Whoever coined the saying “time is money” probably worked in sales. When sellers are more productive, they can close more deals faster.
Of course, it’s not all about speed. Sales reps must strike the right balance between speed and quality of customer interactions.
That’s why sales acceleration makes so much sense.
In this post, we’ll explore how sales acceleration can help you grow revenue – and six key ways you can increase sales acceleration at your organization.
What is sales acceleration?
Let’s define sales acceleration and explore its implications for your company and your customers.
Sales acceleration is the process of improving your approaches and strategies to move prospects through the sales funnel more efficiently.
Sales acceleration is a classic win-win scenario. For your company, it means more deals and fewer resources expended. For your customers, it means less wasted time and a better overall experience.
Does sales acceleration help grow revenue?
While we’re on the topic of old adages, we should address another one: What happened to “slow and steady wins the race”?
That’s not the case when it comes to sales acceleration. Sure, you don’t want your reps to rush through sales discovery calls or other customer interactions, but one of the best ways to grow revenue is to take your time and use it more effectively. Sales acceleration allows you to identify better and take advantage of existing revenue opportunities.
For example, say you use one sales acceleration strategy: lead qualification. When you qualify leads before contacting them, you save time on people who are likely to buy and get better results from the same amount of resource expenditure. This leads to more revenue because you’re focused on leads that show proven interest or receptiveness.
And the faster, the better. Lead qualification success is reduced 10x when reps wait longer than five minutes to respond to a form fill or inquiry. At anything over 10 minutes, that decrease in success jumps to 400%.
Lead qualification is reduced
The same idea applies to all sales acceleration tools and strategies. The time, resources, and leads are out there; sales acceleration improves revenue by cutting waste and putting your focus in the right places.
6 tips to increase sales acceleration
Ready to accelerate sales? Here are just a few tips to get you started:
#1: Use the right tools
Sales acceleration tools help your reps know what to say, show or send, giving them the visibility necessary to determine which deals need particular attention. For example, the best sales acceleration software allows you to keep track of details such as:
- Whether prospects are mentioning your competitors
- Whether deals are multi-threaded
- What messaging is used on calls, and whether this aligns with your most up-to-date recommendations
Based on this information, sales acceleration tools can surface the best training solutions and identify top revenue-driving content, helping move deals forward. This could include building digital sales rooms to set up a mutual action plan.
#2: Improve your sales onboarding and training
To accelerate sales, you need to build out your onboarding and training materials with processes that clearly connect to real-world scenarios. One of the best ways to do this is to deploy sales plays with all necessary information — including everything a rep needs to say, show and do — to sell a new product or build relationships with particular personas.
To make these trainings even more effective, consider using clips from recorded calls or top practice sessions — and don’t forget to make this content available on-demand in a training or onboarding library.
#3: Get more from your notes
Instead of having reps waste valuable time — and potentially distract themselves — by taking notes on calls, use sales acceleration tools to automate notetaking, transcribe communications and gather voice-of-market insights.
This doesn’t just make it easier to learn from every interaction and identify areas for improvement; it also helps you uncover trends that enable reps to choose the right messaging at the right time. They’ll have what they need to use revenue-driving content to win more deals.
#4: Foster better deal collaboration and coaching
To accelerate sales, perform accurate revenue forecasting and more, you need clear communication across multiple roles and departments. Fostering this collaboration requires smoothly sharing the most important content.
For example, have your Business Development Representatives (BDRs) share call snippets with reps and reps share call snippets with Sales Engineers (SEs) and Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to make hand-offs simpler and more effective. You should also empower managers with a coaching workflow based on real data from multiple sources. This enables them to see how healthy their team’s deals and calls are — plus, they can make actionable plans to coach at key intervals.
#5: Consolidate everything
From data and background information to training material and sales enablement content, reps can juggle a lot when navigating a single call or communication. Give them access to everything they need, but don’t overwhelm them with unnecessary or poorly organized information. Instead, provide a more streamlined user experience to reduce clicks and save time. This makes reps more agile and better able to respond in unfamiliar scenarios, but it also speeds up prospect communication and makes your sales funnel faster and simpler.
#6: Adjust your sales acceleration strategy regularly
A sales acceleration strategy depends heavily on best practices, up-to-date messaging, new sales enablement materials, and even the latest version of your sales acceleration software. That means there are a variety of changes that can impact your strategy.
