As businesses adapt and change, the common goals remain: sellers aim to increase productivity, while B2B buyers seek solutions to their business challenges through purchases. Technology that accelerates sales benefits sellers by increasing efficiency and improving buyer engagement.
This innovative approach can expedite your entire sales process, improve conversion rates, and increase revenue substantially. In today's competitive market, staying ahead is important, and sales acceleration can provide you with an advantage. Improving certain aspects of your sales process can lead to faster and more consistent results.
The key is not to focus on working harder or making more calls. Sales acceleration involves working smartly and utilizing proven strategies.
So, let's figure out what exactly sales acceleration is.
This guide provides an overview of sales acceleration, its significance, and the sales acceleration technology available for boosting revenue in your organization.
Let's begin by defining "sales acceleration."
What exactly is sales acceleration?
Sales acceleration involves using various strategies by businesses to streamline the movement of leads through the sales pipeline. In today's business environment, many strategies involve using sales software tools. This technology consists of content, databases, research tools, tracking technology, and analytics capabilities, all of which help speed up the sales process and allow your sales teams to close more deals more efficiently. They can use specific content, analytics, and resources that cater to their target audience to create a meaningful connection and encourage further engagement.
The conventional sales process
The phases of the sales process have remained consistent over the years. Regardless of the market, whether business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), the fundamental steps of any sales process are the same. These steps are:
Generating leads through prospecting
Categorizing these leads
Establishing a connection
Offering various pricing options
Finalizing the agreement
Tracking the outcome
The accelerated sales process
The accelerated sales process moves at a faster pace than the traditional approach. However, the steps remain the same. The evolution of software and widespread data has not removed important touchpoints but has simply accelerated each stage. Here is how an accelerated process that modern companies use:
Utilizing prospecting tools and lead generation software to find potential leads
Scoring and assigning leads with lead management software
Utilizing sales engagement platforms to enhance communication, quoting, and closing processes
Optimizing outreach, quotation, and closing deals with personalized messaging and interactive demos
Tracking results with sales analytics software
What's the purpose of sales acceleration?
Selling a SaaS product can be a challenging process, particularly when it is expensive and requires a significant amount of research before making a purchase decision.
The typical process involves approximately eight touchpoints, such as reading a blog post, watching a demo, receiving emails, making phone calls, and more. The sales cycle is often lengthy as a result.
Sellers who were once used to in-person meetings, business trips, and client dinners found themselves working from home, looking at a screen. Sellers should hence focus on creating personalized content experiences to build relationships with customers, especially in digital-first sales cycles. Utilizing sales acceleration technologies can assist go-to-market teams in managing more complex deal cycles.
Digital-first sales motions have become increasingly common. According to McKinsey & Company, a majority of buyers (75%) prefer to continue digital interactions. Additionally, 97% of buyers are willing to spend up to $50,000 in virtual environments, with 15% willing to spend $1 million without meeting face-to-face.
Without an effective framework, lead conversion can be a lengthy process.
Additionally, there is a risk of not making a sale, resulting in a loss of resources without any return.
Sales acceleration aims to efficiently move prospects through the sales process, optimizing resources, hitting revenue goals, and increasing profitability.
The role of sales acceleration in driving business growth
It is evident that sales acceleration is increasingly important for the success of an organization. When aiming to increase sales acceleration in your organization, it is important to consider various best practices.
So, how is this done?
The key is to create more innovative and efficient strategies than traditional prospecting methods.
Analyzing your sales cycle in detail is crucial for identifying and eliminating any inefficiencies that may be hindering your progress.
Then, by implementing real-time buying signals and improving the transition from marketing to sales, leads can be converted more efficiently, leading to increased business growth.
In a competitive market, sales acceleration can be crucial in ensuring your market share and standing out against competitors.
Different methods for sales acceleration
Several commonly used methods are as follows:
Lead qualification
While many potential leads may be interested in your SaaS product, only a small percentage will ultimately convert into paying customers.
Lead qualification is key to sales acceleration, helping reps prioritize their focus on prospects.
