What Is Sales Acceleration? Benefits, Tips, Software (2024)
- Published: January 14, 2022
- Updated: February 12, 2024
Moving quickly is make-or-break in sales. There’s more competition than ever, buyers are more educated, and sales professionals need to provide solutions faster in order to stay relevant and successfully close deals.
To expedite the often strenuous sales cycle, businesses must refine their sales strategy by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales processes. The key is to assess what is working, what isn’t working, and most importantly, what’s slowing you down.
Once you’ve determined the areas of opportunity within your sales approach, you’ll be able to build 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 take someone from being a lead to a customer faster.
Sales acceleration helps to speed up the sales cycle by automating tasks and streamlining processes. Effective sales acceleration software, for example, provides timely data and insights designed to increase the rate of customer conversions. It can also templatize certain forms and processes for easy and efficient use.
Sales acceleration boils down to using your resources, content, and analytics intentionally to deliver impactful experiences that close deals faster. Ultimately, this means that prospects move through the sales funnel seamlessly, ensuring that you consistently achieve your revenue goals.
Benefits of a Sales Acceleration Strategy
- Make better use of your resources
- Boost revenue
- Fuel business growth through automation
- Track sales more efficiently
- Increase productivity
- Turn prospects from candidate client to closed quicker
- Free up time for sales professionals to focus on customer support
What Are the Benefits of a Sales Acceleration Strategy?
It’s no longer sufficient to rely on traditional sales strategies – if you want to stay competitive, you need to constantly look for new opportunities to improve your sales approach and accelerate the sales cycle. If you’re not ahead of the curve, you’re most certainly behind.
Sales teams who practice sales acceleration close deals more quickly, which itself is a huge win. By properly prospecting, qualifying leads, and optimizing the entire sales process, sales reps can minimize burdensome busy work and maximize sales productivity.
With a sales acceleration strategy in place, you can expect to:
- Make better use of your resources
- Boost revenue
- Fuel business growth through sales automation
- Track sales more efficiently
- Increase productivity
- Turn prospects from candidate client to closed quicker
- Free up time for sales professionals to focus on customer relationships and support
How Do You Build a Sales Acceleration Strategy?
Without the right strategy in place, converting leads can feel like a laborious process. To stay competitive, it’s critical to implement the most impactful and relevant sales acceleration best practices and strategies for your business.
With the right approach, you can convert leads much faster. But how exactly do you accelerate the sales process for your business?
Here are a few key ways to start building a successful sales acceleration strategy:
1. Assess internal inefficiencies and opportunities
The first foundational step to building a sales acceleration strategy is to understand where you’ve fallen short. This allows you to address any pain points or roadblocks your sales team has experienced.
Perhaps your sales team has expressed feeling unprepared for product pitch meetings. Maybe your marketing team has felt like they don’t have enough data to target the right customer base. Perhaps product feedback hasn’t been relayed from the client to the product team, leaving product specialists in the dark about what improvements need to be made. Or maybe you’ve found that your current support software isn’t so supportive after all.
It’s all about looking inward and assessing where your business stands today, and identifying any inefficiencies that might be slowing you and your sales reps down.
2. Embrace new tools and technology
Resisting new and innovative technology is one of the biggest contributing factors to a passive, sluggish sales strategy.
While experimenting with new sales technology might seem unnecessary, its impact is undeniable. Sales technology, by design, significantly improves the efficiency of sales reps with their day-to-day functions – streamlining how they enter and track data, generating workflows based on their position in the sales cycle, and providing additional support when needed.
Embracing sales tools and driving sales technology adoption to better equip your salespeople for success will undoubtedly facilitate faster closing.
3. Flexibility is key
No matter what combination of strategies you decide is most suitable for your team, it’s really a matter of creating a formula that works best for your business – and continually refining it.
Flexibility is the key to surviving any change or shift in the market, no matter the industry. Be willing to adjust and be open to trying new methods. Your needs and opportunities will change as the market, technology, and personnel change. Losing the ‘that’s how we’ve always done it’ attitude will help you keep up with the sales current.
6 Effective Tips for Sales Acceleration
If you’ve decided that sales acceleration is the fuel you need to outperform your competitors, here are some tips for creating an effective strategy:
1. Align marketing, sales, and product teams
A crucial component of any sales acceleration strategy is making sure your marketing, sales, and product teams are aligned.
