What is sales acceleration?
Sales acceleration describes improvements to the efficiency of sales processes an organization uses to convert leads into paying customers. It may be driven by processes, tools, and even the methodologies used to move prospects through the sales cycle to close the deal.
This improvement in efficiency can help organizations rapidly scale their increase in market share as well as their revenue growth. Improving sales velocity and sales productivity are key parts of sales acceleration.
Key takeaways:
- Sales acceleration improves efficiency in converting leads into customers, aiding in rapid market share and revenue growth.
- Streamlining sales processes, employing the right sales technology, and enhancing sales rep efficiency are core elements of sales acceleration.
- Sales acceleration leads to more revenue for business investment, greater market share, and increased brand awareness.
- Implementing sales acceleration best practices involves team alignment, consulting sales experts, leveraging data, removing blockers, and investing in unified tools.
- Overcoming challenges in sales acceleration includes addressing rep burnout and fostering a collaborative team culture.
Why is sales acceleration important?
There are a number of reasons why sales acceleration is important to an organization. First, because it leads to a virtuous cycle. This is where the cash coming in from increased sales allows business leaders to reinvest in the business. This could come in the form of growing the sales team, investing in product improvements or advertising more broadly. Anything that will help to grow the business.
The other reason sales acceleration is important is that markets are growing increasingly competitive. If your organization is not gaining market share, chances are your competitors are, or your prospects are using the dollars they could invest in your product or service on something else.
The core elements of sales acceleration
When it comes to establishing a sales acceleration program in your organization, there are three main things you want to do first. These core elements will lay the foundation to help you drive your sales operations more quickly and more efficiently.
Streamlining sales processes
This is a great place to take a page from the project management book and look at what they call the critical path; this is the shortest possible path from project initiation to completion (understanding that some steps have dependencies).
Look at your team’s current sales processes. How many steps does it take from that initial call to onboarding a new client? If your process is overly complex, is there a way to streamline it so that it takes less time?
For example, if you sell software and require all prospects to attend a live demo with one of your sales managers before you’ll even provide general pricing details can you offer some guidance earlier in your sales process to speed things up? You might learn that a lot of time is wasted performing demos and having meetings with prospects who only have a budget that’s half of what your product costs.
Another place you might be able to optimize your sales process is around approvals. Do your sales reps need approval from a manager before executing a contract or statement of work? Can you automate this process to turn around a contract quicker and ensure your prospect won’t be distracted from singing right away?
Employing the right sales technology
Having sales technology alone won’t help with sales acceleration. But, having the right technology and using it for the right things absolutely will drive acceleration. While there are some tools that specifically bill themselves as sales acceleration software, almost any sales tool can be used to accelerate sales.
Consider how you handle customer relationship management. Having a CRM with additional tools for sales enablement (to provide the right content at the right time), transcribing sales calls (so reps don’t spend hours adding or summarizing notes), or notifications for email tracking and so you’re doing outreach and follow up at the right points in your sales pipeline can really enable speedier sales success.
Other places you can use technology to speed up the sales process are by using tools for marketing automation to drive leads, social listening tools to scrap social media sites like LinkedIn to learn more about your prospects and help develop better relationships, and predictive analytics to help reps prioritize where they put their time and energy.
Enhancing sales rep efficiency and effectiveness
The tools sellers use are only as good as they know how to use them. This is why looking at rep efficiency and effectiveness is the final core element of sales acceleration in your sales organization.
Start by looking at the metrics you track for each salesperson. How many phone calls, emails or meetings should they be having with quality leads each week? Are they easily hitting those numbers, or is it a challenge for them to do the basics of what is expected? If the majority of your reps aren’t hitting the baseline for performance, that’s a big red flag.
There are two ways you, as a sales leader, can choose to address this. First, provide sales coaching or feedback to help sellers better utilize their time and/or adjust the targets to be more attainable. If the majority of the team is struggling and not just one or two bottom performers, the latter might be needed —- sometimes; you do need to slow down a little to speed up sales growth.
But, once you have a team performing well and hitting their targets, it’s smart to try to optimize and improve performance. Are there tools or resources you can provide to help make reps more productive?
Things, like call scripts, AI transcription, playbooks, and proposal templates, can all support sellers and help them do their jobs faster and more efficiently.
The Sales Acceleration Formula
If you’re the type who loves to read, you might want to pick up Mark Roberge’s book, 'The Sales Acceleration Formula'’ To steal a few words from the book’s sales page, “Everyone wants to build the next $100 million business and author Mark Roberge has actually done it using a unique methodology that he shares with his readers. As an MIT alum with an engineering background, Roberge challenged the conventional methods of scaling sales utilizing the metrics-driven, process-oriented lens through which he was trained to see the world. In this book, he reveals his formulas for success. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand.”
