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Since you're here, you're likely familiar with the tedious, time-consuming nature of B2B sales pipelines. New leads come in, some progress is made, but closing the deal seems to take FOREVER.
In fact, Salesforce finds that in B2B deals, conversion time frames can span from more than 100+ days. That’s several weeks, if not months before realizing revenue from pipeline.
But what if you could speed up your sales pipeline and convert leads into paying customers faster?
That would let you grow revenue quicker, make your sales team more efficient, and provide a better experience for prospects.
In this post, let’s look at ten proven strategies to accelerate your B2B sales pipeline. These tactics have helped companies reduce delays, shorten cycle times, and get deals across the finish line sooner.
Let's dive in!
TL;DR;
Here’s a list of strategies to accelerate your sales pipeline:
Pick a few areas that resonate with your business and run with them.
A sales pipeline provides a view of all your potential deals mapped out as they move through your sales process—from initial contact to closed sales.
It's usually displayed as a funnel, with leads at the top of the funnel and closed customers at the bottom. In between are the middle stages that deals must move through, like qualification, calls, proposals, etc.
Each open deal sits in one of these stages, depending on its position in the sales process. This helps you analyze how quickly deals are moving through your sales process.
Here’s a formula to calculate your organization’s sales pipeline velocity:
Pipeline velocity = (Opportunities x average deal size x average win rate) ÷ length of average sales cycle (in days)
To put this formula into perspective, let’s take an example.
The formula would be:
Pipeline velocity = (100 opportunities x $10,000 average deal size x 10% average win rate) ÷ 50 days
That makes the sales pipeline velocity $2000 per day.
This means that for every day, you can expect $2000 worth of deals to move through your sales pipeline, given the current conditions of your sales process.
Now, why does pipeline velocity even matter? What's the big deal if deals take a while to close?
Well, here are some of the critical benefits of having a high-velocity pipeline:
If deals move through your pipeline quicker, you'll close more of them per month.
Using our example above, if you start closing deals in 30 days instead of 50, your sales pipeline velocity would be $3,000+ per day instead of $2000.
Shorter sales cycles mean each rep can handle more deals at once.
So, even without expanding headcount, you can get more done and ramp up productivity.
Slow sales cycles drag out the amount of time spent per deal.
As you begin accelerating your pipeline, it reduces the average cost to close each deal.
That helps boost overall margins and profitability.
When pipeline velocity is all over the place, revenue forecasting gets tough.
But fast, predictable cycles make it easier to forecast sales for upcoming quarters accurately.
Customers want fast sales cycles, too. Quicker time-to-value and onboarding leads to greater satisfaction.
As you can see, there are some significant benefits to accelerating your pipeline beyond just closing deals faster.
It enables sustainable growth, predictability, productivity gains, and happier customers.
That's why making sales pipeline velocity a priority is vital for any scaling company.
Now that you know why sales pipeline velocity matters, let's get into how to improve it. Here are ten proven strategies and tactics to accelerate your B2B sales pipeline:
If you want to speed up your pipeline, the first step is understanding your typical customer's journey.
Analyze every touchpoint and interaction as they move from prospect to customer. Look at elements like:
This end-to-end view will highlight areas for improvement in your sales process.
You'll see where prospects fall out of the journey, what causes delays, and stages with longer cycle times.
Apart from the journey, you also want to understand the customer acquisition costs (CAC) and the current pipeline velocity before you can begin optimizing.
From there, you can simplify touchpoints, improve conversion rates, and take friction out of the journey.
This holistic perspective alone will reveal many opportunities to accelerate deals you'd never catch otherwise.
It's tempting to consider every new lead a hot potential deal and jump on it immediately.
But let's be honest—not every lead is created equal. Many end up wasting sales time.
Instead, begin to qualify leads more likely to convert before spending valuable sales time on them.
Some ways to focus on qualified leads:
Performing lead qualification regularly can help your business as well as your sales team to ensure your pipeline contains quality deals that are ready to move forward quickly.
