Moving fast is a make or fail sale. There is more competition than ever, buyers are more educated, and sales professionals need to provide faster solutions to stay relevant and successfully close deals.
To speed up the often grueling sales cycle, businesses must refine their sales strategy by increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales process. The key is to assess what’s working, what’s not working, and most importantly, what’s slowing you down.
Once you have defined the areas of opportunity in your sales approach, you will be able to create an effective strategy to accelerate your sales cycle.
What Is Sales Acceleration?
Sales acceleration refers to strategies that help businesses move prospects through the sales cycle more efficiently. The main goal is to quickly turn a person from a prospect into a customer.
Sales acceleration helps speed up the sales cycle by automating tasks and streamlining processes. Effective sales acceleration software, for example, provides timely data and insights to increase customer conversion rates. It can also form certain forms and procedures for easy and efficient use.
To accelerate sales, your resources, content and analytics are used to intentionally deliver impactful experiences that close deals faster. Ultimately, this means that prospects move seamlessly through the sales funnel, ensuring that you consistently achieve your revenue goals.
What Are the Benefits of a Sales Acceleration Strategy?
Relying only on traditional sales strategies is no longer sufficient – if you want to remain competitive, you must continually seek new opportunities to improve your sales approach and accelerate the sales cycle. If you’re not ahead of the curve, you’re definitely behind.
Sales teams that practice sales acceleration tend to close deals faster, which is a big win in itself. By properly prospecting, qualifying prospects and optimizing the entire sales process, sales reps can reduce cumbersome busy work and maximize sales productivity.
By implementing a strategy to accelerate sales, you can expect:
1 Make better use of your resources
2 Financial edge
3 Accelerate business growth through automation
4 track sales more efficiently
5 increase productivity
6 Converting prospects from leads to closes faster
7 Carve out time for sales professionals to focus on customer relations and support
How Do You Build a Sales Acceleration Strategy?
Without the right strategy, converting leads can feel like a painstaking process. To stay competitive, it’s important to adopt sales acceleration best practices and strategies that are most effective and relevant to your business.
With the right approach, you can convert leads very quickly. But how do you actually speed up the sales process for your business?
Here are some key ways to start building a successful sales acceleration strategy:
- Assessing Internal Inefficiencies and Opportunities
The first fundamental step in creating a strategy to accelerate sales is to understand your weaknesses. This allows you to eliminate pain points or bottlenecks experienced by your sales team.
Maybe your sales team has expressed unpreparedness for a product pitch meeting. Maybe your marketing team feels they don’t have enough data to target the right customer base. Perhaps product feedback has not been passed from the customer to the product team, leaving product specialists at a loss as to what improvements need to be made. Or maybe you find that your current support software isn’t that helpful.
It’s all about looking inside and assessing where your business is today, and identifying any inefficiencies that might be slowing you down and reducing your sales.
- Adopt new tools and technologies
Resisting new and innovative technologies is one of the biggest contributing factors to a passive and sluggish sales strategy.
Experimenting with new sales techniques may seem unnecessary, but the impact is undeniable. Sales technology, by design, significantly increases sales reps’ efficiency with their day-to-day tasks – streamlining how they enter and track data, generate workflows based on where they are in the sales cycle, and provide additional support when needed.
Adopting sales tools and technology to better equip your sales force for success will definitely facilitate faster closings.
- Flexibility is key
No matter how you decide which combination of strategies works best for your team, the important thing is to find the formula that works best for your business — and keep improving it.
Flexibility is the key to surviving any changes or changes in the market, regardless of the industry. Willing to adjust and open to trying new approaches. As markets, technologies and personnel change, your needs and opportunities will change. Losing the ‘we always do it’ attitude will help you maintain your current sales position.
6 Effective Tips for Sales Acceleration
If you’ve decided that you need to outperform your competitors to drive sales, here are some tips for building an effective strategy:
- Align Marketing, Sales and Product Teams
An important component of any accelerated sales strategy is ensuring that your marketing, sales and product teams are aligned.
Your sales team needs to understand the inside and outside of the product they’re promoting, and the product team needs to understand customer needs in order to come up with a product that satisfies. When your sales team knows the content your marketing team is presenting, they are more likely to use it during customer calls or promotions. Sales representatives can also provide marketers with feedback that can help push content more effectively.
More often than not, gaps and frustration with results and performance can be overcome by aligning your team and encouraging collaboration – and you won’t know it until you evaluate and discuss it as a team.
- Invest in Sales Software
Sales software allows businesses to close sales faster by creating templates and customizing processes and tasks. It also provides visibility to the rest of the team about where everyone is in their workflow.
Sales techniques that synergize with your current supporting technology enable accelerated sales. Invest in and harness the power of sales software to streamline processes and maximize your efforts so that customers move more quickly through the sales cycle.
- Create Better Sales Training and Orientation Materials
Accelerate new hires through engaging and valid onboarding and training content.
By using a high-quality sales onboarding process, your sales representatives will be able to quickly pick up speed and build customer connections. The sooner they understand their business, processes, and customer needs, the sooner they can get started and find the right prospects with confidence.
An effective training manual is a catapult for increasing sales productivity. But remember, the job isn’t done once you’ve created your onboarding and training materials — you need to update your training materials as often as needed, and make it a priority to review updates with your sales team.
- Document Your Sales Process
The sales process helps sales professionals prospect, qualify, and ultimately close the deal – and documentation about your sales process helps them know how to do this.
A clear written strategy ensures that your sales representatives know what actions they need to take to follow up with prospects. In the event of confusion or misalignment, you will have the necessary documents to arrange the training opportunity.
Having process documents such as standard operating procedures (SOPs) on your sales process ultimately ensures that your sales team has everything they need to be successful. It’s a smart way to ensure everyone is playing the same music and have a consistent approach to converting prospects into customers.
- Provide on-demand sales performance support
One of the most resourceful ways to move your prospects through the sales cycle faster is to provide your sales representatives with live performance support when they need it.
With today’s sales environment, equipping your reps with real-time support is critical. Having useful content such as personalized self-help widgets, integrated chatboxes, or even a simple prompt feature to complete important tasks can help them make the most of the hours worked in their day. This eliminates time spent searching for support assistance and support information.
When your sales representatives feel empowered to act in a timely manner and effectively use interactive assistance, closing a sale becomes less like a marathon and more like a sprint.
- Use data to customize your sales process
Data-driven sales teams can save your organization time, energy, and money – resources your company can’t afford to waste.
Digging deeper into your company’s data and analytics will reveal actionable insights for your team. What is currently working for your sales team? What’s not working? Your sales software will help you find the answers to these questions, but data is also important here – the numbers don’t lie.
These data-driven insights can help you direct and train your sales reps in a way that will drive growth
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