The impact of sales acceleration on business growth
Considering sales acceleration solutions and implementing them into your business will impact your business growth for years to come. It’s important that you’ve set up your business to handle the impact of additional sales volume and new customers.
When done right, you’ll reap the benefits including:
More revenue to invest in the business
Having a higher sales volume as a result of sales acceleration gives you more money to invest in the business. You could add sales reps or sales support team members, new tools like sales engagement platforms, sales training, or even invest in marketing, customer support, or your product.
Another result of this additional revenue might be more sales commissions paid out as sellers are hitting their quotas faster - while this money isn’t a direct investment in your business, having sellers hitting quotas and making money may boost your bottom line when it comes to employee retention.
Greater share of the market
The faster you win, the slower your competition can win. If potential customers are choosing your solution more often, it means they’re going with the competition less often. And more satisfied customers might mean more referrals, growing your share of the market, and crushing your competition.
Increased brand awareness
This ties back to a greater share of the market. The more people that use your product or service, the more brand awareness you’re able to build, and the easier it will be for your sales team to close deals.
Think about it this way: if a potential customer is looking for a financial management application to send invoices and track their P&L, are they going to choose QuickBooks or some smaller, unknown application with similar functionality and a much higher price tag? If all things are equal, they’ll likely choose QuickBooks as its a brand they’re familiar with.
How to implement sales acceleration best practices in your org
Going faster might help with sales acceleration, but in order to play the long game, you’ll have to do more than that. These six best practices will have the right people doing the right things in the right order to really accelerate your sales.
Align your teams properly for sales acceleration
If you’re trying to have your sales team move faster, you want to start by aligning all of the professionals that support your go-to-market strategy, so this also includes your marketing team and sales enablement.
Having clearly defined roles for each member of these teams and determining how they can best collaborate will allow you to execute your new strategy flawlessly. It’s also important to avoid letting egos get in the way. As your organization grows, it can be easy for people to volley for self-promotional opportunities - to the detriment of the organization.
To avoid this, leaders should strive to provide opportunities for growth and recognition while quickly shutting down any political grandstanding. It’s not unusual for organizations today to have no assholes policy, and it’s something worth considering as you grow. One toxic team member can derail sales acceleration.
Consult sales experts when building your enablement platform
It’s great to have a team of sales enablement professionals who can help you build out your sales enablement platform and add content for each of the personas you sell to at each stage of your sales funnel. But, if you don’t consult the sellers, you might end up with content that misses the mark.
Having sales professionals who are actually out in the field (or the Zoom room) selling communicate their needs and share feedback and ideas will help make the sales enablement platform more useful and powerful.
We talk a lot about making data-driven decisions to accelerate sales and your sellers offer a lot of data points from their experience.
Offer coaching programs for your sales coaches
As you work to develop and implement sales acceleration programs, ensure your sales coaches are prepared to support your efforts.
Ensure they reinforce the new behaviors you want to see in your sales organization to drive lasting change. For example, if you’re leaning more heavily on lead scoring than in the past, ensure your sales managers are coaching reps to look at the top-scoring leads each day when prioritizing outreach instead of using other criteria like when the lead was submitted or something else arbitrary.
Leverage your data to create a winning content strategy
One of the mantras of sales acceleration should be test, don’t guess. And testing leads to gathering a lot of data that can be used to refine strategy, especially when it comes to content.
In order to create the best content strategy both internally (sales enablement) and externally (buyer enablement), you want to gather data about how the content is being utilized and what results you’re getting.
For example. Let’s say you sell personal accounting software, and you do a content audit to find that your best lead magnet is an annual planning guide for creating a new budget. How else can you use this information to create more of the content your audience wants and needs? Maybe you can create a guide to budgeting for the holidays or for taking that dream vacation. These guides, coupled with your software, help your customers achieve their financial goals! Pretty powerful stuff that can lead to an increase in sales.
Remove blockers
This one feels obvious; of course, we need to remove blockers to help people move faster. But, in reality, sometimes we don’t even know what these blockers are. Additional manual reports, paperwork, project management, and additional administrative burdens might help leaders understand what’s happening in the business but can take a lot of time away from selling.
When working on your sales acceleration strategy, consider any activities your sales reps are doing outside of spending time with customers and see if you can either delegate them or automate them to give sales reps back valuable time to close deals.
