Sales Acceleration: What It Is & How to Impact It

Most of the time, responding quickly is the best way to make your customer happy. Seller response time influences 57% of buyers' behavior. Luckily, with sales, quickness also happens to be the way to make your sales team happy. Sales acceleration helps you do both.

What is sales acceleration?

Sales acceleration enables teams to shorten their sales cycles and engage healthier and more bountiful prospects. Not only do teams close deals more quickly, but they prospect, qualify leads, and optimize the sales process, all without compromising any of the customer experience.

While you can influence some of this by hiring the right individuals, the sales acceleration formula often includes social-networking technology, AI, data pipelines, and even visualization platforms. It's the best way to make the sales process streamlined for both your customers and your sales team.

How to Use Sales Acceleration

The sales acceleration formula mimics much of what is essential in the day-to-day life of a sales rep: data, technology, and inbound selling. Each of these things impacts the critical aspects of sales, like closing and finding leads. Unfortunately, what's most important can also be the most difficult. In a recent survey, 40% of salespeople said prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process, closely followed by closing (36%) and qualifying leads (22%).

Let's look into how you can use sales acceleration to impact your sales process as it stands right now.

Lead Generation

Leads become prospects, and prospects become sales. Sales are what keep both your team and your company afloat. Sales acceleration tools help automate much of the work that a sales team needs to generate and maintain a pipeline. For instance, finding leads, vetting them, and finding the decision-maker can all be done by an AI or tool before your sales team even gets involved. Free up your team from tedious research, and let them get straight to selling.

Lead Scoring

After your team implements sales acceleration tools, long gone are the days of moving into a relationship with a prospect and realizing that they have no intention of buying. Setting up processes to appropriately score and allocate your leads is one of the best ways to improve sales velocity and make your team even quicker on the uptake. Knowing and targeting your hot (or even warm) leads can be a huge leg-up in shortening the sales cycle.

Engagement Tracking

Imagine what your team could do if they weren't required to write follow-up emails to each of their prospects. Now, imagine if your sales reps had a tool that told them exactly who they should reach out to and when (and maybe even had a tool that reached out for them)?

The sales acceleration formula helps with just that. Use data around what leads are doing with your emails, customer feedback from calls with reps, and even social media listening. All of this helps to paint a better picture of your prospects and gives your sales team insights into where they are in the process and how you can improve your reach outs. Automating intelligently is the way of the future.

What Sales Acceleration Tools to Use

Everyone wants to get better leads more rapidly and have a magic eight ball to tell you when to reach out to them. There are a few different types of tools that may help, depending on what you're looking to impact.

The sales acceleration formula differs for every company, based on the structure of your team and product. Select different pieces and experiment with them to find a solution that fits. Here are a few different types of tools to consider.

• CRM: CRMs are tools that help you keep your leads, prospects, and customers organized and all of your information about them in one place. It's easier to move quickly when you're well organized. An excellent example of this type of tool is HubSpot Sales Hub.
• Predictive analytics: Predictive analytics allows you to pull in sales historical data and current customers and create predictions and how future customers will behave. An excellent example of this type of tool is Everstring.
• Email tracking and automation: These tools allow your team to track what's happening with the emails they send and even start to automate reach outs. Great examples of this type of product are Leadfeeder and HubSpot Email Tracking.
• Data visualization: It's easier to make sense of complex data when you can see it. Data visibility gives your team insights into team performance and customer needs in a way that is easy to digest and move on. Sisense is an excellent example of one of these tools.
• Company Research Tools and lead databases: Curious about who the decision-maker is, or if there's a better person you could be talking to? Company research tools help your team gain better insights into the what and how of the sales process. Products like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are super useful here.

Get Started Now

There is no time like the present. Get started now on getting your team up and running more quickly. Implement the sales acceleration formula's functions to ensure that your team gets the best, qualified leads, and acts on them quickly. The faster you can get prospects through the sales cycle, the better it will feel for both you and them.

Take the heavy-duty work out of the hands of your sales reps: use AI to generate and score your leads, automate your engagement tracking, and reach outs. Create data that is meaningful and interesting to members even outside of your team: data visualization and predictive analytics can tell an even more compelling story than you'd be able to without sales acceleration tools. Reach out if you're interested in learning more about sales acceleration with HubSpot today.