Lead qualification involves determining which prospects meet specific criteria and are more likely to convert into customers. This helps you focus your sales efforts effectively.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is a method used by businesses to rank and prioritize qualified leads based on their actions and behaviors. Each lead's interactions, such as visiting specific pages, downloading content, or attending webinars, are assigned numerical scores. Major actions receive more points than minor ones.
These scores help you determine where your leads fall in the sales funnel and allow you to automate tracking through CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Sales teams can then prioritize efforts on leads with higher scores, maximizing efficiency and improving conversion rates. Continuous monitoring and refinement ensure the lead scoring model accurately reflects the characteristics of high-quality leads, ultimately driving revenue growth.
Lead routing
Lead routing is the systematic process of assigning leads to the most suitable sales representatives based on predefined criteria and meeting queues. By segmenting reps into meeting queues according to factors like lead location, company size, and industry, you as a business owner can ensure that each lead is directed to the most appropriate team member. This sales approach guarantees fairness and efficiency in lead distribution, maximizing the chances of successful conversion while optimizing resource allocation within the sales team.
Buyer research
A sales representative's proficiency in guiding hot leads through the sales funnel and maximizing conversion rates is heavily influenced by their level of knowledge about the buyer. Buyer research plays a crucial role in this process, involving the optimization of acquiring pertinent information such as company background, publicly available financial documents, competitive intelligence, company goals, and potential pain points. Armed with this comprehensive understanding, sales reps can tailor their pitch to cover relevant topics and directly address the prospect's needs. By leveraging this knowledge to offer personalized solutions and establish rapport, sales representatives can effectively navigate the sales process, build trust with prospects, and significantly increase the likelihood of successful conversions. Leading to a good buyer experience.
Email tracking
All the existing email marketing tools in the market are now equipped with email tracking. It helps sales reps receive notifications when a lead opens an email and clicks on a link. This actionable insight empowers reps to tailor their outreach efforts based on the lead's level of interest and engagement, allowing for more informed and timely follow-up emails.
]Marketing enablement
In the world of sales acceleration, one key factor that can significantly impact sales acceleration is GTM alignment. GTM, or go-to-market, alignment refers to the coordination and collaboration between marketing and sales teams to ensure they are working towards the same goals and objectives. When marketing and sales are on the same page, they can partner effectively to produce the right content that addresses customer needs and drives sales.
Automation
This process entails harnessing technology to streamline repetitive tasks, thereby enhancing the efficiency of sales operations. Tasks such as entering data into a CRM system, generating product estimates, facilitating seamless information sharing between marketing and sales departments, email automation, and processing orders are optimized through technology. By leveraging sales acceleration tools for these routine activities, sales representatives can minimize the time spent on administrative tasks and allocate more resources to activities that directly generate sales. This increases sales productivity and enables reps to focus on building relationships with prospects, identifying opportunities, and closing deals more effectively, ultimately driving revenue growth for the business.
Analytics
Analytics serve as a cornerstone in sales operations, providing a holistic perspective on many key performance indicators. These include lead distribution, management, individual and sales acceleration team performance, customer engagement, customer satisfaction, overall campaign effectiveness, and growth opportunities. Businesses gain invaluable insights into these sales acceleration metrics by leveraging analytics, enabling informed decision-making and strategic planning. Studies underscore the significance of data-driven insights, revealing that sales teams embracing analytics outperform those relying solely on intuition. This underscores the imperative of integrating analytics into sales acceleration strategies to navigate the intricacies of today's competitive landscape effectively and sustainably drive success.
Kickstart your sales acceleration process today!
Sales acceleration involves providing salespeople with efficient delivery of information and relevant context to help them close deals faster. Sales enablement software helps sales teams streamline their entire process by providing easy access to information, allowing them to focus on closing deals.
It is important to train your sales team to operate at a higher level and eliminate any inefficiencies that may be impacting their performance.
Fable helps you create outstanding personalized interactive demos that will make your potential customers fall in love with your product. By creating interactive demos with Fable, you can accelerate your sales process and generate more revenue. Give Fable a spin today, to create kickass demos for your product.