Sales Acceleration

Steps for Growing Pipeline and Revenue

This sales acceleration series covers topics like pipeline growth strategies, sales AI, B2B sales cycle, outbound B2B, and sales and marketing alignment.

Your company’s revenue, growth, and profits depend on the length of your sales cycle. If it takes too long to identify prospects, nurture leads, and close deals, it will not just affect your revenue but also the morale of your sales teams. That’s why you should approach shortening your sales cycle as a sales acceleration solution.

Accelerating your sales pipeline will help you unlock the power within your organization. Beyond helping with revenue acceleration, a shorter sales cycle helps you assign responsibilities in a more optimal manner. Moreover, anything that improves efficiency will have a ripple effect on the business.

What is sales cycle length?

Sales cycle length describes the time it takes for you to close a deal. Usually defined in months, it shows the efficiency of your sales process. For a significant proportion of B2B companies, the sales cycle length is around four months. For those in SaaS B2B, the duration is around 83 days.

If you find that your sales cycle length is considerably longer than these, there are inefficiencies in your process. These could be due to:

  • Poor quality of leads
  • Inefficient prospecting
  • Irrelevant content
  • Overworked sales reps
  • Inferior sales assets
  • Broken pipeline
  • Unproductive processes
  • Lack of accountability
  • Opaque reporting
  • Absence of follow-up
  • Disjointed outreach

If you notice any of these in your organization, it’s time to accelerate your sales cycle since that would affect your revenue and growth.

8 ways to accelerate your sales pipeline

Repeating the same tactics won’t be effective anymore. Organizations will have to rely on technology, analytics, and AI platforms to shorten sales cycles. Here are eight modern ways in which you can accelerate your sales pipeline.

1. Implement marketing automation and inbound processes

Automation optimizes resource allocation, reduces human errors, and significantly improves the overall efficiency of the process. By automating inbound marketing, you can streamline your efforts, increase conversion, and get more bang for your buck.

Follow-ups and lead qualification are two things on the top of the list for marketing automation. Using the right CRM, you can automate sending out emails, triggered responses, scheduling blogs and social media posts, and SEO suggestions. Automation will also help you set up CTAs and campaigns.

2. Leverage market or client signals

You can reach out to prospects whenever there is a change in their status quo or if there is a market event that might impact them. These include leadership or board of director changes, company or industry-specific challenges and opportunities, and government policy decisions that might affect the category.

By setting up Google Alerts on keywords, individuals, and companies, you will get the relevant news to act on. When you reach out immediately with value-added strategies, you will be increasing your chances of converting that lead.

3. Keep up with sales pipeline and CRM hygiene

Cluttered or broken sales pipelines create redundancies and inefficiencies in the system. It means that you can’t classify your prospects, the information is bad, the data is unreliable, and your team is overworked.

The solution is to focus on relevant information and prioritize action points. Start by identifying pending leads and defining the stages in your pipeline. Importantly keep all your CRM data updated.

4. Leverage a targeted inside sales process

Purchasing processes have become more complex and now depend on multiple individuals and even committees. To implement an effective sales acceleration solution, you need to know the dynamics of decision-making at your client’s end.

Understand the roles of the key individuals, deliver relevant and personalized content, and make sure that you get your timing right. Doing these will improve your chances of conversion.

5. Align sales and marketing as much as possible

For sales acceleration, one of the first things to do is to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are aligned. With pipeline acceleration as the common goal, both the domains should work in sync to understand client concerns and create compelling contact.

An effective way to do this is by documenting the goals, expectations, and challenges for both teams and encouraging lateral interactions. Marketing should focus on top-of-the-funnel leads to give more opportunities for the sales team.

6. Implement a sales enablement strategy

If you need revenue acceleration, you have to enable your sales time with the right support and resources. Instead of merely recognizing top performers, what you need is a comprehensive support system that combines technology with soft skills.

Arm your sales teams with the latest tools and information that they can easily access. Empower sales reps to make timely decisions and you will have faster movement in the pipeline.

TIP: ModuleQ can help! ModuleQ's patented People-Facing AI surfaces personalized customer-centric insights, directly in the collaboration platform your team uses every day.

7. Revise your sales assets and messaging with the content team

If you have great content, you don’t need an influencer. But this shouldn’t be confused with the quantity of content. What you need is to consistently deliver multi-media content that’s relevant to the stage of the buyer journey.

Start by doing an audit of your existing content. Get rid of any irrelevant assets or outdated messages. The primary objective should be to create content that establishes your expertise and align it with the needs of the prospects.

8. Prioritize your leads and treat them accordingly

Prioritizing leads will make sure that your team optimizes its efforts. If sales acceleration is your objective, chasing cold leads won’t be of any help to you. Instead, you will have to identify and reach out to warm leads with a higher chance of a conversion.

You can turn to your existing customer base and figure out who is most likely to buy from you. Remember that 80 percent of your revenue will come from 20 percent of your clients.

In short

Accelerating your sales pipeline using these tips will lead to revenue acceleration for your business. Once you start incorporating them, you will also improve the morale of your sales and marketing teams.


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