How to Implement a Sales Acceleration Strategy (Tips for B2B Sales)

B2B sales cycles are long and complex, but there are ways you can optimize and compress your sales process. Implementing a sales acceleration strategy requires a holistic approach that focuses on the following areas: improving lead generation and qualification, providing a comprehensive product demo, streamlining the sales process, enhancing buyer enablement, and boosting the effectiveness of your sales team.

When done right, a sales acceleration strategy can reduce your sales cycle by 20-50% and double your conversion rates. But first, you must establish a strategic framework that identifies where you are now, where you want to be, and the tactics needed to close the gap. Here are the essential components for a successful implementation.

Optimize Lead Qualification and Routing

One of the first steps in accelerating your B2B sales process is optimizing how leads come into your funnel and qualifying them correctly from the start. Getting the right leads immediately in front of the right sales reps is key to maximizing every opportunity.

Begin by reviewing your current lead qualification process. Are you capturing all necessary data to properly qualify prospects’ user personas and route them to sales reps based on the fit?

Ensure you are collecting information like company size, pain points, budget, and timeline that allow you to determine if they are a good match for your product.

Next, implement tools that can automate as much of the initial lead assessment as possible. CRM systems and marketing automation platforms can help qualify leads based on engagement data like web behavior and content consumption. Use integrated systems to sync data and pass valuable insights to your sales team.

Once you have the right information and tools, establish clear qualification criteria that sales reps follow to identify ideal prospects. These criteria should dictate whether a lead is worthy of a sales rep’s time or if it should be nurtured further.

Finally, develop routing rules within your systems to match the highest quality leads with the most skilled and available sales reps. Use data like company size, location, and buying role/authority to align prospects with reps who have experience selling to similar accounts.

By optimizing lead information collection, automating qualification where possible, establishing clear criteria, and developing intelligent routing, you can accelerate your sales process from the very start of the funnel. Getting the right prospects in front of the right reps is critical to reducing your average sales cycle.

Provide Highly Interactive and Customized Product Demos

One of the best ways to accelerate your B2B sales cycle is by providing highly engaging and interactive product demos that clearly show prospects how your solution addresses their needs. Traditional static demos and video presentations often lack the interactivity and customization buyers want in the evaluation process.

Look into interactive demo software that allows you to:

Create customizable demos by account or buyer persona - Use data collected during lead qualification to tailor your demos specifically for each prospect’s industry, use cases, pain points, etc. Show them how your solution is the ideal fit.

Design interactive product tours and walkthroughs: Give prospects an in-depth, guided tour of your software and key features. Use highlights, callouts, and clickable links to control the pace and ensure they understand each section.

Embed product demo videos to illustrate features in action: Short product videos synced to specific areas of your interface provide a visual demonstration that static screenshots can’t match.

Provide “test drive” functionality: Allowing prospects to get hands-on with a live demo of your product, even with limited functionality, engages them more deeply and improves comprehension.

Allow clicking between pages and areas: The more control and interactivity you give buyers, the more they will mentally engage with your solution as they evaluate it.

Track prospect engagement: Monitoring how long buyers spend on various areas of your demos and which features they interact with most can provide valuable insights for reps during the sales process.

Arming your sales team with highly interactive, data-driven product demos will boost comprehension and buyer confidence in your fit. Prospects can evaluate independently and ask informed questions during the presentation, shortening the sales cycle.

Look for a demo solution that can integrate with your other systems to sync updated product info, pass lead data, and trigger follow-ups based on engagements. The more data and insights you can gather from your demos and pass to your sales team, the more efficiently you’ll be able to progress buyers through the funnel.

Streamline and Standardize Your Sales Process

Another critical element of a sales acceleration strategy is optimizing the efficiency of your sales process itself. You can significantly compress your sales cycle by streamlining and standardizing how your sales team moves prospects through the various stages.

Begin by identifying any points of friction or inefficiency in your current sales motion. Are there unnecessary steps to remove? Moments where prospect follow-up delay? Tools that reps struggle to use effectively? Take inventory of where your sales process may be holding you back from closing deals faster.

Next, develop a clear, stage-based sales process that outlines the ideal steps from qualified lead to customer. Define what activities and touchpoints should occur at each stage, what responsibilities reps have, and what goals must be met to progress buyers to the next step. Be sure to incorporate the right sales tools to support each part of the process.

Then, train and coach your sales team on following this optimized and standardized sales motion. Emphasize the responsibilities at each stage, goals that must be achieved, and metrics that indicate success or trouble spots. Monitoring reps’ alignment with this sales process will be critical to its effectiveness.

Finally, establish guidelines for rapid follow-up and quick response times throughout the sales cycle. Define expectations for how quickly reps should reach prospects after events like a demo, respond to emails, and provide requested information. The faster your team can react to buyers’ questions and needs, the faster deals will close.

