Sales Cycle Guide: 7 Stages + Best Practices & Tips

Do you want to close deals faster and increase your business’s revenue? Then you need to streamline and optimize your sales cycle.

Here at OptinMonster, we’ve been moving leads through the sales cycle stages for over a decade. The result? Over 1.2 million users trust our software to turn their website visitors into subscribers and customers. In this article, I’ll share what we’ve learned with you.

Below, I’ll explain the 7 stages of the sales cycle and provide best practices and tips for each step. This guide will show you how to make the most of every interaction, so you can convert more leads into customers and convert them faster.

• What Is a Sales Cycle?
• 7 Sales Cycle Stages: Best Practices & Tips

What Is a Sales Cycle?

A sales cycle is the step-by-step process that moves potential customers from initial contact to a completed purchase. By breaking the process into clear stages, businesses can track performance, forecast revenue, and identify areas for improvement. The cycle includes stages like lead generation, overcoming objections, and closing the sale.

The average sales cycle length can vary widely depending on the nature of your business. For example, the sales cycle for an inexpensive piece of clothing might last 5 minutes. On the other hand, it can take months to complete the sales cycle for a corporate software system.

For online businesses, the sales cycle has unique challenges and opportunities. Unlike traditional face-to-face interactions, the eCommerce sales process happens digitally. It usually involves email marketing, targeted popups, and special offers.

When you optimize your sales cycle for digital leads, you can generate, nurture, and convert prospects more efficiently. The end result? More sales and revenue for your business.

7 Sales Cycle Stages: Best Practices & Tips

While every business and product is different, the standard sales cycle contains 7 stages:

1. Generate Leads
2. Initial Outreach
3. Qualify Leads
4. Present Your Solution
5. Overcome Objections
6. Close the Deal
7. Post-Sale Nurturing

Below, I’ll explain how each stage works and share best practices and tips, so you can optimize every step of your sales cycle.

Keep in mind that some of these stages may overlap or even happen simultaneously. For example, you may use your initial outreach email to start presenting your solution and overcoming objections. What’s important is that you specific spend time and effort on each stage.

1. Generate Leads

The first stage of the sales cycle is lead generation, which is the process of attracting prospects to your business. This stage focuses on finding potential customers who are likely to be interested in your product.

Online businesses usually generate leads through their website, social media, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements.

Best Practices & Tips for Lead Generation

• Get the right website traffic: Carefully target your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts and PPC ads to drive high-quality traffic to your site.
• Increase your reach with social media: Post about your products on your social channels to improve brand awareness. Learn more in our guide to increasing sales with social media.
• Use website popups to capture new leads: Grow your email list with strategically placed popups and floating bars.
• Entice website visitors with lead magnets: Offer a coupon code, free ebook, or PDF guide in exchange for an email address.

OptinMonster makes it easy to turn your website visitors into leads. We offer over 700 templates for popups, floating bars, and other onsite campaigns.

For example, here’s our template for a popup offering a free ebook as a lead magnet:

With OptinMonster’s easy drag-and-drop builder, you can customize this template for your brand in just a few minutes.

2. Initial Outreach

Now that you have new leads who are interested in your brand, it’s time to make direct contact with them. Your first interaction needs to make a strong first impression. Otherwise, you may not have the chance to move those leads further through your sales pipeline.

For eCommerce sites, your first direct outreach is usually through email or live chat. Your goal is to engage your new leads, answer any initial questions, and keep them interested.

Best Practices & Tips for Initial Outreach

• Send a welcome email series: Use email automation to send every new subscriber a series of welcome emails that introduce your brand. These emails should provide value to the subscriber so they’ll stay subscribed. Learn more in our guide to writing the perfect welcome email series.
• Deliver lead magnets immediately: Did your new subscriber sign up through a lead magnet offer? If so, your first direct contact will be delivering that content or coupon. OptinMonster integrates with all major email marketing platforms, so you can easily ensure that every subscriber gets their lead magnet right away.
• Personalize your welcome series with email segmentation: You can segment your email list based on which lead magnet a user signed up for, their geographic location, and other demographic and behavioral data. With this data, you can customize your welcome emails based on your subscribers’ interests.
• Offer live chat on your site: Allow website visitors to interact with your sales team in real-time by using live chat software. Live chat is the best way to answer leads’ questions quickly.
• Use chatbots during off-hours: You may not have the resources to have live chat agents available 24/7. With the rapid growth of AI and large language models (LLMS), chatbots can answer many of the questions that come through outside business hours. Many live chat tools offer chatbots as part of their service.

