8 Strategic Tips to Accelerate Your Sales Pipeline

Businesses always seek for and try to implement updates into the performance haunting the revenue and competitiveness levels growth. Thus, it is quite hard to keep pace with innovations, and the old proven methods of constant reporting, hiring expensive professionals, and deep performance analysis deliver lower results. So, the question is how to accelerate sales pipeline and work smarter, not harder.

Outlook of An Average Company Daily Round

In the average company, marketing and sales departments work separately though they use the same CRM system with extensive data transparency capabilities. Yet, these teams have different objectives, and lack of cooperation as each has some prejudices and underestimates the roles.

Despite the automation of the manual processes, marketing managers gather leads and route them to the sales department with a minor accent on the qualification. So, sales reps waste a lot of time on prospects that require nurturing and try to nurture those clients that are ready to buy.

The incorporation of marketing automation into the business performance enhances the process of departments cooperation and aids greatly in your sales pipeline acceleration.

Marketing vs. Sales Pipeline View on Leads

The traditional sales pipeline consists of the following stages: prospecting, qualification, proposal, decision, and repeat business. Thus, it is designed for the ideal customer while the actual buying personas may come to you with different objectives and varying readiness for making purchases. Depending on the business strategy type – B2B, B2C, or B2B2C, the sales cycles may last from a couple of days to a couple of months. So pipeline acceleration includes marketing and sales departments in the process of developing the buyer’s journey through awareness, consideration, and decision stages.

Make sure that your team has a single view of the sales funnel. In the customer-centric approach, customers will go through the following phases of the buyer’s journey:

1. Prospect/Visitor
2. Lead
3. Marketing qualified lead
4. Sales qualified lead
5. Opportunity
6. Customer

The appropriate qualifying of leads will help you to convert your prospects faster and deliver a satisfying and delightful buying experience.

Benefits of accelerating your sales pipeline

Some of the advantages of speeding up your sales pipeline are obvious, while others are less so. More revenue equals faster sales. But it isn’t as simple as increasing the sales team’s speed in order to close more deals. There are a lot of things to think about.

A sales acceleration strategy should not be rushed. Consider all of the places in the pipeline that require maintenance before committing to a half-baked plan to speed up pipeline flow. Your company will benefit much in the long run if you implement the appropriate approach.

Shorten your sales cycle

A long sales cycle isn’t always a bad thing. A quick sales cycle isn’t always a desirable thing, however, there is a connection between shorter sales cycles and higher revenue. A short sales cycle implies your team can reach out to more customers and close more deals throughout the quarter or year, resulting in higher income.

Longer, less effective sales cycles can result in prospects turning off or vanishing, wasting your sales team’s time. Accelerate pipeline analysis will help your company reduce unwanted bottlenecks and obstructions that extend the sales cycle unnecessarily.

Increase revenue

Your goal is to increase income, and one of the most effective ways to accomplish it is through sales acceleration. Turn your pipeline into a proactive tool for creating closed-wons rather than working reactively to enhance sales team efficiency from month to month or quarter to quarter.

Unless you’ve built the world’s most efficient sales funnel, there’s a good chance you could cut your company’s sales cycle in half. Because of the shorter sales cycle, your team will have more time and resources to close more deals at a faster pace, resulting in increased income.

Boost sales rep productivity

Salespeople talk to prospects for as little as one-third of their working day. The remaining two-thirds are spent on email writing, data input, prospecting, lead research, internal meetings, and call scheduling.

Imagine a future where sales reps are liberated from a million jobs thanks to CRM data enrichment-powered automation in their processes. Or a future in which SDRs don’t have to chase agreements with prospects who aren’t interested. That’s the world of quick sales pipeline acceleration.

Improved internal communication

Without the support of the marketing and sales teams, sales acceleration will not be possible. While relationships between sales and marketing teams might be difficult, there’s no doubt that aligning the two departments would provide more value to prospects and increase corporate performance.

Teams will be more aware of their common aims and more inclined to collaborate if marketing and sales work together. After all, what use are marketing reports if they don’t include sales numbers or sales reports that don’t include marketing attribution?

