1. Get your sales team to focus on qualifying out, and not qualifying in. If you don't have a rigorous qualifying program or MEDDIC scheme in place that sets a hard stop on when to walk away from a prospect, get one in place and drill your team for examples of deals they abandoned at that point. Do this with rigor and you will see your sales go up.
2. Reward large deals and high quality revenue over small deals with no names. The high quality deals will attract other high quality prospects and will validate your company's products or service. It takes the same number of calories to close and manage one deal worth $100K as it does 5 deals worth $10K each.
3. Map the time spent in the first level of your sales cycle with each prospect. If it takes more than 2 months to get beyond that level, walk away. That deal will never happen.
4. Map the time spent post demo to next level. If that level takes more than a month, walk away. That deal will never happen either.
5. Pay close attention to the quality of your prospect list. Bad lists waste a lot of sales time. You don't want your best reps responding to prospects with no juice or at the wrong level. You want to get to decision makers.
6. Avoid lead generators. You don't want someone else pitching your product. Not only do you have no control over the message, you risk losing true prospects because your outsourced callers didn't quite get your message. You only get one chance.
7. Invest in a service like ConnectAndSell. You want your best sales people taking inbound calls from prospects on your high quality lead list. That way, your best reps spend all of their time selling and none of it dialing. And, no one but you talks to your prospects, so you have complete control over the entire sales cycle.

Steve King
Former CEO, Endymion Systems, Inc.