What Is Sales Acceleration?

DEFINITION
Sales acceleration is the act of speeding up an organization’s sales process to turn leads into paying customers. The process includes optimizing your sales funnel and tools with a targeted content strategy, ideal client profiling, lead scoring, and lead routing.

💡Understanding sales acceleration

Traditional sales have always depended on “who” you know and the number of leads you reach. However, this dynamic has shifted today–the power is now in the hands of the buyers and “what” you know about them. Cold outreach without being informed with data and your ideal client profile will fall flat and waste time. 

The good news is that with data, technology, and strategic use of your resources, you can transform this traditional process into an efficient, modern one. This will help lead your team towards a common goal and drive sales results quickly. This is called sales acceleration.

Sales acceleration is the process of making your sales cycle more efficient. As a result of sales acceleration, you can move prospects down a sales funnel faster, turning them into paying customers quickly.

The fundamentals of sales acceleration are leveraging your existing resources like content and data properly to optimize the user experience and sales process. It makes use of automation tools to streamline systems and processes and data-driven insights to help in conversions. 

The result: The faster you close leads, the more revenue you generate as the number of paying customers increases. Your team can get through more leads every month, and even with the conversion rate remaining the same as your old process, you’ll still be able to generate more revenue.

🖋 Takeaway

To survive in today’s hyper-competitive market, you need a supercharged sales process with the right assessment, strategy, and tools to implement. Sales acceleration is a surefire way to get there.

To get started with sales acceleration, you’ll need to include new GTM tools in your tech stack, help change the mindset of your sales team to prioritize user experience, and leverage data. 

While this might sound like a drastic change, it’ll pay off over time as you get new customers faster. Not only that, but these customers will also stay longer with your organization as they are hyper-targeted on your ICP and have been pre-qualified.

What Is Sales Acceleration?

Sales acceleration is the process of increasing sales velocity by aligning resources with opportunities, ideal client profiling, strategizing content, and making use of analytics in order to create impactful user experiences and drive sales faster. 

It makes use of activities and assets like:

• Ideal client profile: Your ideal client profile (ICP) narrows down your target audience and helps you align your content and marketing campaigns with their needs.
• Lead qualification: You’ll have numerous leads at the top of your funnel, but only a select few will move down it. You must have lead qualification filters as early as possible so your sales reps don’t waste time and resources on unqualified leads.
• Lead scoring: Lead scoring helps lead qualification and cold outreach. It’s when you score your leads based on pre-defined criteria and can allocate more or less attention based on their score.
• Lead routing: Once a lead is qualified and moves down the funnel enough, you can assign specific sales reps to the leads based on criteria like their company size, industry, needs, and more. 
• Automation: Under automation, you focus on using tools to automate recurring tasks like information sharing between two teams, gathering data from multiple platforms, and collecting and scoring leads.

Why Do You Need Sales Acceleration?

Sales acceleration helps you achieve many benefits:

• Track sales results: Sales acceleration optimizes your entire sales process. You have tools to automate most tasks and can quickly identify existing bottlenecks. With this information, you can track the process more efficiently, resulting in a better analysis of your sales outcomes.
• Higher productivity and efficiency: A huge part of sales acceleration is eliminating redundancy by incorporating tools and systemizing the process. With a  blueprint of the process, your sales team can focus on tasks that require their attention instead of filling out excel sheets.
• Increase revenue: The simple equation that determines your revenue growth is:

Revenue = monthly recurring revenue x sales velocity

After a point, your revenue is dependent on the number of new customers you can get per day. With sales acceleration, this velocity increases, and you can get more customers faster. 

How To Implement Sales Acceleration

Once you have your sales acceleration software ready, here are some best practices to follow to reach your accelerated sales quickly:

#1. Take control of data: The first step to accelerating your sales is optimized and organized data. Scattered marketing and sales data prevent you from creating an integrated and aligned sales strategy. Start with collecting data from different departments in a single CRM platform and creating a process to do this regularly. 

#2. Analyze the data and current systems: Once you have your data organized, it’s time to start with deep analysis to understand past trends. This is where you’ll identify any gaps in your current processes as well as existing bottlenecks.

#3. Set your team up for success: Organized data doesn’t only help with analyzing and strategizing, but it also helps your sales and customer success teams to use the data. Ensure every department involved in sales has access to the central CRM to access and use the information when needed.