Sales Velocity: 8 Startup-Backed Tactics to Improve + Formula

Pipeline management and product knowledge are only scalable to a certain point. 

“After that,” muses Mike Welsh, CEO of Uptime. “The company must adopt a sales enablement mindset where every team is held accountable.”

From a marketer handing over the most promising leads to the product team delivering compelling features, all are vital influences on sales velocity. 

“It builds a springboard for rapid revenue growth,” says the CEO. 

This guide defines what sales velocity is and recommends eight tactics to move your deals through each stage quickly.

What is Sales Velocity?

Sales velocity measures how quickly your leads are moving through the pipeline from opportunity to closed-won deals.     

Why is Tracking Sales Velocity Important?

It’s important to track sales velocity because it tells you the specific areas in your sales cycle to improve on, like sales team structure, message framing, and marketing enablement.

“Sales velocity happens when a company’s strategy and selling motions are in lockstep, rather than isolated to a team of ravenous deal hunters,” says Welsh.

“Any company that puts in the hard work to align their product, marketing, and organizational strategies is a solid sales motion and process away from revenue success.” 

The Sales Velocity Formula

(Number of opportunities x Average deal size x Win rate) / Pipeline length

4 Sales Velocity Metrics You Need to Know Today

From sales cycle length to win rate, these metrics keep you on top of your sales goals.

1. Number of opportunities

Total number of sales activities / Number of opportunities created

2. Average deal size

Total revenue achieved in a time period / Number of deals closed-won opportunities

3. Win rate / conversion rate

(Number of closed-won deals / Closed-won deals + Lost deals) x 100%

4. Sales cycle length (a.k.a. pipeline length)

Total number of days for a deal to close / Total number of closed deals

How Do You Increase Sales Velocity?

To improve sales velocity, Uptime reimagined its consumption model. 

“We freed up our sales representatives’ time to focus on larger accounts and build relationships with strategic prospects,” reveals the CEO.

By raising prices on the frontend and offering a self-served and à la carte buying model, the startup eventually increased its average revenue per account (ARPA) and accelerated sales velocity.

These aren’t the only real-world tactics that bump up sales velocity. Here are eight more that work just as well.

1. Agree on your best leads with marketing

Companies find themselves struggling with misalignment when marketing and sales clash on lead quality.

For online course platform Thinkific, both teams would work on qualitatively different leads, often resulting in inefficiency and missed revenue opportunities.

Fortunately, after aligning both teams on what makes a high-quality lead and identifying which leads are ready to buy in real time, the company doubled its MQL to OPP rate in three months and reduced speed to lead from 2-5 days to 10 mins and SLA by 99%.

So, how do you replicate Thinkific’s strategy?

To start, identify who makes your ideal customer profile (ICP) on Reveal. 

Breadcrumbs Reveal connects your existing marketing, sales, and product data into one place, so you can quickly pinpoint the attributes and actions that make up your best customers today.

Here’s how it works:

1. Connect your marketing, sales, and in-app platforms with Reveal
2. Select a customer segment that means success to your business (e.g., all users on Professional plan)
3. Reveal your results

Reveal will not only identify these high-value customers, but also pin down the specific activities that impact your revenue streams. 

Now that you know who and what makes these prospective buyers, it’s time to surface them in real time using our contact scoring platform, Breadcrumbs.

Here’s how it works:

• Connect your data sources with Breadcrumbs
• Select who makes your ICP in the Fit model (e.g., CEO, Company size > 500 employees, Manufacturing industry)
• Assign a score to these attributes (e.g., CEO +100%, Company size > 500 employees +100%, Manufacturing industry +80%)

Breadcrumbs will send all scoring information back to your main data source, automatically notifying you whenever a lead meets the criteria.

Your scoring model will send the most promising leads (no more bad leads!) to the sales team directly and segment the remaining leads into ad hoc campaigns. 

With this approach, your sales team can pitch at the right time while simultaneously move other not-ready customers through the funnel.