For example, you should track whether sales processes and methodologies are adopted. This can change everything from return on investment (ROI) to sales performance and revenue, so it has a big impact on sales acceleration.
Say you use MEDDPICC — a sales qualification methodology that stands for:
- Metrics
- Economic buyer
- Decision criteria
- Decision process
- Paper process
- Implicate the pain
- Champion
- Competition
To ensure you get the most out of every MEDDPICC idea or approach, you should have a MEDDPICC score based on how much information you can provide. You would also have a playbook with best practices and practical guidance, plus training, daily sales report (DSR) templates, and a Mutual Action Plan developed with this methodology in mind.
Benefits of implementing a sales acceleration strategy
Once you’ve implemented all the right tips and your sales acceleration approach is well underway, you could start seeing benefits around every corner. For example:
- Filled quotas: With a solid sales acceleration solution at your reps’ fingertips, more of them can achieve their quotas faster. That means more deals won, more experience with different persona types, and more revenue.
- Better wins: Bigger, better, faster wins are possible using the right sales acceleration tools. You’re connecting dots to streamline experiences, improving the deals, not just the processes that build them.
- Smoother hand-offs: A completed deal is a product of multiple teams and departments. Sales acceleration makes it smoother and quicker to communicate key points and create better internal and external experiences.
- Reduced churn: Grow your customer base and reduce churn simultaneously. It’s all possible thanks to better processes and more prepared reps.
- Scalable sales motion: Make your sales motion repeatable and scalable with best practices, training, and other sales acceleration solutions.
- Adoption: Accelerating sales allows you to more easily adapt your sales process and methodology to a “win every stage” approach. This also means improving your stage-to-stage conversions.
Types of sales acceleration tools
There are various tools in the market to help with sales acceleration. Let’s take a closer look at some of the common types of sales acceleration tools.
#1 Prospecting tools
Prospecting is foundational to the sales process. After all, if you can’t find the right prospects, you won’t have anyone to sell to. Prospecting tools allow you to find and contact prospects who are a good fit for your product or service more effectively.
#2 Lead scoring tools
Sellers only have so many hours in the day. You want them to spend their time with prospects most likely to convert. Lead scoring tools help revenue teams identify which leads are the most valuable.
#3 Contact management tools
Contact management tools help revenue teams keep track of details for their current and prospective customers.
#4 Activity tracking tools
Each deal has several moving pieces. Activity tracking tools enable sellers to keep track of all their interactions with prospects.
#5 Revenue enablement tools
Sellers need the right tools, training, and resources to be effective and efficient. An integrated revenue enablement platform like Mindtickle provides sales teams targeted training, personalized coaching, and real-time insights. Our integration of conversation intelligence and ability to set and track challenging yet achievable goals ensures a complete approach to driving sales success.
#6 Sales dialers
Sales reps spend a large portion of their time making calls. While these calls are necessary, manually typing in hundreds of numbers is tedious and time-consuming. Sales dialers are a sales acceleration tool that automates outbound calling.
#7 Sales engagement tools
Modern B2B sellers expect tailored communication and experiences throughout the purchase journey. However, meeting these expectations and effectively engaging buyers is time-consuming.
Sales engagement tools automate communication with prospects. With the right tools, sellers can deliver personalized, targeted outreach at scale.
#8 Sales forecasting tools
Accurate forecasting is important. The right sales acceleration tools empower teams to create more accurate forecasts. In addition, these tools can flag at-risk deals so sales managers can step in to provide guidance and coaching to improve the deal’s outcome.
Start accelerating sales today
A sales acceleration solution may sound like a significant shift, but it doesn’t have to be. All you need is a platform that can integrate your processes and data.
Mindtickle is more than sales acceleration software — it’s a single home for all your sales enablement, training, coaching, and enablement content and solutions. You can even share sales data with other teams to improve collaboration and further support the customer experience.
Start Accelerating Sales Today
Set up time to see how Mindtickle combines enablement, training, coaching, content, and conversation intelligence to help reps win deals faster.
Get a DemoThis post was originally published in May 2023, updated in December 2023, and again in August 2024.
By Rahul Mathew
