What is Sales Acceleration? 9 Strategies and Tools to Boost Your Sales

Every business is looking for ways to maximize sales in today’s fast-paced environment, but the sales process is sensitive, and sales teams are often working at capacity already. A sales process that moves too slowly may mean losing your leads to another company, but rushing too quickly through the process often means missing key information or moving faster than your prospects, leaving them unprepared to make a purchase. You have to find the right balance, which is where sales acceleration helps.

Sales acceleration uses strategies to help speed up the sales cycle without sacrificing quality interactions with prospects. This technique makes the entire sales process more efficient, easing the burden on your sales team and helping grow your revenue. That’s why it’s essential to learn how it differs from traditional sales methods and the ways in which you can incorporate it into your business.

What is sales acceleration?

This technique isn’t just about speeding up your existing sales tasks. Sales acceleration focuses on creating a more efficient sales process by using specific strategies and tools. For example, using analytics tools to optimize your marketing campaigns to bring in more qualified leads or tracking prospect interactions helps your sales team know when and how to approach them.

Along with data analytics and contact management tools, sales acceleration uses content in more relevant and strategic ways so prospects become more engaged with your company. It also requires training your teams on the right sales techniques, such as when leads should be handed over to sales from marketing and how your sales team can develop trust and value-based relationships with prospects.

Sales acceleration is designed for more meaningful interactions that ultimately help speed up their progress through your sales pipeline—bringing you more sales in a shorter period of time.

Traditional Sales Process vs Accelerated Sales Process

There are similarities between traditional and accelerated sales processes—both follow the same steps within the sales cycle and complete them in the same order. This process includes:

1. Using lead generation to gather prospects
2. Qualifying them using lead-scoring techniques
3. Engaging with prospects to develop a strong relationship
4. Offering quotes on pricing
5. Making the sale to close the deal
6. Tracking your wins and losses

The main difference between the two processes is that an accelerated sales process uses software applications and other tools in each step, which helps increase the velocity of your sales cycle. Take lead generation, for instance. In the sales acceleration process, your team would use specific tools designed to capture leads quickly and gather personal information (like their demographic data or level of engagement with your business) as well.

This data is critical for accurately scoring and qualifying your leads, which lead management tools also enhance. Other technologies, such as sales engagement platforms and analytics tools, are incorporated into the remaining steps of your accelerated sales process to reduce the time it takes to close the deal.

These tools help automate many of the mundane tasks within your sales process and make each step more efficient without hurting your sales teams’ ability to connect with prospects at critical points. That’s why many businesses are choosing an accelerated sales process to help boost their revenue.

The Sales Acceleration Formula

Mark Roberge introduced the sales acceleration formula in 2015, offering strategies and tips for building an effective and efficient sales process in the fast-paced digital sales environment. Here are the four main formulas Roberge believes your business needs to consider when moving to an accelerated sales process.

1. The Sales Hiring Formula

Your business shouldn’t hire salespeople based on their resume alone. Instead, focus on finding the right fit based on your company’s values, products, and needs.

Before beginning the hiring process, you’ll want to develop guidelines based on the ideal skills, characteristics, and experience your business is looking for. Personal characteristics, like work ethic and curiosity, should be considered along with their past sales experience when evaluating candidates. You want to hire someone who embraces your company values and complements the skills of your existing sales team.

2. The Sales Training Formula

According to Roberge, having your new salespeople shadow other team members or your sales manager isn’t the most effective way to train them. While it is important for new sales members to learn the ropes by observing product demos and customer interactions, a more effective training program will help them learn the ins and outs of your sales process faster.

Sales training should include key details about your audience segments and cover your typical customers’ buyer’s journey—including how to combat customer objections and at which points to touch base through prospect interaction. Your sales training program should also help them develop new skills, whether those skills include sales acceleration tools or soft skills, to improve the effectiveness of their communications and other sales efforts.

3. The Sales Management Formula

The sales management formula is about holding your sales and marketing teams accountable through performance analysis and coaching. To analyze team and individual performance, you’ll first need to identify key metrics for each stage of your sales cycle.

Metrics, like the number of qualified leads or marketing campaign ROI (return on investment), are just a few examples that help measure effectiveness at the earlier stages of your sales funnel. Further down the funnel, you’ll want to track and evaluate sales performance using metrics such as sales velocity, win rate, and customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Data analytics tools make gathering and assessing performance simple, as your team can quickly gauge their performance through dashboard visualizations, like line graphs, to see where they stand. Setting clear expectations from the start and measuring performance on an ongoing basis will help everyone stay on track and accountable for their work.

Coaching is another key component, it helps identify and correct weak spots within individuals and teams to close more deals and raise productivity levels. Encourage a coaching culture within your business by having sales managers meet with each team member separately, so they can develop goals and a plan of action.