Your sales team needs to understand the ins and outs of the product they’re pitching, and the product team needs to understand customer needs in order to deliver a satisfactory product. When your sales team is aware of the content that your marketing team puts out, they’re more likely to use it during customer calls or pitches. Sales reps can also give marketers feedback that can help push content in a more impactful way.
More often than not, gaps and frustrations with output and performance can be resolved by aligning your teams and encouraging collaboration — and you won’t know where you can improve unless you evaluate and discuss as a team.
2. Invest in sales software
Sales software allows businesses to close sales more quickly by templatizing and optimizing processes and tasks. It also provides all teams with visibility into where everyone stands in their workflow.
Sales technology that syncs harmoniously with your current support tech makes sales acceleration possible. Invest in and utilize the power of sales software to streamline processes and maximize your efforts so your customers move through the sales cycle faster.
3. Create better sales onboarding and training content
Accelerate new hire ramping through compelling, validated onboarding and training content.
With the use of a high-quality sales onboarding process, your sales reps will be able to get up to speed quickly and start making customer connections. The sooner they understand the business, processes, and customer needs, the sooner they’ll be able to get out in the field and hunt down the right leads with confidence.
Effective training manuals are the catapult for driving sales productivity. But remember, the job is not done simply after creating the onboarding and training content – you need to update your training content as often as necessary, and make reviewing the updates with your sales team a priority.
4. Document your sales processes
A sales process helps sales professionals prospect, qualify leads, and ultimately close deals — and documentation on your sales processes help them know how to do it.
A clear, written strategy ensures that your sales reps know which actions they need to take to advance a lead. If there’s ever any confusion or misalignment, you’ll have the necessary documentation to streamline that training opportunity.
Having process documentation 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 of making sure that everyone beats to the same drum and there is a consistent approach to turning prospects into customers.
5. Provide on-demand sales performance support
One of the most resourceful ways to move your prospect through the sales cycle faster is by providing your sales reps with hands-on performance support exactly when they need it.
With today’s sales climate, arming your reps with real-time support is essential. Having support content such as a personalized self-help widget, an integrated chatbox, or even a simple nudge feature to ensure important tasks are completed can make the most of the work hours in their day. This support eliminates time spent searching for help and support information.
When your sales reps feel empowered to perform tasks effectively using just-in-time and interactive help, closing a sale becomes less like a marathon and more like a sprint.
6. Use data to adjust your sales processes
A data-driven sales team can save your organization time, energy, and money — resources your company likely doesn’t have to waste.
Doing a deep dive into your company’s data and analytics will reveal actionable insights for your team. What is currently working for your sales team? What is not working? Your sales software should help you uncover the answer to these questions, but data is also key here — numbers don’t lie.
These data-driven insights can help you steer and coach your sales reps in a way that will drive both top-and bottom-line growth and close deals faster.
Sales Acceleration Software
Once you’ve determined your ideal sales acceleration strategy, then it’s time to narrow down the software your sales force will need to be successful. Your business is unique, and the secret sales acceleration software recipe will also be unique to you. If you’re not already using or considering any of the following tools, this is a great place to start:
- CRM software
- Digital adoption platforms (DAPs)
- Sales enablement software
- Business intelligence (BI) software
- Email tracking tools
Using the right combination of software – which ideally works in sync with one another – will streamline, optimize, and accelerate the entire sales process.
Sales acceleration facilitates faster closing by delivering information more efficiently and providing relevant context when needed.
It’s the key to increasing sales and marketing activities by delivering information that’s insightful, customized, accessible, and actionable. When you work with Whatfix, you have access to key features that improve sales productivity by creating a self-sufficient workforce with self-service, contextual help embedded directly into your applications.
Whatfix enables companies to deliver meaningful, personalized user experiences at every stage of the sales cycle. We serve as an omnipresent guide for users, providing real-time recommendations and direction that accelerate sales and help sales professionals take advantage of every revenue opportunity.
With Whatfix, you can expect:
- 45% reduction on support queries
- 84% reduction in training content creation costs
- 1.25x increase in employee productivity
- 3x faster time to proficiency for a new employee
When you invest in the right people, processes, and technology, you’re sure to win. Win with Whatfix today.
Charlotte Binder, Project Manager Business Solutions & Corporate Projects at Hays
Request a demo to see how Whatfix empowers organizations to improve end-user adoption and provide on-demand customer support
