and good?

The ability to just contact somebody and say, “Hey, do you still hold that same viewpoint?” and then they tell you the reality like, “Yeah, no, they’re awesome,” or “Avoid them, they’re awful.”

You see what I’m trying to say?

So anyway, confirmation page best practices: good, real, modern confirmation page video, a bunch of little breakout videos with very specific questions that are preventing people from closing sooner.

In addition to that, testimonials where people can actually get reached out to. Don’t have to incentivize these people.

Most people who have worked with you are happy to talk highly about you to be clear to people that hit them up.

How Aggressive Remarketing Content Pushes Buyers to Decide Faster

All right, let’s go to the next one.

So I have talked extensively about this on my site. There’s entire pieces, multiple pieces as a matter of fact, where I go into what we call the hammer them remarketing strategy.

It’s a content marketing strategy, a propaganda campaign if you will, where we take upwards of 30 to 50 short form pieces of content and about 15 to 30 long form pieces of content if available and if shot well.

And we attempt to answer very specific questions that come up in our sales process.

I won’t dedicate this entire section to talking about it at length due to the fact that I already have multiple pieces on the site and I want to make sure for your sake, especially if you’re a returning reader, thank you so much for coming back.

I don’t want to bore you and again just go at length here when you could just go read one of those other pieces instead and get those answers.

But I will say this, the hammer them strategy is one of the greatest modern tactics to shorten sales cycles because you can do it for more than just the, “Okay, this person just booked a call, let’s hammer them before they show up to the call.”

You can also create a hammer them campaign for after they get on the call in a really tight time frame that your sales process would ideally be.

So if I wanted as an example a 7-day sales process, I could create another hammer them campaign, another hammer them sequence, another set of hammer them content that is specifically answering the questions, the expectations, the objections, include a ton of testimonials, things that are contextual to what they’d want to know after they’ve already talked to your sales team in order to help shorten the sales cycle.

So I can do it for more than just one area of the sales process. I can ideally do it for both and it works phenomenally well.

How to Ask Buyers to Commit to a Clear Decision Timeline

Let’s go into the last point. This is one of my favorites.

It comes from one of my good buddies and great partner in the business, Mr. Josh Troy from a company called Wires from Strangers.

I reference Josh as a partner because in any marketing and sales relationship you have to be hand-in-hand working extremely well and efficiently with one another in order to maximize client results.

I love working on accounts with Josh and his organization Wires from Strangers. To be clear, they just do such a consistent phenomenal job as sales teams.

Again, I just talk extremely highly of them for that exact reason. Thank you very much to Josh for all the commitment standards that he holds and that his people within his organization hold as well.

To be clear, I digress.

Josh gave me this tip one day. He was actually talking about it in the Inner Circle group because he’s in there as well and shares insights.

He’s actually one of our upcoming speakers at one of our quarterly masterminds so I’m really excited for that. Hopefully we’ll get some clips and some things that we could share here on the site and kind of give you a preview of what that’s like.

Without digressing too far, let’s get back into it.

Josh one time said to somebody that asked him a question, “How do you shorten a sales cycle?”

He goes, “Well, ask permission.”

We were talking about the raising capital niche specifically and in that niche it’s very common for accredited investors who are going to put up low hundreds of thousands to sometimes millions of dollars into different offers, a little bit of time in order to process things.

There’s also in most instances cool down periods and PPMs and risk disclosure documentation that has to be not only addressed, signed and submitted, but again, respectfully, there’s a time frame that generally has to pass.

He says for this specific piece of advice to just tell the person you’re talking to, and this can start right on the confirmation page, this can carry through in the marketing automation as well, ask a timeline that’s favorable to both parties to commit to doing all of the due diligence, getting all the questions answered that are necessary to get to the point where the decision can be made one way or the other.

So he’ll frame it like, let’s just use the example it’s for something that has a shorter timeline like 10 days.

As soon as the lead who just booked a call or just committed to the webinar process or whatever it is just opts in or books, on the confirmation page right then and there or on the sales call, up to you for how you do it, will say:

“Is it okay and fair if we both commit to a 10-day timeline to make this decision? My goal in that 10 days is to get you any and all information that you need, any questions answered, any testimonials you need, just the confidence, sometimes even lining up the money, helping you with finances, to get you to the point where you can either be in or out one way or the other.

I want to commit together right here right now that over the course of this next X amount of days you and I can come to the point of a decision, again to in or out, doesn’t matter. I just want you to be able to make that decision by the end of that timeline. Is that fair?”

And then again, in almost all instances the person’s either going to tell you one of two things.

Yeah, that’s totally fair.

Or two, they’re going to say, “My timeline is…” and then they’re going to literally tell you what their timeline is.

Which still is radically helpful because then you can have a follow-up process tailor-made with that rep to help the person on their desired timeline.

And you also immediately get transparency into it which helps with pipeline management and transparency.

Just literally ask permission.

Why Long Sales Cycles Happen and How to Fix Them for Good

If you have a long sales cycle, I just want to conclude on this to wrap up with you here.

You are likely withholding all the information that in almost all instances is only currently being talked about on your sales calls.

You are allowing sales calls to be education calls because you are withholding all the information.

Every single one of these best practices are modern, current, literally what we’re doing right now in million-dollar month deals.

This is it. We are just as transparent as we can possibly be, as helpful as we can possibly be, getting everybody that goes to the sales process as much information before they actually get to the conversion event that we want the close to happen at.

And when done properly, will you still have somebody that shows up on a sales call and didn’t consume any of it?

Yeah, you will. There’ll still be ideally a very small minority that come through that are going to have that kind of frame.

And we have a whole piece on this site by the way just to be clear, we call it type one and type two people.

Type one people, they’ll consume literally all of this. You could send them upwards of six emails a day and your open rates will stay in the high 60s to 70s percent. For context, the average email open rate across industries is only 21.5%, making open rates in the 60-70% range exceptionally high and indicative of highly engaged, qualified prospects.

At the same time there’ll still be person type number two. They don’t care about all the information that you have available online about you.

They’re going to treat your sales call like an education call. They’re going to use your sales rep as a librarian to help custom tailor what they need to pay attention to out of everything that you make available to them.

That type of person will still come through and you still have to be good at selling to them too.

But just to be clear, doing all these best practices, that’ll create a majority of the people that are currently coming through your process to have much shorter sales cycles.

Which will in turn weight the average of your current timeline to a dramatically lower, shorter window than it currently is now.

What I can teach you isn’t theory. It’s the exact playbook my team has used to build multi-million-dollar businesses. With Master Internet Marketing, you get lifetime access to live cohorts, dozens of SOPs, and an 80+ question certification exam to prove you know your stuff.

I hope you enjoyed today’s piece.

Check out all the links available. We’ve got plenty of great offers for you and we’d love to help accelerate your progress with whichever one is most appropriate for you.

Hope you enjoyed this. Thank you so much. Go get richer. Talk soon.

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