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Sales acceleration relies on one thing. The speed at which leads get pushed through the sales cycle.
With minimal business friction or uncertainty, it’s all about smoothly converting leads.
Here’s what you need to learn about sales acceleration and how it can be used in your business process to light a fire.
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What is sales acceleration?
We can all agree that the entire process of attracting prospects in order to convert them to leads and THEN paying customers is no easy feat. 😩
This makes for a lengthy sales cycle. The answer to this problem? Sales acceleration.
Sales acceleration refers to strategies that help businesses increase the efficiency and speed of sales processes. You can achieve that through the use of sales acceleration tools that provide you with relevant insights for quicker lead conversion.
Its goal is to get prospects from point A to point B in the shortest amount of time possible.
Over the years, ‘traditional’ sales processes have changed thanks to advancements in technology. This change is referred to as ‘sales acceleration’. Here are some examples:
Common types of sales acceleration solutions
There are many ways sales acceleration can help to increase sales, but we picked out 8 of the most common ones for you.
1. Email automation
Remember a time before email automation existed?
Drafting different email templates for different groups of prospects, manually sending emails to hundreds of prospects, and checking your email every few days to see if you got a reply.
Thank goodness that’s a thing of the past! Because ain’t nobody got time for that now!
With software like SalesHandy, you can set up trigger events to notify reps when a prospect takes a certain action, such as downloading your ebook or requesting a price. You’re also able to track email open rates, click-through rates, and site visits that give you insight into the performance of your email outreach efforts.
2. Call tracking
You’ve set up all these ads that drive calls to your business, but how do you know which one drove the call?
Thanks to sales acceleration, we can now eliminate the guesswork about which campaigns drive call traffic.
As its name suggests, call tracking refers to tracking your calls down to their specific marketing campaigns. This helps you take the appropriate actions to optimize and invest in the best-performing ones.
You can track offline campaigns, trace calls down to their source, and even find out the keyword visitors used to find you.
3. Click-to-call
“Please hold, all our support staff are currently busy.”
Sound familiar? We’ve all probably heard this line and been put on hold with background music playing at least once in our life.
But even though that happens, 77% of customers still believe that phone calls are the most effective way to get an answer to a query. That’s because they want to skip the endless back-and-forth email conversations just to find a common meeting time or to get their questions answered.
Click-to-call software like Novocall allows website visitors to connect with your reps in real-time with a simple click of a button. They can choose their preferred dates and times, schedule a call, and wait for a rep to get in touch with them!
4. Content scheduling
88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as a lead generation tactic. That’s a lot of content being shared.
It’s common practice for marketers to use sales acceleration software to help speed up the content scheduling process. That’s because having hundreds of articles on an excel spreadsheet doesn’t scream ‘efficient’.
And trawling the internet for content to share or manually posting a blog article on ALL accounts sounds time-consuming too.
Scheduling software like ContentStudio allows marketers to plan ahead and schedule content to be posted on their social media platforms or blogs at a later time. This ensures that their target audience is constantly fed with content without having to do the tedious work every day.
By consistently sharing relevant content, businesses can nurture and lead their prospects down the funnel quicker.
5. Lead qualification
So your pipeline is filled with leads, but how many of them eventually end up converting into a paying customer? 
Businesses often miss out on this important step of qualifying their leads before pushing them down the pipeline, only to bark up the wrong tree.
That’s why lead qualification software like Bitrix24 exists.
Lead qualification is the process of filtering out and qualifying leads so that they fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). This helps sales and marketing teams reach out to the most qualified prospects that will eventually convert into paying customers.
This allows your reps to prioritize their efforts on qualified prospects that meet your criteria.
Some criteria can include:
- Company size
- Country of business operation
- Budget
- Timeline
6. Lead scoring
It’s physically impossible to assign an individual rep to one lead. So how do you know which lead you should prioritize and pay the most attention to?
Cue lead scoring software.
Lead scoring refers to the process of assigning a numerical value to your leads based on certain actions or behavior.
To help you better understand, we’ve created a visual representation of lead scoring:
Evidently, the lead with the highest lead score should get the most attention from your reps as they’ve been consistently reading your blog articles, opening your emails, and downloading your content.
Because they’re keeping up to date with your business, this shows that they are highly interested in your business and product.
7. Lead routing
Ever face that awkward situation where a customer calls and you’re stunned because they’re speaking in a language you don’t understand? Or when a customer calls to inquire about a product demo and a customer service rep picks up?
To prevent such situations, businesses have started using lead routing software.
Also known as lead assignment, lead routing efficiently distributes leads to specific sales reps so that there is a lead-to-sales rep match.
For example, lead routing software allows you to assign a lead to a rep based on language preferences.
There are several other predetermined lead routing rules you can set to use to maximize the odds of closing a deal. Some examples are:
- Availability of sales reps
- Location of caller
- Business function
- Company size
8. Outbound dialing
Cold calling is not the most enjoyable process for salespeople. Going through a list of several contacts and manually dialing each one of them doesn’t sound like fun.
But what if you could automate all that?
Outbound dialing software helps you to automate the dialing process, so your reps don’t have to go through each contact, manually dial, and wait for prospects to answer the phone.
Reps can spend this extra time preparing for the next call or keying in information from the previous call.
Sales Acceleration Benefits
Increased sales productivity
As mentioned above, sales acceleration helps to improve the productivity of your sales reps.
If your sales reps are overwhelmed by monotonous tasks, a substantial amount of time is wasted and slows down the entire sales cycle. And, as you guessed it, this will lead to the potential loss of revenue.
That’s why businesses adopt sales acceleration tools and software to help sales reps maintain high levels of productivity to speed up processes.
Improved insights
Having a customer relationship management (CRM) software to store all customer data is one thing. Knowing what to do with that data is a whole other ball game.
Sales acceleration software usually integrate with various CRM software to help your teams make valuable use of the data. Some tools can reveal key insights such as customer purchasing behavior, or peak periods of customer calls.
Your teams can make use of this data to gain a deeper understanding of campaign performances, business operations, and customer satisfaction. This allows your team to take actionable steps to improve and scale processes that will lead to business growth.
Keeps your pipeline filled
With sales acceleration software, sales teams don’t have to worry about keeping the pipeline full.
Sales acceleration tools can help automate tedious tasks such as lead generation, prospecting, lead qualification, and more. Because you’re constantly feeding the pipeline with leads at a quicker pace, you don’t have to worry about your pipeline ever being empty.
Drives growth
This is the ultimate cherry on the cake.
Tying in all the previous points mentioned, the end goal is to ultimately drive sales, which leads to business growth.
Sales acceleration tools give businesses the data they need to achieve their goals and drive growth.
By accelerating processes and making full use of the resources you have on hand, you empower your team to drive more sales in a shorter period of time. And naturally, more sales will also lead to upward growth for your business.
Speed through the sales cycle
We know how long a sales cycle can be. Been there, done that.
That’s why many businesses, ourselves included, adopt sales acceleration software to make life a little easier.
We hope that after reading this article, you have a better understanding of what sales acceleration is and how it can benefit you by shortening sales cycles.
These days, time is of the essence. Make your leads wait too long, they leave to find your competitors. Reply to customer queries too slowly, and they leave a bad review. This is why sales acceleration software like Novocall and Hubspot were invented.
To learn more about how sales acceleration tools like Novocall can help accelerate your sales, get started today!
Faye
Faye is a digital marketing executive at Novocall. When she’s not busy writing articles for Novocall’s blog, she spends her time baking and playing with her dogs.
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