Another big problem in sales in 2023 is pipeline acceleration. Sales leaders are asking how they can accelerate the early stages of their sales pipeline.
Sales cycles are so long right now. For many B2B companies, they're 20-30% longer than they were this time last year. Because of that, revenue leaders are looking for ways to both increase overall coverage and pipeline acceleration. We've talked about ways to increase pipeline coverage here. This post is about another vital component of your sales cycle - pipeline acceleration.
With unpredictable sales cycles and longer late stages, the sooner you can get a prospect on a demo to see if an opportunity has real potential, the better. So, how can you accelerate the early stages of your sales pipeline? How can you increase the speed with which you turn a lead into an opportunity, an SQO into an SAO, or a stage 1 opp into a stage 2 opp?
Here are five ways you can accelerate your sales pipeline.
1. Rethink your early stage processes
What’s the role of your SDR team in pipeline acceleration? Are there ways SDRs can move leads more quickly into a qualified opportunity? When can you fast-track certain leads straight to an AE? Do you need to update your SLAs around lead response times? Does your discovery process take too long? Can you auto-enrich leads differently to save time? Think about where you can improve data enrichment, automations, and other processes that can help you move more quickly to a demo.
2. Focus on your pipeline pipeline
Dig into data from your last two quarters and understand what kinds of deals are moving well through your early stages. Are there certain kinds of accounts or opportunities that are more likely to move forward? How can you get more of those? Marketing and sales should work together here to generate more top of the funnel leads in these areas.
And a note of caution: As you work to increase your pipeline coverage ratio, don’t just inflate your early stage pipeline by moving leads into opportunities if they're not ready.
3. Encourage reps to focus on early stage opps in the sales cycle
Make sure you have reps dedicated to moving opps through the early stages. Don’t let young opps die on the vine, when it's so easy to lose momentum. Are there ways you could incent sales reps to focus on early stage deals?
You should also ensure rep account books are the right size, so reps feel like they have the time to prioritize deals at every stage. If a rep has too many accounts, they'll focus on the later stage deals that seem more likely to close. Help them feel the urgency of working early stage deals too.
4. Return to things that don't scale
When times were good, we had to scale up our efforts to effectively manage deal flow. But now that inbounds have slowed down and deals are moving more slowly, it's worth taking a page from the entrepreneur's playbook and try things that might not scale. If a rep has a creative idea for keeping a deal moving, let them try it. Run experiments, try one-offs. Don't worry too much about scaling these up until you know they'll work. The key here is to get creative and find new ideas.
5. Give your prospect something they can take back to their boss
We know that deals can slow down right after a demo. Your point of contact probably needs to convince their team that your solution will work; there are stakeholders, budgets and a whole lot of status quo to manage. So what you can provide your POC that will help them make their case? Better yet, is there something you could provide to make them a bit of a hero? Figure out where their biggest organizational problems are, and help them bring something back to their team that helps with it.
What else have you tried to increase sales velocity in your early sales pipeline stages? We'd love to hear more about the sales acceleration tactics that have worked for you. Find us on Linkedin!
