Background Conversation for Sales Velocity

In a prior episode, Africa Regional Host Dave Nel joined Trust Enablement Customer Council Member Petek Hawkins and Greg Stockton, CEO of Prosperity, a Financial Planning firm in Dubai, to explore the Sales Velocity Equation.

You should give a listen to hear a fantastic debate about the importance of optimizing the sales velocity, it’s impact on short-term and long-term business outcomes.

If the sales velocity KPI is one that matters for your business, focus your efforts on optimizing one of the key variables at a time to maintain focus on how your activities are influencing a given outcome.

Number of Opportunities

Throwing more deals into the pipeline is a great approach as long as they fit your ICP, truly ready to buy, and in all ways are fully qualified.

If you are looking to increase the number of opportunities, you need to ensure  marketing and sales teams are working very closely to:

• Align on the definition of well qualified and your ICP.
• That marketing is focused not on volume of leads, but on the quality.  This means changing their focus, and bonus programs, around new definitions and approaches.
• Ensure your inside sales team is fully trained to have effective conversations.
• Ensure your inside sales team is able to correctly prioritize and customize their outreach efforts to personalize to each lead’s potential needs.

Average Deal Size

Increasing your average deal size can happen in many ways, including raising the prices in your product catalog. 

For organizations where this is not feasible, the common methods include:

• Upselling and cross-selling more licenses or more products/solutions respectively.
• Decreasing the amount of discounting.

Both of these can be influenced by better training and coaching your teams on how to run discovery as well as by teaching them how to have value-driven vs. feature-driven sales conversations.

This can often be one of the easiest methods for improving sales velocity.

Win Rate %

When you consider how to influence win rates, you need to think about the solution from multiple angles:

• Lead and Deal quality as was already discussed above under Number of Opportunities.
  • In addition to the above, consider the fact that, on average, companies have much more success selling to existing customers vs. new prospects.  How actively are you selling to this audience?
• The effectiveness of your conversations during the deal cycle.  Do your sellers have a playbook to up level the conversations sellers are having with prospects.
• Coaching and training of sellers leads to more practice which will increase how well they run the playbooks.
• Demo quality.  Do the teams know your products well enough to run effective demos around the customers use cases vs. feature dumps.

You could add countless other items to the list above.

Average Deal Length

The majority of the recommendation to improve win rates will also lead to improvements in your average deal length which will improve overall sales velocity.