2. Offer freebies with no strings attached

Most lead magnets come with a catch:

You can only access them if you share your contact information.

And yet, SignWell takes a different approach in its lead generation efforts. 

Note how the e-signature app offers three options for its free contract templates. Users can either access the free contract template with a free account, without an account, or download it right away with no strings attached.

By offering these 40+ templates for free, SignWell fosters goodwill and provides value right from the start in the customer journey. 

The startup’s approach brings to mind the 100/0 Principle—give it your all to customers and expect nothing in return. With time, nurturing these relationships will lead to an influx of sales opportunities.   

Ruben Gamez, the founder and CEO of SignWell, seconds the principle. He shares with us, “It eased the sales funnel and improved our sales performance for that quarter.”

Test to see if you should gate or ungate your lead magnets for better results.

If you gate it, use a contact scoring platform like Breadcrumbs to rank your leads’ web activities. The more your leads interact with your site, the deeper they progress into your funnel.

Try these steps:

• Connect your data sources with Breadcrumbs
• Determine what makes a sales-ready or sales-qualified lead in the Activity model (e.g., page visits to pricing page)
• Assign a score to these activities (e.g., page visits to pricing page +25%)

Set it live.

Breadcrumbs will send all scoring information back to your primary data source.

Once a lead hits your predefined threshold, your sales rep automatically receives a notification that they’re ready for a pitch.

3. “Warm up” your sales outreach

Out of 707 cold emails sent to C- and VP-level executives, 45.5% were opened. 

These emails contained different variables—subject line, email length, purpose,etc.—and were all sent at the same time.

The result?

Only 1.7% replied.

Though the response rate was abysmal, the experiment uncovered a crucial insight: 

Optimizing sales emails is “not as important as personalized research and sender/sendee fit.”

One quick way to personalize your email outreach is to use website tracking tools like Leadfeeder, LiftCertain, and SalesIntel. 

These tools uncover the companies behind your anonymous web visits, so you can personalize your outreach to prospective buyers.

Like the way Anura did below:

“Hey [Name],

Someone from your organization was checking out Anura.io earlier. 

We’ve helped [Job title]s just like you virtually eliminate fraud and skyrocket conversions, so I’m guessing you might know who stopped by. 

Who would be the best person to chat with about growing your business by eliminating fraud?”

It’s a great conversation starter, but there’s just one problem: bounced emails. 

With people changing jobs around 12 times in their lifetime, inaccurate email addresses are unavoidable.

Worse, dirty data causes spam traps and deliverability issues. On average, U.S. respondents feel inaccurate customer data wasted 27% of their revenue.

To improve the deliverability of your emails to prospective customers, eliminate any invalid email addresses from your list using our free email verifier.

Here’s how it works:

1. Connect HubSpot
2. Select an email list with up to 10,000 contacts
3. Click Verify

Once uploaded, the verifier will score and include more information about the email addresses. 

Prune your email list accordingly.

Verify your email list for free here.

4. Get the logistics out of the way

Logistical challenges put a brake on sales pipelines. 

For FacilityBot, it’s cybersecurity measures. 

After discovering an increasing priority on cybersecurity and how much the complexity causes bottlenecks, the startup decided to publish its cybersecurity measures on its security status page.

“It pays to just publish the details of what’s been done on your website,” reveals Patrick Sim, the co-founder of FacilityBot.

“This avoids the hassle of filling up lengthy cybersecurity questionnaires, which shortens the sales cycle.”

Since bringing the security measures into conversations and publishing them on the site, FavilityBot reduced the time needed to engage with the IT team.

Rizan Flenner, the founder and CEO of iSEEit, offers a tip to overcome these logistical bottlenecks: 

Identify the final steps in the buying process and then create a reverse engineered timeline. 

This way, you’re aware of how soon you need to get started—which can get even more urgent before the big holiday season, Flenner stresses, as there are only 20 working days in December.

The founder paints a picture for us:

“Let's say you need the signature by 23rd of December, and getting it takes up to two days.

