Implementing sales acceleration is one of the best practices to simplify your sales process and boost sales performance. In this article, let’s discover why your business should have sales acceleration and how you can use it.
What Is Sales Acceleration?
Sales acceleration refers to gathering and analyzing data to determine strategies that help make a sales process more efficiently and effectively. It lays the groundwork for your sales reps so that they can know what they should do to move leads down the sales funnel.
Typically sales acceleration can involve reviewing the sales process and identifying areas that should be improved, applying technology solutions to centralize data and automate sales activities, and more.
Sales Acceleration Benefits
With sales acceleration, you can make your sales process faster, enhance your sales team’s productivity, and eventually boost your company’s revenue.
Sales without a sales acceleration strategy
- Take a lot of time researching and vetting new leads
- Reps working without timely guidance and instructions
- Data silos and mismatch between sales and marketing
- Approach forecasts and growth based on guesswork
- Miss out on changes, trends, risks, and opportunities
Sales with a sales acceleration strategy
- Focus on engaging prospects and closing deals
- Provide just-in-time coaching and training for reps
- Sales and marketing work in sync with each other
- Make accurate sales forecasts based on data and insights
- Keep track of everything in the pipelines and quickly adapt to changes
More specifically, sales acceleration helps you:
- Understand what deals have the best chance to win and what actions you can take to turn leads into actual customers.
- Keep track of risks that impact your sales pipeline’s performance and send alerts to your sales reps so they can take immediate action to manage those risks.
- Identify the best channels to communicate with customers and the best time to reach them so you can finetune your outreach strategies.
- Create more accurate sales forecasts and more actionable execution plans.
- Develop effective sales coaching programs to reinforce reps’ strengths and improve their weaknesses.
- Ensure your sales and marketing teams work well together and avoid conflicts.
Do You Need Sales Acceleration?
As said above, there are several reasons why you should implement sales acceleration. Done right, sales acceleration can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales strategies.
In case you still have doubt, you can use the signs below to determine if you need sales acceleration right now:
- Using a guess-and-check method for everything, from developing sales funnels to planning growth strategies to forecasting sales.
- Being confused between steps and priorities—reps find it hard to follow sales processes.
- Lacking insights into customers to deliver the right values to them, leading to low sales performance.
- Sales and marketing teams work separately and rarely communicate with each other.
- Adapting to changes slowly and without a well-structured approach.
Sales Acceleration Formula
A successful sales acceleration formula should include the following:
- Engagement tracking: The ability to track prospects’ activities, for example, email opens, email clicks, shares, likes, comments, live chat, etc. This helps you understand how much a prospect is interested in your business and how potential they become a customer.
- Data analytics: Features that provide real-time data and insights into deal sizes, the number of opportunities, deal risks, engagement, click-through rates, conversion rates, etc.
- Automation: Features that help automate repetitive tasks like syncing data between channels, creating reports, assigning reps, scheduling appointments, sending onboarding emails, etc.
- Personalization: Personalization capabilities that allow you to tailor content to individual prospects, making it easier for you to approach them, start conversations, and deliver what they expect.
How to Use Sales Acceleration for Driving Revenue Growth
According to Mark Roberge, there are three areas you should focus on when developing sales acceleration strategies: (1) sales process, (2) technology or tools, and (3) sales coaching and training. You can get started by answering these questions:
- Sales process: What does your current sales process look like? What are the characteristics of your ideal buyers? How do you identify qualified leads? How many opportunities do you have at each stage of a sales funnel? Do you have an efficient system to research leads before reaching out to them?
- Technology or tools: Are you using a technology solution to accelerate your sales? How does it fit into your organization? What is your return on investment? Does it help your reps speed up their workflow and win more deals?
- Sales coaching and training: How do you currently support your sales reps? What are their skill sets? What additional resources do you need to supply them? Who are the top-performing sales reps in your company?
How to Optimize Your Revenue Engine With Sales Acceleration Software?
Many businesses have adopted sales acceleration technologies like lead generation software, sales automation, and proposal makers to boost sales performance. While these tools can help improve certain aspects of the sales process, you should implement an all-in-one system like Revenue Grid to maximize your revenue.
Revenue Grid is a sales acceleration platform designed to accelerate revenue growth. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and complete communication data to surface insights and send real-time alerts to your reps so they can act quickly. That means with Revenue Grid, you can improve stage-to-stage conversation rates and shorten the sales cycle.
It’s important to note that Revenue Grid enables your reps to move deals in the pipeline with higher velocity. The reason is that your reps know what step to take next, easily identify decision-makers and influencers, and focus on the most critical things in their pipeline.
Sales Acceleration Tools
If you’re looking for a B2B sales acceleration tool, Revenue Grid is a perfect choice. As said above, it’s a revenue and sales intelligence platform offering seven powerful features: Revenue Signals, Pipeline Visibility, CRM and Email Integration, Team Analytics, Sales Sequences, Forecasting, and Deal Guidance.
Apart from Revenue Grid, you may also want to deploy other software like web conferencing, live chat, email marketing, and customer survey to facilitate the execution of your sales acceleration plan.
The faster your sales reps can see the opportunities and take action, the more likely they can seal the deals. And the best way to make this happen is by adopting an AI-powered sales acceleration solution.
