B2B sales cycles are long. The average duration of a B2B sales cycle is 4 months or 124 days. Many things can happen during this period, the worst being losing a lead. This is why b2b sales pipeline acceleration is important to speed up your prospect’s journey and impact your sales pipeline velocity positively.
What is B2B sales pipeline acceleration?
Sales acceleration is strategizing the speed up of different stages of the sales pipeline. The different stages include discovering, contacting, and converting a lead. You can devise marketing strategies such as online promotion and advertisements to shorten the sales cycle and accelerate the pipeline.
What are the benefits of sales pipeline acceleration?
Pipeline acceleration can speed up the entire sales cycle leading to high revenue and fulfilment of targets. Here are some of the benefits of pipeline acceleration.
Shorter feedback loops
B2B sales pipeline acceleration focuses on reducing the time of feedback loops between marketing activities and revenue impacts. This will enable you and your team to spot opportunities and address loopholes rapidly.
Boost revenue generation
Since you get the opportunity of addressing every feedback quickly, you will get more time to strategize and plan campaigns to hit your targets. Reducing your sales cycle will give more time to sales reps to target more leads which will cause revenue acceleration.
Simplifying the buyer journey
A shorter sales cycle will allow the buyer to make quick decisions. This will simplify the buyer’s journey as they don’t have to face multiple rounds of follow-ups. It also reduces the point of contact, making it easier to analyze the impact of each marketing initiative.
Sales and marketing alignment
Reducing the sales cycle will allow the marketing and sales team to plan and sync their activities. This will ensure better alignment between the teams.
How to accelerate your sales pipeline?
Focus on high-quality leads and nurture them
Not all leads have the same potential for conversion. There may be some weak leads who have no intention of buying. You should not be afraid of discarding them right away. Instead, you can shift your focus to identifying high-value, high-potential leads and nurture them to speed up buying decisions.
Use automation whenever possible
Automating repeating pipeline processes can ensure that leads are responded to quickly. Follow-ups and lead qualification are tedious processes in sales that can use some automation. You can set up follow-up e-mails or messages and automate responses to important customer activity like sign-ups, purchases, etc. You can prepare follow-ups ahead of time and send them out automatically via a CRM tool.
Focus on high-performance channels
Having multiple marketing channels can seem like you are acing your campaigns. But are all of them performing well? You should design processes that identify high-performing channels. Email and webinars are some of the best marketing channels with an ROI of 312% and 240% respectively. Focusing on high-performance channels will help you optimize your campaign.
Make it personal
The best way to attract and convert leads is to personalize customer experiences. Having an insight into customer preferences, behavior, and need can help you develop personalized marketing materials.
Understand the decision-making process
Typically, a B2B sales cycle is longer than B2C because it involves a lot of decision-makers. Whenever you approach your prospect, you should know their role in decision-making. It is essential to figure out their requirements with your product such that you can address them correctly. You can determine how their evaluation will proceed from their responses and customize a pipeline management strategy to target the ultimate decision-makers.
Implement paid search
Paid search ensures that your firm appears on the top of the search engine whenever a prospect searches the product. This will help you increase traffic and brand visibility, and accelerate the sales pipeline. You can begin by doing keyword research to identify specific words that prospects used to search the product on the search engine. You can then link the prospects directly to your landing page whenever they click the ad link. You can attract the leads’ interest with differentiated and interesting CTA’s.
Accelerate your sales pipeline with better pipeline management
The right marketing strategy and pipeline management process will help you in improving your lead nurturing and qualification process while contributing to the B2B sales pipeline acceleration. It will also contribute to organizing your routine and daily manual processes. We hope this gives you a fair idea on how to improve sales pipeline velocity.