Invest in a unified set of tools
One way to remove blockers and accelerate sales is by making an investment in a unified set of tools. These tools should allow sellers and sales teams to run their deals from the top of the funnel to close and run the business by creating needed reporting, forecasting, and financial modeling.
Having duplicate entries or having tools that don’t “talk to each other” can seriously slow down the sales process, adding to the administrative burden we’ve already discussed. Also, having unified tools can help your customers, too, by making sure they have all of the information and documents at their fingertips.
Tools for sales acceleration
There are so many tools that can be used to support sales acceleration that we’d need another article to address all of the best choices. But, when thinking about your technology stack these are some of the pieces you should consider having or adding if you’re looking to speed things up.
CRM
Think of a CRM as the heart of the sales team. All of the customer’s data should live here. Notes from meetings, logs of collateral sent, and analytics around what has been opened can all live under a customer’s record.
When it comes to choosing the right CRM for your sales organization, think about the size of your business and sales team, the functionality you need, and the size of your budget. Many software companies offer a lite version of their CRM for free. You can also choose something like Salesforce that can be highly customized for your team's needs and business goals.
Marketing automation
A marketing automation tool like Hubspot can save your team many hours of manual work. From automating early parts of the sales process like outreach, some follow-up, and even sending emails and tracking communications. If you want to go faster, adding some marketing automation is guaranteed to help.
Proposal and collateral generation
Creating personalized sales collaterals and proposals can be a time-consuming process if sellers have to start from scratch every time. Proposal software like Qwilr can really help with sales acceleration in that it can house templates designed to brand standards with core messaging for sellers to simply customize for each client.
It integrates with most of the popular CRM systems so sellers can avoid duplicate entries, and the analytics that are native to Qwilr can help salespeople know when their proposals are being read, what sections are being viewed, and when to follow up. Taking the guesswork out of the process.
Sales enablement
Having the right information and key data points to move sales conversations and proposals forward could be the difference between winning and losing, needing four meetings, and being able to get the deal done in three
Sales enablement platforms like Highspot, Salesloft, and Seismic can help sellers seamlessly close more deals by arming them with the information they need. If you’re not at a point where investing in a sales enablement platform, you can also arm teams with sales battle cards or playbooks. And to get more bang for your buck, you can build these right in Qwilr.
Reporting
Sales teams should know where they stand at all times to help them make strategic business decisions. Having the right data to accelerate your sales means knowing when you should invest in more salespeople, add dollars to the marketing budget, or consider looking at new markets. At a minimum, you want to know what your pipeline looks like, how many deals are in each sales stage, how many deals you’ve closed this year, and how many you’ve lost. You should be able to sort this data by rep to understand both individual and team performance and address issues before they become too big.
Communication and collaboration
Having the right tools for communication and collaboration can help accelerate your sales. Ensure your teams have consistent access to video conferencing tools like Zoom and Teams and easy ways to communicate with each other and the sales enablement and marketing teams.
You can also use scheduling tools like Calendly to eliminate some of the back and forth when trying to schedule external meetings.
Overcoming common challenges in sales acceleration
When it comes to sales acceleration, two of the biggest challenges you might face include rep burnout and a poor sales team culture. Due to increased pressure to perform faster, sales reps risk burning out. It's critical that sales leaders check in with team members often to ensure they’re taking enough time to rest and recover. This might be as simple as making sure nights and weekends are generally free from work obligations. But, if you work in an industry that requires travel and frequent dining out with clients and prospects, it's worth finding some other solutions so your reps don’t burn out.
When it comes to team culture, try to ensure you’re rewarding your team members for working together and helping each other. Having a goal of seeing who can close the most deals fastest can create competition and discourage collaboration. Incentivizing collaborative opportunities can help ensure that you’re closing deals and building a culture where reps work together and help.
Building a sales operation that allows for sales acceleration
Accelerating your team’s sales requires the right infrastructure, team members, tools, and culture. Finding a sustainable pace to grow quickly is a challenge for many sales organizations. Consider your current tools and processes carefully and work with your teams to find new ways to remove friction from sales processes.
If you need help building sales materials for your sales reps and prospects, look no further than Qwilr. Our software solutions can help your teams with sales enablement materials, one sheets, battle cards, collateral, proposals, and contracts. Schedule a demo to see how we can help you with your sales acceleration.
About the author
Marissa Taffer|Founder & President of M. Taffer Consulting
Marissa Taffer is the Founder & President of M. Taffer Consulting. She brings over 15 years of sales and marketing experience across various industries to a broad range of clients.
Frequently asked questions
A sales acceleration approach is where sales teams work to optimize their processes in order to close deals more quickly. This can result in more deals closed and shorter sales cycles.