Ask yourself, ‘What needs to be accomplished before that?’ 

If the project must be approved in the PO system, identifying the right person and getting their approval alone could take four, five days.

The next step is to find out who needs to enter it into the system and what is required for it to happen. 

If the project and portfolio teams are responsible, find out when they’re meeting. 

This process could also take another four, five days, and before you know it, you’re already on the seventh of December.”

“There are many moving parts in the customer buying process a salesperson must know how to control,” adds Flenner. 

“Reverse engineering your timeline helps you achieve all your intermittent milestones by the final deadline.”

5. Get found on review platforms

Kolleno, a global financial operations platform, increased its number of closed-won opportunities by 10X after partnering with G2.

Companies that advertise on software review platforms like G2 often see better results, thanks to the sheer number of higher-intent audiences. Buyers are already primed, interested, and almost always ready to buy. 

There’s also another upside to advertising on such platforms: 

Built-in customer reviews.

Ștefania Bulgaru, an account executive at Jam Session Agency, shares with us, “Reviews stand as proof of the qualities you advertise. These personal and authentic content are proven to have a great impact in the decision-making process.”

6. Support your champion buyer with stage-centric content

A typical sales cycle in enterprises involves multiple stakeholders: champion buyers, decision makers, influencers, blockers, and insiders.

In Josh Brown’s experience, zeroing in on the champion buyer impacts the sales process tremendously.

“The buyer champion shortens the sales process by convincing others within the organization that your SaaS solution is the best option,” explains the SEO and content marketing manager at Helpjuice.

However, this doesn’t mean you can kick back and call it a day. Empowering the champion buyer requires active collaboration.

“You need to collaborate with your champion and equip them with the right knowledge at the right time.”

What Brown means is connecting your content based on the various stages of the purchasing journey. For example, if the decision maker is in the evaluation stage, send your champion buyer a product-focused white paper or customer testimonials to make the case.

“Work with your champion to understand where the rest of the stakeholders are in the buyer’s cycle,” advises Brown. 

“Then provide your champion with relevant content at the right time. It’ll enable them to lead the rest of the stakeholders through the purchase decision process.”

7. Stack up your product against competitors

SpinupWP directs all leads to its feature comparison table.

“Leads from all channels are referred to this table,” says Brad Touesnard, founder and CEO. 

“And currently, it generates a 11% conversion rate, making it the highest-converting page on our website. Our sales velocity also went up by 4.7%.”

Before creating the comparison table, SpinupWP narrowed down to its closest competitors and researched its target audience to learn what product features were the most important to them. 

The page then ends off with buying triggers: a customer’s testimonial and five-star rating on Trustpilot.

Both triggers instill credibility. It reassures prospective customers they pick the right cloud server control panel.  

8. Prove value early on

Long sales cycles happen for multiple reasons.

In Cody Miles’ experience, it often arises when potential buyers don’t understand the value of your product.

“People don’t jump to spend their hard-earned money on something they think they don’t benefit from,” says the CEO of Ashore, an online proofing SaaS startup.

So what’s the solution?

“Prove yourself early on,” advises Miles. “Structure the sales cycle so that the value proposition is inherently felt within the user’s first interaction with the product.”

In the SaaS world, this means a self-service product demo or free trial.

“It allows first-time users to assess your app based on their own experience. By providing these things, potential clients can better understand your value proposition, leading to a shorter sales cycle.”

Accelerate Sales Velocity for Rapid Revenue Growth

These tactics show all departments influence sales velocity.

A delay in security review measures, the wrong collateral in the wrong hands, or an unfit lead that was cherry picked. These challenges slow down sales drastically.  

Try these startup-backed tactics to quickly move your deals through each stage.

But before you do, marketing-sales alignment must be in place.

Start by identifying who makes your ICP on Reveal. 

Breadcrumbs Reveal connects your entire marketing, sales, and product data into one place. Quickly pinpoint revenue-driven attributes and actions. And get aligned with the marketing team on who your best customers are today.

Start your free plan now.