By streamlining overlapping or unnecessary steps, standardizing a clear sales process, properly training reps, and enforcing guidelines for quick follow-up, you can significantly accelerate how long your team moves a prospect from interested to contract. The more consistent your sales motions become, the faster you’ll achieve results at scale.

Focus on constantly optimizing your sales process based on key SaaS metrics and reps’ feedback. Standardization and efficiency will allow you to scale more profitably while compressing your sales cycle.

Enhance Buyer Enablement with Content and Tools

Enabling buyers to educate and evaluate themselves is critical to speeding up your sales cycle. The more self-sufficient prospects can be in learning about your solution and how it solves their problems, the less hand-holding your sales team will need to do.

Focus your buyer enablement efforts on creating and distributing:

Educational content: eBooks, infographics, videos, blog posts, webinars, etc.- teaches prospects about their challenges, potential solutions, and how your product fits in.

Helpful tools: Calculators, ROI estimators, RFP templates, and feature comparisons. Freebies that make prospects’ lives easier and show your expertise.

Product documentation: Use cases, feature lists, video walkthroughs, and other materials that prospective customers can reference independently.

Customized research: Reports, case studies, and ROI analyses specific to prospects’ industries that demonstrate value.

Make this content easily accessible from your website, pop it into your email drip campaigns, and distribute it proactively using sales and marketing automation. The key is to get the right enablement resources into buyers’ hands at the ideal moments to educate and move them closer to purchasing independently.

You should also provide self-service evaluation tools like free trials, test accounts with limited functionality, and interactive product demos. The more prospects can learn about your solution and see it in action, the less dependent they’ll be on your sales reps - accelerating the process.

As prospects progress, share higher-value resources like customer success studies, competitive analyses, and unreleased product roadmaps. The deeper their self-education, the closer they’ll be to a buying decision.

Enhancing buyers’ ability to educate and evaluate themselves with useful content and self-service tools allows some prospects to move further down the funnel independently. This frees up your sales team to focus on the most valuable deals, shortening the sales cycle overall.

Boost Sales Team Productivity and Effectiveness

To accelerate your sales cycle, your team of sellers needs to be as productive and effective as possible. They require the right tools, training, coaching, and motivation to close deals quicker.

Start by ensuring your reps have the software, systems, and technology needed to perform their roles efficiently. This includes CRMs, sales automation, demo platforms, and collaboration tools. Look for solutions that integrate seamlessly to streamline your reps’ workflows.

Next, provide ongoing product training and coaching to keep your sales team sharp. Focus on how they can position your solution quickly based on buyer needs, create an impact with their demos and presentations, and ask the right questions to uncover critical requirements and pain points.

Also, establish clear metrics your reps should hit at each stage of the sales process to gauge their efficiency, like the number of demos booked each week or conversions from demo to close. Measure their performance against these KPIs and goals.

Motivate your team with incentives and recognition for accelerating deals. Welcome input from top performers on optimizations to your sales process.

Finally, identify star sellers whose efficiency and skills put them ahead of the pack. Study how they optimize their demo approaches, handle objections, ask questions, and move quickly between stages. Then replicate their best practices across the entire sales team through training, content resources, and sales playbooks.

By keeping your sellers equipped with the best tools, trained on product positioning and demo delivery, measured against clear metrics, motivated to accelerate deals, and able to replicate the methods of your top performers, you’ll optimize your entire team for sales cycle compression. Reps who understand how to sell quickly and close business faster will become a competitive advantage for your growth.

Utilize Sales and Marketing Automation Tools

Leveraging sales and marketing automation technology is critical for sales acceleration. These systems make it possible to qualify leads faster, streamline processes, provide valuable insights, and move prospects further down the funnel with less manual effort.

Start by implementing a CRM to track your entire sales pipeline, manage contacts and automate routine tasks. Look for a system that integrates seamlessly with your other tools to provide a single source of truth for prospect data and insights.

Then layer on marketing automation software to qualify inbound leads, score them, and trigger relevant automated campaigns. Triggered emails, messages, and content can automatically nurture prospects based on engagement data to slowly move them toward sales-readiness.

Next, integrate your sales and marketing automation platforms to sync lead information and pass insights between teams. This allows campaigns to be dynamically adjusted based on updated data and sales reps to be notified as prospects become qualified opportunities.

Add sales acceleration tools that automate follow-up, status updates, to-do’s, and task assignments within teams. Systems that trigger automated outreach based on events or milestone completions can help keep prospects engaged and progressing through the sales cycle.

Consider technologies like AI assistants and chatbots that can identify qualified opportunities, answer common questions, and schedule demo appointments - reducing the workload on your sales team.