How to Accelerate Sales: 8 Strategic and proven Tips

1. Nurture Your Leads

Begin by classifying your contacts into lists of casual browsers and those who are unlikely to make a purchase anytime soon. These are the leads that must be nurtured before being forwarded to sales. For a faster sales pipeline, lead nurturing allows your sales staff to focus on qualified, ready-to-buy prospects. Slowing down the cycle is clogging your pipeline with leads that aren’t ready. One of the key reasons for this is that, according to Salesforce data, 61% of B2B marketers send all leads to sales without assessing whether or not they should be nurtured.

2. Automate Where Possible

Automating various pipeline procedures aids lead scoring and guarantees that leads are responded to quickly. Determine which tasks are systematic/repetitive and automate them, as minimizing the number of hours required to execute these processes allows your staff to focus on high-value leads.

Follow-ups and lead qualifying are two processes that you may automate that are both vital in sales but can be tedious. Follow-ups make your clients feel valued, but keeping track of them can be difficult amid the hurry and bustle of modern life. Prepare follow-ups ahead of time and have them sent out automatically through your CRM.

Another major difficulty that can be automated is qualifying sales-ready leads before passing them on to salespeople. Automation can address this flaw in the vetting process to provide a faster, scalable, and more efficient qualification process.

3. Implement Paid Search for the Top of the Funnel

Longer sales cycles indicate that your prospects are taking their time to consider their options, which they are most likely doing online. Paid search ensures that your firm appears at the top of their search engine results pages (SERPs), helping you to increase traffic and brand exposure.

Begin by conducting keyword research. Remember to use the keywords that individuals who are looking for your products and services will type into a search engine. Then, to continue nurturing these leads, construct landing pages with instructive material. Landing pages require excellent CTAs as well but don’t be overly aggressive with them because they may not yet be ready to make a purchase decision. You may also develop advertisements that explain why customers should choose you over your competitors.

4. Work with Real Buyers

The decision-makers in this scenario are the real buyers. When you don’t communicate with these people directly, you’re more likely to have protracted and uncertain sales cycles. Find strategies to communicate with and collaborate with executives. You can begin by dealing with mid-level clients and earning their trust until you are able to persuade them to meet with their decision-maker.

5. Understand the Decision-Making Process

Ask about the timeliness of your prospects. Before making a decision, find out what they want to know and who is engaged in the decision. You’ll be on your way to success if you figure out their requirements and what they want to learn about the business. Their responses will offer you a sense of how their evaluation will proceed, allowing you to customize a lead management strategy to your specific target audience or persona.

6. Align Content and Reward with the Sales Cycle

The marketing funnel follows a natural path, and leads must pass through each stage at some time. Ensure that you’re providing them with the information they require at each stage of the purchasing process.

Begin by creating brand recognition and reputation, then move on to serving up your offerings once the prospect has gained sufficient understanding. Make sure that with each piece of material you provide, you explain what they can do next to advance further down the funnel.

Thought-leadership content can be used in promotional offerings. Showcase your products and services to counteract the educational material. They’ll be a lot closer to making a decision once you’ve persuaded them and sent them on to sales.

7. Personalize Everything

Most individuals nowadays have learned to recognize and disregard blatant marketing ploys, making it more difficult for businesses to maintain customer engagement throughout the early stages of the sales cycle. However, having a better grasp of a customer’s interests and personalizing the relationship might help solve this problem.

Obtaining more detailed information about clients necessitates acquiring their trust. As a result, you must supply something of worth in exchange. Other approaches to tailor your marketing efforts include:

• Have a remarketing plan that is tailored to the habits or actions of your customers.
• Give your brand a face that will promote and reflect your business.
• In your messaging, use relevant language that nevertheless retains your company’s image.

8. Focus on High-Performing Channels

Having more marketing channels isn’t always beneficial, especially when seeking to halve your sales cycle time. Determine what to concentrate on and which channels perform best. To get the best results, continue to design processes that enable a focus on those channels. There are a few must-haves, such as email marketing, which has a 4,200 % return on investment, and content marketing, which is becoming increasingly popular each year.

Keep in mind that the performance of your channels may change with time, so you should track them on a frequent basis. When it comes to optimizing your campaign, don’t be scared to experiment with and try out new channels.

To Sum up

Wrapping it all up, you see that engaging marketing and sales teams into the lead nurturing and qualification process will boost your sales pipeline speed. Besides, the implementation of marketing automation will facilitate the daily routine and manual processes.