Be sure to register for my free training on, "The 5-Step Formula to Closing More Deals without the Price Pushback, 'Think-It-Overs' or Ghosting"https://salesinsightslab.com/training/ Welcome to Data Driven Insights, the podcast that helps sales reps and business owners elevate their game and close more deals at higher prices. I’m your host, Marc Wayshak. In this episode of Data Driven Selling, we delve into a fundamental challenge faced by sales professionals: How to close deals more quickly and prevent them from slipping through the cracks. Marc emphasizes that many issues encountered at the end of the sales process actually stem from how the process was initiated.  To address this, Marc introduces a five-step strategy designed to accelerate any sales cycle and drive more effective results: 1. Organize your entire process. Every professional salesperson, and every sales organization as a whole, must have a good CRM system in place to organize everything. The last thing you want to do is just have your entire sales process organized in some Excel spreadsheets, on paper, or in Google Docs. You don't ever want to walk into the office wondering what your day will look like. Your process should be so organized that you already know exactly what each day is going to entail. There must be a particular system through which you can see your entire pipeline, so that way nothing is ever slipping through the cracks.  The more organized your process, the better off you'll be. Having a good CRM system that really holds it all together is simply key to closing the sale faster. 2. Disqualify prospects. This is less about organization and more about how you're actually selling. One of the reasons many sales start to slow down is that they were never truly qualified in the first place. You must become adept at using a systematic process to understand whether each prospect is actually qualified or disqualified. This is essential to closing the sale faster, because otherwise you’ll spend all of your time with disqualified prospects that have just kind of hung around in your pipeline. You've got to clean those people out, and move on.  By learning to disqualify prospects early on, you’ll enable yourself to focus your time and energy on prospects that are actually a good fit. 3. Present only what’s relevant. Salespeople constantly want to present their entire offering to every single prospect. But the reality is that you probably have an offering that's pretty broad. And so your prospects often don't need everything that you do. They only need certain things. Presenting features or components of your offering that are outside the scope of what the prospect is really trying to solve only distracts them—and slows down the sale. If you really want to close the sale faster, you must present only what’s relevant. 4. Be NSO. NSO stands for Next Step Obsessed. One of the most common reasons sales start to slow down is a lack of clear next steps. If you really want to start closing the sale faster, then you need to become absolutely obsessed with next step. As in, you can’t sleep at night if you know that you didn't schedule a next step in that last meeting. Once you prioritize next steps and become militant about scheduling them in every meeting or sales conversation, you’ll noticed that you’re able to hold sales together far more effectively. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in sales is to give a proposal to a prospect and then plan to “reconnect in a couple of months” or something similarly vague. Instead, there should always be a scheduled appointment in the calendar. Become obsessed with asking every prospect, “Do you have your calendar in front of you?” before ending any sales conversation. (And by the way, everyone has their calendar in front of them nowadays.) Always get that next step in the calendar right then and there, and send out a calendar invite while you're actually on the phone or on the Zoom or fo