Finally, look for automation systems that provide visibility into pipeline metrics to surface opportunities for acceleration. Data-driven insights can reveal inefficiencies in your sales process, how long it takes leads to progress between stages, and which reps are accelerating or impeding cycle times.

By leveraging the power of sales and marketing automation technology, you enable systems - not overworked humans - to perform many repetitive tasks required to qualify leads, nurture prospects, route opportunities, follow up and provide insights. This frees your teams to focus on higher-value activities, accelerating your sales cycle and driving more revenue.

Align Stakeholders and Roles Across Teams

For a sales acceleration strategy to succeed, all stakeholders - from sales and marketing to product, customer success, and executives - must be aligned on goals, priorities, and roles. Miscommunication and lack of team accountability will inhibit your ability to compress the sales cycle.

Start by involving executives, sales leaders, marketers, and product managers in creating your company’s sales acceleration strategy. Co-develop the strategic framework, identify priorities, establish goals, and define success metrics.

Then document all team roles and responsibilities - from lead qualification criteria to demo preparations to opportunity follow-up. Map out who does what, when, and with what support from other teams to progress a prospect through the sales cycle. Ensure accountabilities are clear.

With the above in place, socialize your organization’s strategy and role definitions. Use kickoff meetings and written communications to share the plan, timeline, metrics, and specific responsibilities with all relevant teams. Solicit feedback and refine where needed.

Next, establish frequent check-ins between marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams to review the sales metrics that matter most to acceleration. Have leaders from each function jointly track goals, identify issues, and agree on optimization opportunities.

Get the entire organization aligned around a shared definition of “pipeline velocity.” Align internal KPIs to incentivize teams to accelerate deals, not just maximize overall volume.

Finally, hold all teams accountable for playing their part. Track role-specific metrics to ensure qualifiers qualify correctly. Marketers nurture effectively, demo-givers engage prospects deeply, sellers ask the right questions, etc. Apply appropriate incentives and consequences to maintain focus on compression, not just growth.

By involving multiple functions in developing an aligned strategy, clearly defining roles and accountabilities, socializing the plan across the organization, establishing frequent cross-team check-ins, sharing a single focus on pipeline velocity, and holding all teams accountable for their piece - you maximize your chances of compressing cycle times through stronger coordination and synergy between traditionally siloed groups.

Establish Metrics and Key Performance Indicators

You must establish the right metrics and KPIs to track and analyze to gain visibility into how effectively your sales acceleration strategy is working. Data will reveal bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and opportunities for optimization across your process.

Start by defining your most important sales metrics and tracking them within your CRM and automation systems.

• MQLs per month - Measures lead volume and growth
• SQLs per month - Tracks how many leads qualify
• Demos booked per rep - Signals rep productivity
• Demo to close rate - Indicates sales efficiency
• Close rate - Shows your overall conversion effectiveness
• Revenue per rep - Highlights sales team performance
• Sales cycle length - Key indicator of how fast deals move

Next, identify KPIs specific to processes you aim to accelerate, like:

• Lead response time
• Demo scheduling speed
• Proposal delivery time
• Contract turnaround
• Onboarding speed

Measure and compare these KPIs to your ideal targets to gauge optimization opportunities. Analyze variances by sales rep, region, and buyer persona to surface specific issues.

Gather metrics from your technology solutions like CRM, marketing automation, demo software, and sales tools. Integrate systems to automatically track and report on the data you need.

Using your metrics as a baseline, set stretch goals for sales cycle compression and target increases in KPIs like demo/close rate and revenue per rep. Hold teams accountable to these aspiration levels as motivation to accelerate.

Review sales metrics and analyze process KPIs frequently - ideally weekly at minimum. During reviews, identify underperforming areas, reps, stages, or handoffs between teams that require optimization.

Finally, iterate your strategy based on the insights and opportunities surfaced by your metrics. Test optimizations, measure impact, and refine continually based on data. What gets measured gets managed - and accelerated.

By establishing a comprehensive suite of sales metrics and process KPIs, measuring and reporting on them frequently, analyzing variances, tying incentives to goals, identifying optimization opportunities through data, and iterating your strategy based on proven results - you bring visibility, accountability and a data-driven approach to compressing your sales cycle and accelerating revenue growth.

Implement demand-generation programs

To accelerate your sales process, you must have a steady stream of qualified leads ready to engage your sales team. Demand generation programs are a critical part of any sales acceleration strategy.

Start by defining your ideal client profile, key attributes that identify your most valuable customers.