3. Qualify Leads

Once you’ve attracted and engaged new leads, the next step is to determine whether those leads are a good fit for your product or service. This process is known as lead qualification, and it helps you assess whether a prospect has the interest, budget, and decision-making authority to move forward in your sales cycle. When you qualify your leads, you can focus your resources on the leads that are most likely to buy.

Here’s a quick video that covers a few basics of lead qualification:

If you’re an online business, you can qualify your leads by tracking their engagement with your emails and their behavior on your website. Let’s examine these ideas more closely.

Best Practices & Tips for Qualifying Leads

• Track onsite behavior: Has your lead looked at your pricing or product page multiple times? That’s a good indication that they’re highly interested in buying. With OptinMonster’s real-time behavior automation, you can show exclusive popups and offers to those high-quality leads.
• Regularly clean your email list: If a subscriber goes months without opening your emails, you should remove them from your list. Keeping bad leads on your list can cost you money and hurt your sender reputation. Learn more in our guide to cleaning email lists.
• Segment high-interest subscribers: Create email segments made of your most engaged subscribers. Since they’ve shown a higher level of interest, it’s a smart idea to reach out to them with special offers.
• Use forms and surveys: Collect qualifying data by asking leads to fill out surveys and forms. You can link to these forms in your welcome email or include them on your site.

You can collect data for your lead qualification right in your OptinMonster campaigns! Use our custom fields to ask questions that are relevant to your business’s sales cycle process.

4. Present Your Solution

In the next stage of the sales cycle, it’s time to present your product to your leads as a solution to their problem or pain point. In other words, you have to show how your product meets one of your prospect’s needs.

That need can be anything from “I need a sturdier backpack for travel” to “I need the best software to sell online courses.” Your job is to show why your product is the best solution.

Best Practices & Tips for Presenting Your Solution

• Write a strong value proposition: You need a concise statement that describes the unique benefit of your product. Use our guide to writing value propositions to help get yours just right.
• Create dedicated landing pages: Sales pages and other landing pages let you show the value of your product without distractions.
• Showcase testimonials: The best customer testimonials give a first-person account of how your product solved a specific problem. Our guide to asking for testimonials can help you gather effective quotes to promote your product.
• Create video demos: Share explainer videos and product walkthroughs that highlight the core features and benefits of your product.
• Offer webinars: Live or pre-recorded webinars are a fantastic way to provide in-depth presentations on your product. Live webinars are especially effective because attendees can ask questions in real-time.

Here’s a webinar signup page we’ve used here at OptinMonster. This webinar presents our product as the best solution for growing your email list quickly.

Notice that the text on this landing page clearly defines the problem: many businesses struggle to grow their email list and are overwhelmed by the volume of advice available. This 1-hour live webinar will show you how to solve this problem.

5. Overcome Objections (& Build Trust)

Before leads click that “Buy Now” button, they want to be certain they’re making the right choice. It’s your job to overcome their objections by addressing any concerns, doubts, or hesitations. Common objections and concerns include:

• Is this product worth the price?
• Will I be able to get this product at a lower price later?
• Does the product have the features I need?
• Is the product high-quality?
• Can I return the product or get a refund if doesn’t meet my needs?
• Will this product arrive on time?

When you tackle these concerns head-on during your sales cycle, you build trust with your leads and can convert more of them into customers.

Best Practices & Tips for Overcoming Objections

• Create FAQs: A prominent Frequently Asked Questions section can cover multiple objections quickly. Your sales and customer support teams can compile a list of questions they receive regularly. You can also collect customer feedback on your site to discover the most common concerns.
• Offer free trials, returns, or money-back guarantees: Have you ever regretted a purchase? Your leads have, too. Overcome that fear of regret by letting people try your product or offering refunds. Here at OptinMonster, we offer a 14-day, 100% money-back guarantee for all new customers.
• Clearly show shipping times: Display shipping times on your product pages, so customers know that they’ll get your product in time.
• Showcase customer reviews and ratings: Shoppers trust the opinions of other customers more than they trust assurances from your marketing team. That’s called social proof, and it’s a powerful tool for handling objections. Do you need more reviews on your products? Follow these 10 tips for getting more customer reviews.
• Add exit popups for abandoning shoppers: Use exit popups to redirect abandoning website visitors to pages that can answer their questions. That could be customer support pages, FAQs, or webinar or demo registration pages.

OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® technology detects when visitors are about to leave your site, so you can capture their attention with a popup.

Here’s an exit popup that OptinMonster has used on our pricing and checkout pages:

This popup overcomes objections in 3 ways:

1. The primary message is a discount offer to overcome objections about pricing.
2. The popup is loaded with social proof. The top right corner lists that over 1,000,000 sites trust our software and that we have 300+ 5-star reviews.
3. The “I have a few questions first!” button directs visitors to a contact page where they can send a message to our support team.

This single website popup helps advance leads through this pivotal stage of the sales cycle.

6. Close the Deal

This stage of the sales cycle is what you’ve been waiting for: finally landing the sale! At this stage, all your efforts in nurturing and addressing objections come together, and the prospect is ready to convert. To close the deal, you need to offer a blend of urgency, trust, and convenience, so your lead feels confident and motivated to complete the purchase.

Best Practices & Tips for Closing the Deal

• Recover abandoned carts: Did you know that 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned? If you want to close more deals, focus on recovering those abandoned carts with exit popups, special offers, and cart abandonment emails.
• Streamline the checkout process: 22% of customers abandon carts if the checkout process is too complicated. Win more sales by following these 20 tips for optimizing your checkout process.
• Offer limited-time deals: To close the sale, you have to convince leads to buy now instead of later. Time-sensitive offers encourage customers to purchase quickly. You can offer these deals sitewide or make them even more enticing by keeping them exclusive. For example, offer the deal just to your email subscribers, webinar attendees, or social media followers.
• Create urgency with countdown timers: Add countdown timers to your special offer popups and floating bars. These timers are a visual reminder that the customer should act now.

In OptinMonster’s easy drag-and-drop builder, you can add a countdown timer to any campaign in seconds.

Do these countdown timers work?

Cracku used OptinMonster’s countdown timers to increase their conversions by 300%!

Learn more by reading our full Cracku case study.

7. Post-Sale Nurturing: Win More Customer Loyalty, Retention, & Referrals

Congrats, you’ve closed the deal! You may think that’s the end of your sales cycle. But if you want your business to grow, you have one more stage to optimize. In the post-sale stage, your focus shifts to nurturing customer loyalty, retaining customers as repeat buyers, and encouraging them to refer others to your business.

Here are a few reasons why it’s so important to nurture customers post-sale:

• It costs between 5 and 25 times to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
• Repeat customers spend an average of 67% more than new customers.
• 83% of Americans say a recommendation from a friend or family member makes them more likely to purchase a product or service.

In short, your existing customers can be one of your greatest sources of revenue. It’s up to you to keep them engaged and happy, so they’ll maintain their subscriptions, buy more products from you, and recommend your brand to others.

Best Practices & Tips for Post-Sale Nurturing

• Engage through email marketing: Keep your brand at the top of customers’ minds by sending helpful and engaging email campaigns.
• Upsell and cross-sell: Use popups and follow-up emails to suggest products based on previous purchases. Learn more in our guides to upselling and cross selling.
• Focus on customer support: Keep existing customers happy by quickly answering their questions and helping to troubleshoot any problems.
• Create loyalty programs: Offer incentives to keep customers buying from you. For example, customers could earn a $15 coupon for every $200 they spend.
• Create referral programs: Offer incentives for your customers to refer your brand to their friends. Typically, both the referrer and the referee get a discount or credit.

The post-sale stage completes the full sales cycle. Throughout the whole process, you continue generating new leads, which starts the sales cycle all over again.

For online businesses, each stage of your sales cycle is always ongoing. Thankfully, once you set up your targeted popups, sales landing pages, and automated email campaigns, much of the process is hands-off. However, you should continually monitor the performance of each stage and regularly make adjustments. That way, you can keep your sales cycle optimized for maximum revenue.

Streamline Your Sales Cycle & Grow Your Business

When you optimize all 7 stages of your sales cycle, you can increase your conversions, earn more revenue, and build lasting customer relationships. As you improve your sales efficiency, you’ll also shorten your average sales cycle length, helping you convert leads faster.

With the right tools, this process doesn’t have to be time-consuming or complicated. OptinMonster can help you improve nearly every sales cycle stage, from generating more leads to offering special deals to abandoning website visitors.

Join over 1.2 million websites that trust OptinMonster to convert visitors into leads and customers. Ready to improve your sales cycle? Get started with OptinMonster and see how it can transform your sales process.