B2B SaaS Revenue Growth:
How to Accelerate Sales
Velocity
Nemanja Zivkovic,
Founder & CVO @ Funky Marketing

This webinar will cover the definition of sales
velocity, factors that affect it, as well as tips
on what you can do right now to increase
your own company’s revenue growth.

A startup. SMB.
A long-standing corporation.
It doesn’t matter.
You got sales objectives you gotta meet and the majority of
sales goals include more deals closed in a shorter time frame.
This is also known as sales velocity.

But how can we accelerate sales velocity?
And how can we define it first?
Sales velocity is a sales metric.
It explains the amount of revenue you can probably close on a
particular day. In essence, the higher your sales velocity, the
quicker your business growth.

You can determine it with the following
formula

Three Reasons Why Sales Velocity is Your
Key Metric
Understanding the sales velocity brings a lot of value to the table.
That’s why before we even try to explain optimizing the sales
velocity, let’s explore its importance.
And how increasing your sales velocity leads to maximum revenue
and scalable business.

1. You can always understand your current
position

Sales velocity tells us a lot about a
company’s potential revenue and health.
As a matter of fact, you can use only this metric to gauge your business
success.
For instance, if you have increased your sales velocity for this month, the
sales pipeline will experience more output.
In other words, if you’re making more new business during the same time
frame means your business growth is getting faster.

2. You’ll know where you want to go with your
business

Sales velocity metric represents a key
milestone in reaching your sales strategy
targets and goals.
It’s hard to determine the value of one slow-moving, big-dollar,
enterprise-level deal when compared to several off-the-shelf contracts.
However, with sales velocity, you’ll get a metric you can use for both of
these contracts. The metric that tells you which verticals, cohorts, strategy,
tactics, or segment is making the most revenue.
Like with any other metric, the point in sales velocity is wanting to move up
and right.

3. You’ll get extra revenue

Yes, a smaller contract is closed faster than an enterprise-level opportunity.
However, you need to optimize the sales pipeline for both types of
contracts.
The longer you need to close the deal, the less likely you will close it.
Thus, when you fasten your sales velocity, you make it likely to improve
your win rate across contracts of all sizes.

Five Key Reasons Why Your Sales Pipeline is
Slow
Before we start talking about optimizing your sales velocity, let’s explore
why deals get slower in the first place. Or even get stalled entirely.
In essence, we can see five main reasons why opportunities get stuck,
run into a bottleneck, or just move way too slow.
These five reasons are also your five main threats to the sales velocity.

1. Poor decision-making strength

If your contacts aren’t authorized to close the
deals, you’ll have real big trouble closing
them.
Even more, if your contacts require buy-ins from entire teams of C-levels before
buying, you’ll need a helluva lot of time to close and get approval from everyone.
This is a typical sales velocity problem.
In fact, based on research from CEB, the typical B2B buying decisions include
6.7 various stakeholders. As a rule of thumb, the more people are included, the
more likely the deals will stop before they’re through the pipeline.

2. Low resources

When you don’t have enough resources,
you’ll likely stall the deal.
If the business you’re closing doesn’t have a budget for your product/service, they’ll surely
stop the deal.
That’s why using frameworks like BANT to score and qualify leads is crucial. There’s one
more problem that comes with resource shortages. Especially when you’re dealing with
SaaS or tech products. It’s called time shortage.
If your prospects don’t have enough time to implement your new tools, learn about them,
and onboard others, it will be up to you to explain why the workflow change is worthwhile.

3. Trying to avoid change

Inertia, unwillingness to change, and the
status quo have stopped more deals than we
can count.
In fact, based on the research from the Sales Benchmark Index, 57% of
stopped deals are connected to the desire to keep the status quo.
In other words, we don’t like change. Even when it comes with long-term
gain.
If their existing solution is working, you’ll have a hard time explaining why
it’s good to switch to your product.

You can make this easier, though.
Convince them why benefits from your product are worth the change.
Address any concerns.

4. Troubles with closing deals

We all know that closing is one of the most
coveted salesperson skills.
If your team or you got trouble with this,
identify and resolve the root issue.