Focus on traits like:

• Industry
• Size
• Pain points
• Budget
• Timeline

With this profile in place, develop demand gen programs] that attract the right audience:

• Paid ads targeting your ideal buyers
• SEO focused on their search queries
• Branded and educational content
• Account-based marketing programs
• Lead generation partnerships
• Trade show and event sponsorships
• Social media targeting specific personas

As leads come in, filter and score them based on fit with your client profile using the:

• Qualification forms
• Gated content
• Web behavior tracking
• Content consumption data

Nurture leads via:

• Segmented email campaigns
• Automated chats
• Social media outreach
• Gated educational content

To slowly move them toward sales-readiness. Hand off high-quality leads to your sales team as they become qualified opportunities.

Monitor results of your demand gen programs using metrics like:

• Campaign response rates
• Lead volume
• MQLs per month
• Lead costs
• Lead to opportunity conversion
• Opportunity win rate

Adjust programs that underperform and double down on those that produce the highest-quality leads at the lowest cost. Reallocate budgets as needed to optimize results.

Regularly test new demand generation channels and tactics based on your evolving client profile. Explore areas like:

• Podcast sponsorships
• Live webinars
• Influencer marketing
• LinkedIn lead gen ads

Implement the programs that prove most effective at attracting your ideal customers in large, qualified volumes.

By strategically generating demand for your solution from the buyers that matter most, you ensure a constant stream of sales-ready leads for your team to engage. This allows you to accelerate deals by keeping reps productive and closing opportunities as they arise - rather than spending time hunting for the next lead. Nurturing the right prospects through an intelligent funnel is fundamental to selling faster.

Enable Account-Based Sales Strategies

An important part of accelerating your B2B sales cycle is focusing on the specific accounts representing the greatest opportunities. Adopting an account-based sales (ABS) strategy can help you compress the time it takes to close strategic deals.

Begin by identifying the accounts that represent your best fit and potential based on traits like:

• Industry
• Size
• Pain points
• Budget
• Timeline
• Executive interest
• Competitive threats

Use scoring models to identify which accounts offer the highest potential value and easiest path to purchase. Then develop account plans tailored to each target that outline:

• Key contacts
• Pain points and objectives
• Desired outcomes
• Proposed solutions
• Special offers

Next, assign dedicated resources to pursue each strategic account. Give one or more reps full responsibility for qualifying the opportunity, booking demos, overcoming objections, and closing the deal.

Equip your assigned reps with the knowledge, tools, and enforcement to prioritize and accelerate movements within their accounts. Focus them solely on compressing the sales cycle for that one strategic opportunity.

Use account-specific collateral like case studies, ROI analyses, executive briefings, and customized demo content to quickly engage high-level sponsors within targets.

Provide sales and marketing support to help assigned reps execute account plans, including targeted ads, email campaigns, event outreach, and customized content. The goal is to overwhelm targets with value at every touchpoint.

Track progress and results for each strategic account using metrics like:

• Demos booked per quarter
• Demo-to-close rate
• Proposal response time
• Contract turnaround time
• Target onboarding speed

Adjust tactics and optimize where needed based on these goal-oriented KPIs. Replace underperforming reps if progress stalls.

By focusing your sales acceleration efforts on the specific strategic accounts that matter most - equipped with the knowledge, tools, resources, and dedicated attention required - you maximize your chances of compressing cycle times for your most impactful deals. An account-based sales strategy can dramatically accelerate revenue from your largest opportunities.

Conclusion

Implementing a successful sales acceleration strategy requires a holistic and data-driven approach. It means optimizing your lead qualification, streamlining your sales process, enhancing buyer enablement, boosting rep productivity, leveraging automation, aligning roles across teams, establishing the right metrics and KPIs, generating large volumes of qualified demand, and enabling account-based sales strategies.

Done right, these efforts combine to form a powerful flywheel effect. Accelerating one part of the process - like shortening demo response times - can enable faster hand-offs, reduced cycle times, increased productivity, and higher conversion rates. The gains compound as prospects move more quickly through each stage.

You must measure results, analyze gaps and iterate your strategy continually based on proven outcomes. Test optimizations, double down on what works, and abandon tactics that fail to compress cycle times. Deploying the right technologies and systems - like interactive demo software - can supercharge your acceleration efforts by automating manual tasks and providing data-driven insights.

But ultimately, creating a culture of sales cycle compression within your organization will sustain results over time. Aligning incentives, recognizing top performers, training reps to sell faster, and defining "pipeline velocity" as a key performance indicator can motivate stakeholders to contribute to acceleration.

By viewing sales cycle optimization as a strategic, companywide initiative rather than the sole responsibility of your sales team, you lay the foundation for long-term growth based on increased productivity, efficiency, and deal velocity. A data-driven and relentless focus on compressing cycle times at every opportunity is the key to scaling your revenue acceleration efforts. 

Cover Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash