Your Complete Guide to Sales Acceleration

Sales acceleration perfectly answers the challenging demands that come with new-age consumers. It's all about improving the efficiency and speed of your sales process by identifying critical areas you can scale in value addition. With the proper team culture, analytics, and software tools, sales acceleration helps businesses create the ultimate sales process. 

In this guide, we will share actionable tips on how to get started with sales acceleration. But before all that, let’s quickly look at what sales acceleration really is and why it’s important:

What is Sales Acceleration, and Why is It Important?

Sales acceleration focuses on converting leads through the sales process as quickly as possible. It’s all about speed and efficiency with zero delays or fall-offs. To implement sales acceleration, managers have to look at the sales process to identify and eliminate bottlenecks or redundancies. Not only that, but they must also look outside, searching for any tools or technologies that can accelerate the sales process. The top goals of a sales acceleration framework include engagement-tracking, data analytics, automation, and content personalization. Automation partnered with the right technology can help improve redundant day-to-day tasks such as auto-dialing or inventory monitoring. That leaves room for businesses to focus on more strategic account management tasks. Sales acceleration delivers other benefits too. For example, it helps businesses generate more revenue and have predictable account growth. It also helps create engaged sales teams that approach prospective customers with personalized pitches.  Moreover, sales acceleration can help achieve the elusive marketing-sales alignment. Sales teams can provide data from their sales calls with prospects. For example, they can point out the top customer objections. Marketing teams, on the other hand, can use that data to fine-tune their campaigns.

5 Tips to Help You Get Started with Sales Acceleration

The specific implementation strategies can vary substantially. However, the primary goal is still to convert a lead as efficiently as possible. Here are five tips on how to get started with sales acceleration:

1. Align Your Teams

Not even the best sales acceleration strategies will work if your sales, marketing, and product teams are not aligned.  A report compiled by Deal Hub shows the effect of misalignment between teams. It also points out the importance of having a seamless collaboration between teams. Source: Deal Hub Sales teams need to understand the product they're pitching intrinsically. The product team needs to understand the customer's needs to deliver a satisfactory product. A smoother exchange between the marketing and sales team equips the sales team with the correct information for customer pitches. The sales rep should also give marketers feedback to help them push content with more impact.  As you can tell, team alignment plays a pivotal role in the success of sales acceleration. Therefore, create a culture that encourages efficient collaboration between teams. Also, provide the necessary tools to facilitate that collaboration. That brings us to the next point.

1. Use the Right Tools

Technology plays a prominent role in sales transformation and acceleration. A great example would be Cyberbiz. The company switched to DottedSign to cut down on time spent tracking down signatures and preparing contracts. From the switch, the average time from creating documents to signing was reduced from two weeks to 28 minutes, and document processing time was reduced from 4 hours to 15 minutes. Source: DottedSign Arming your team with the right tools helps you build a solid foundation for the entire sales process. Here are some of the primary sales acceleration tools you should look at:

Email tracking software 

The tool shows the exact date and time your sales or marketing emails are opened. That allows you to optimize your campaigns for the best results. For example, you can check when a lead usually opens your emails and ensure all future emails are sent at that particular time.

Inbound call tracking software

The tool tracks the source of inbound sales calls and displays the contextual data regarding the call or lead. Account managers can then use that data to ensure the lead is directed to the right person. These tools can also help you see what channels or campaigns are bringing in the most inbound calls. 

Market intelligence tools 

These give account managers and sales reps critical information on leads and accounts. The managers can then use that information to categorize leads into cold, warm, and hot groups. The intelligence also helps drive personalized engagements.

Outbound sales dialers

These are sales productivity tools that eliminate repetitive tasks within the sales process. For example, they will help your team send emails more intuitively or dial hot leads in just a single click.

Sales Webinar Software

Getting qualified leads via a sales webinar is an especially effective strategy for B2B high ticket sales. It arms your sales team with a powerful tool - live and personal interactions with very targeted leads. The best webinar platforms allow your reps to really engage with their audience, present the sales offer attractively, utilize social proof and ultimately schedule automatic follow-up emails. 

Sales gamification tools 

These tools help gamify some of the tasks in the sales process. In doing so, they make the sales process get entertaining and competitive. That could motivate your team to work harder.

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tools

CPQ tools automate the creation of sales quotations, proposals, and prices. That allows your team to focus on other more critical tasks like closing deals. With the help of AI and the above tools, you should be able to take the efficiency of your sales process to the next level.

1. Train Your Sales Reps

Training your sales reps is another incredible way to increase their productivity and boost the team’s overall output. For example, you could help them learn not just how to create a buyer persona but also how to use these personas to drive conversations. You could train them how to interact with prospects, counter objections, etc.

Take iProspect as an example. This company was looking for a training program to help the sales team be more proactive with customers. After taking their team through the relevant programs, they saw a 22:1 ROI and 17% overall increase in consultative skills. Source: Richardson’s sales performance You can look at advanced courses built with membership platforms like Thinkfic, Kajabi, and Teachable. Although expensive, these courses can provide excellent training equipping your team with cutting-edge skills. Something else you don’t want to overlook is your team’s ability to utilize the tools provided to them. The last thing you’d want is to invest in automation tools for sales acceleration only to hand them over to people who can’t utilize them. Therefore, provide any training required to help your team make the most of all tools provided to them.

1. Improve Sales Productivity

Sales acceleration can’t happen when internal processes and tasks are always preventing the sales reps from doing their job. Therefore, you must optimize internal processes to boost your rep’s productivity for them to be more efficient in their jobs. A good case study on how to improve sales productivity would be Airstream’s use of HubSpot’s marketing software and tools. This switch gave them a 78% increase in leads and a 44% decrease in total lead generation total costs. Source: Hubspot To improve your rep’s productivity, first, examine how they spend their time. Chances are that they're wasting a lot of time on administrative tasks that are not directly involved with sales. To remedy this, you'll need to outsource, automate, and eliminate activities that are not relevant to the rep’s primary tasks. Here are some ways to improve the sales productivity of your team:

• Invest in sales software that efficiently optimizes processes. That will help your reps to close sales quicker.
• Create high-quality sales onboarding and training content to help sales reps get up to speed quicker. The sooner they can fully understand the business and customer needs, the sooner they can confidently hunt down the right leads.
• Documentation of sales processes to help your sales professionals, both new and older ones, know how to prospect, qualify leads, and close deals.
• Providing sales reps with on-demand sales performance support to help move prospects through the sales cycle faster.

Also, don’t assume you always know what’s best for your team. Instead, hold regular meetings with your team and encourage them to point out issues affecting their productivity. Then, address the issues as quickly as possible.

1. Use Data for Your Content Plans

Numbers never lie. Data analytics is a sure way to personify the ideal customer and guide company decisions on how to best target them.  Hubspot uses research, original data, and insights in content marketing and has a vast audience of more than 7 million monthly readers. Data-driven insights help save the organization time, money, and energy in the sales process.  Source: Hubspot  Therefore, don’t just create your sales and marketing content based on hunches. Look for data and let it guide your processes. One basic example is doing research to know what channels your ideal customers use. Then, use the data from that research to create content optimized for that particular channel. You could also go back to your sales team and identify the common or top reasons for dop-offs. Pass that data to your product team and other relevant members. Let them use it to optimize the product or sales process. That’s one less customer objection slowing down your sales process.    

In Closing

Sales acceleration is critical to the growth of a business. You need to find ways to make your sales team work more efficiently to bring in those conversions as quickly as possible.

With these tips, your sales team will land highly accelerated deals. To recap, you need to align your entire team, invest in the right tools, improve sales reps' productivity, train your sales reps, and utilize data for your content plans. That’s how to build an accelerated sales process. Good luck.