Not focused on the client.

No storytelling.

Too forceful closing.

Inertia, unwillingness to change, and the
status quo have stopped more deals than we
can count.
In fact, based on the research from the Sales Benchmark Index, 57% of
stopped deals are connected to the desire to keep the status quo.
In other words, we don’t like change. Even when it comes with long-term
gain.
If their existing solution is working, you’ll have a hard time explaining why
it’s good to switch to your product.

5. Not utilizing the right CRM

Salespeople often use CRM that’s wrong for
them.
Not wrong per se. Just for that case.
This results in not spotting the ROI they require to justify the
expense or opportunity pipeline movement.
For example, if the CRM isn’t capturing data from auto-updates
and social media, you’re likely losing too much energy on
manual entry.

Combining Art and Science: 11 Different
Strategies for Improving the Revenue Growth
Now it’s time to talk about optimizing sales velocity.

Combining Art and Science: 11 Different
Strategies for Improving the Revenue Growth
The following strategies concentrate on increasing one of the four metrics we use
to determine sales velocity. Specifically, how you can:
● Increase the conversion rate
● Scale your usual deal size
● Get more pipeline opportunities
● Make your sales cycle shorter
But before we start with practice, let’s explain the theory behind it.

For instance, you wish to raise your sales velocity by 150 percent.
This will result in 2.5 bigger revenue generation per day.
This does look like a mission impossible.
You can’t wish this to be.
But you can do something.
Optimize the sales velocity.
And thus get worthier deals in a shorter time.

Small improving steps in the sales process
may significantly increase the sales velocity.
And even change the direction of your company. Based on our 150% example,
let’s explore how we’d do this.
Jumping from $100,00 to $150,00 is a 150% rise in sales velocity. You can drive
this when you incrementally improve every factor we use to determine the sales
velocity. All of them combined to increase the growth of revenue.
Since you know which indicators you use to calculate the sales velocity, you can
easily determine which of them you can control. And thus improve the output.

Raise Pipeline Opportunities

The first way to improve the sales velocity is
to improve the number of pipeline
opportunities.
Even if other factors remain the same, more opportunities give
you higher sales velocity.

Increase the number of leads

Most businesses struggle with generating
leads.
Some basic approaches include:
● Social selling
● Cold prospecting
● Pay per click
● Content Marketing

Lead Outreach Optimization

Some of the basic tips for this include:
● Closing the gap-follow up as fast as you can
● Optimizing your emails for open rate and delivery
● Testing your messaging
● The phone follows up after emails
● More follow-ups

Optimize lead to opportunity conversion rate

Follow this process to do it:
● Enter a group of qualified leads
● Open the campaign
● Push an individualized email sequence
● Flag (automatically) leads who opened or responded
● Begin a real convo
● When you got a fit, convert them into opportunities

Take care with leads who aren’t qualified

Close More Deals — Improve Conversion
Rate

Optimize the process of sales discovery

Collect more intelligence

Quicker opportunity response

Raise Deal Size

Strategize with upselling

Sit in the market middle

Increase your price

Make the Sales Cycle Shorter

Defining the timeline on-time

Automate the funnel sequence and follow-ups

Nine Closing Tactics to Improve Sales
Velocity
Closing is all about explaining why your buyer is making the
right decision.
Fortunately, there are vetted tactics that help.
The following techniques create more mutually advantageous
deals.

Make the Deal Sweeter

Talk directly

Write it down

Talk about the benefits

Remove the pressure

Hold steadfast

Let them think

Open-Ended Questions

Don’t stop the game

Conclusion
Sales velocity is the speed of a sales process. It’s how quickly you can
generate more revenue and close deals faster, which will ultimately lead
to increased profitability for your company.
You want to do everything possible today that will make this happen in the
future for yourself or your clients.
Make sure you stay on top of leads, nurture them through the funnel, and
avoid missed opportunities by following these expert tips from our team.

Thank you!
funkymarketing.net
nemanja@funkymarketing.net