Roberge also recommends using employee incentives and internal promotions as part of the sales management formula. When your business grows—especially if it’s a result of your sales team’s actions—your employees may expect something in return for their hard work. Regularly evaluating your compensation plan helps ensure that commissions and other incentives are in line with your growth and an individual’s performance, boosting morale. Promoting from within instead of recruiting from outside is one way to achieve this.

4. The Demand Generation Formula

Sales has moved away from outbound marketing (like cold calling) to inbound lead generation strategies, attracting leads through content marketing, social media posts and ads, customer reviews, and other means. By analyzing what actions your lead takes and the content they’re engaging with, your sales team can determine their interests, preferences, and what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in.

Taking advantage of technology makes this even easier, as tools can automatically track and organize this data for you. These tools not only save you time, but they also help you gain insights into your customers so you can develop more effective sales strategies and move them through the funnel faster.

5 Types of Sales Acceleration Tools

Investing in the right type of sales acceleration software or tools is key if you want to quicken the time it takes to transform leads into customers. Here are five tools that can do just that.

Lead Scoring

When it comes to leads, you know that quality trumps quantity every time. The more qualified a lead is, the more likely they are to become your customer. That’s where lead scoring tools come in, using data to evaluate and score leads based on your unique qualifications (like their level of engagement with your business or how well they fit into your target audience). This automation tool does the work for you, so sales team members can focus on higher-level work.

Lead Routing

Lead management platforms automate the lead routing process, increasing its overall efficiency and ensuring that leads are divided up fairly among your team. This tool also distributes leads based on each team member’s experience and qualifications, so leads are always being routed to the most relevant and appropriate sales members for better outcomes.

Analytics

Data analytics tools help you make informed decisions during every stage of the sales cycle. You can use analytics platforms to learn more about your prospects, track marketing and sales performance, measure customer experience and satisfaction, or find new opportunities to increase productivity and growth. AI-powered analytics tools with predictive capabilities can even help you forecast future sales and identify changing market or consumer trends that will impact your sales efforts.

Email Generation and Tracking

Sending engaging, personalized emails to prospects throughout the buyer’s journey becomes less challenging when you’re using sales engagement and email marketing tools. These platforms use customer data to develop personalized outreach emails and offer pre-built templates for common uses like order confirmations or frequently asked questions. You’re able to track the delivery of your emails and whether the receiver opens or clicks through the email to measure your campaign’s effectiveness.

Contact Management

Contact management software keeps all your prospect and customer information organized and up-to-date in one place. This tool automatically keeps track of all interactions to help make future communications less repetitive and more effective at moving them down the funnel. And, its features even alert your team if their contact information changes, so you don’t accidentally lose a lead.

How To Accelerate Sales Cycle: 4 Tips

If increased sales and revenue growth are among your business goals, then it’s important to have the right tools, resources, and sales strategies on board. Here are a few tips that can help boost your sales.

Leverage Data-Driven Insights

Before you can optimize and accelerate your sales cycle, you first need to know where you currently stand by analyzing your marketing and sales metrics. What’s currently performing well, and what can be improved? Evaluating team performance, as well as individuals, can help identify areas where teams may need more support and where you can try out new strategies.

Embrace Continuous Improvement

After you’ve assessed your current performance, you need to develop sales goals and strategies to accelerate your sales process. Start building your framework using marketing and sales tactics that are already performing well for your business. Examine your marketing and lead generation activities to see which have the highest ROI and what types of outreach are leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

From there, you can create new, accelerated approaches and train your teams to ensure they understand the new process and have the needed skills to succeed. But, even after all strategies are in place, you’re not done yet. You’ll need to continuously monitor your sales acceleration process, so you can make adjustments to strengthen your strategies for improved performance.

Build Buyer Personas

If you don’t already have one, creating a buyer persona is key to understanding your ideal customers—their interests, motivations, challenges, and more. Your buyer persona’s profile can be used to develop lead generation and scoring strategies, helping you attract people who will be more aligned with your company’s products, services, and values. Sales teams can also use the buyer persona to develop deeper, more meaningful connections during prospect interactions, leading to greater satisfaction and swifter movement down the sales funnel.

Strategize Before Embracing Technology

Before investing in a tool or platform, evaluate your company’s specific needs. Is there a certain step of the sales process that you need assistance with more than others? If so, you may want to consider a single-use tool instead of, or in addition to, an all-in-one platform.

Identify the goals you want to achieve and the features you’re looking for to help narrow down your options. Any tool you choose should provide the capabilities required to meet your objectives. For instance, if you’re interested in developing a more data-driven sales process, you need to look for a tool or platform that offers analytics. Also, take note of the tools and software you’re already using to ensure any new sales acceleration tools will integrate with your system.

Boost Your Sales Acceleration Strategy with Podium

If you’re ready to accelerate your company’s sales process, consider Podium. Our all-in-one platform streamlines every step of your sales process so you can get more leads and sales by integrating it with the tools you’re already using. Watch a demo to learn more.