Research conducted by the TAS Group into complex, high-value B2B sales environments shows that losing deals spend an average of 150% longer in the sales pipeline than winning ones. It's not hard to understand why - winning opportunities tend to be propelled by a strong momentum, whilst the poorly qualified deals you end up losing typically hang around in the pipeline quarter after quarter with no real signs of movement.
Our own experience confirms that sales velocity is one of the most important indicators of the health of a sales pipeline - and one of the most powerful predictors of sales success. These findings chime with the "gut feeling" of most sales managers that the longer a deal has been stuck at the same stage in the sales pipeline, the less likely you are to close it.
Given this, it’s surprising that so few CRM implementations pay attention to the issue of tracking sales velocity from start to finish and - this is particularly important - from stage to stage in the sales pipeline. And if you’re not measuring velocity at every level in your sales operation, you can’t identify where deals are getting stuck, work out why, and diagnose and deal with the bottlenecks.
We enable clients to shorten average sales cycles and accelerate sales velocity - by helping them establish relevant metrics, implement better sales qualification disciplines, and align sales pipeline stages, sales tools and collateral material with the key steps in their prospects buying decision process.
As a result, they are better able to to qualify bad deals out early, and to systematically identify and eliminate the barriers and bottlenecks that have traditionally served to slow down or derail otherwise well qualified sales opportunities. We might be able to help you achieve the same.
Take the Next Step
We would be pleased to share what we’ve learned about helping high-growth-potential organisations to systematically shorten average sales cycles and increase sales velocity as part of a balanced programme of sales and marketing performance improvement. As a first step, you may find it useful to self-audit your current sales and marketing processes.
As soon as you are ready to learn more, please email us at salesvelocity@inflexion-point.com, or call us on +44 (0) 118 975 0595. We look forward to discovering whether we might be able to help your organisation to improve its performance in this critical area.