Marketing studies consistently show that average response time is 42 hours. But if you want things to move faster, contacting leads as quickly as possible after they engage will help boost conversion rates.
That's where marketing automation comes in. It lets you respond to new leads within minutes or hours before momentum dies.
Some ways to use automation for responding to leads:
The idea isn’t to replace your sales people. We want to use automation to engage leads until your sales team can get back to them.
Combine automation with that human touch at precisely the right time to get the win.
Here's a tactic that may seem counterintuitive...
During the early stages of their journey, leads aren't ready to talk to sales. They're focused on researching potential solutions.
You'll turn them off if you try to pitch them too soon.
Instead, provide value upfront through:
Nurture first, sell second. Prospects will automatically develop more interest when you lead with value instead of a sales pitches.
And once they know you understand their needs, they'll be way more open to a conversation.
For most prospects, your website will be one of the first touchpoints when evaluating solutions.
So, making sure it accelerates deals is critical.
The more questions prospects can answer on their own through your site, the less time you'll spend answering them 1:1 down the line—and the more confident prospects will be about your business.
Letting users sign up and experience your product for themselves at no cost is incredibly powerful for pipeline acceleration.
It helps remove that friction point entirely rather than make prospects request demos and jump through hoops.
Offer a limited but valuable free version with your core features available.
Then, make it easy to upgrade to paid plans within the product.
A freemium approach reduces the heavy sales lifting required to get prospects onboard and use your solution.
However, if your product requires 1:1 onboarding due to technical complexities, have an interactive product demo or product tour for prospects to try out.
You want them to get a feel for your product as effortlessly as possible—the less friction there is, the faster your sales pipeline.
Pricing promotions, limited-time discounts, gift boxes, swag...these special offers work to nudge prospects when they’re unable to make a decision.
A free 30-day trial pitched right before the prospect chooses to close the checkout page can help push an otherwise lost opportunity.
But don't just blast everyone with the same deals. Such tactics lower your product’s value.
Instead, reserve them for accounts where your sales team has identified mutual intent and the deal is trending positively.
Get strategic about it.
When timed right in the customer journey, incentives can be the extra push that accelerates a deal from evaluation to close. Just use them selectively and thoughtfully.
Complex B2B deals often involve multiple decision-makers—end users, finance team, CXOs, etc.
But too often, sales teams focus on just one main champion prospect and ignore everyone else.
This risk deals with stalling at the last mile when someone at the company isn't aligned.
To accelerate pipeline movement:
Getting everyone on the same page early (even if indirectly) smooths the approval process and avoids last-minute hang-ups.
Lack of prompt, consistent follow-up after initial outreach kills more deals than anything as we learned before.
So don't drop the ball after those first few emails or that big demo call. Nurture the relationship until you either close the deal or the client goes completely cold.
Reminds me of this scene from the Wolf of Wallstreet!
Some key pointers:
Just having that structured process for managing follow-ups removes a major pipeline bottleneck. No more waiting around for prospects to come to you!
Finally, you can't accelerate your pipeline if you're flying blind. You need to start crunching the numbers.
Look at key metrics like:
Here are some other key metrics to track while running ABM and demand gen campaigns.
Going through this data will help you understand what messaging, products, and channels work best to progress sales.
You can also survey lost accounts to learn why—was it price, competition, or missing features?
Now, you may be wondering—how can I map journeys, score leads, and analyze pipeline metrics?
Doing that manually with spreadsheets is painful and inaccurate!
That’s when you need a customer journey analytics software like Factors.
Factors automatically captures prospect and customer data across all your touchpoints.
Then, they connect the dots to map entire journey visualizations.
Factors can also help you score leads based on engagement metrics and surface actionable insights.
It's like having an all-seeing eye across your tech stack. No more dragging exports from sales, marketing, and support systems separately.
For accelerating your sales pipeline velocity, Factors can help you:
So, if you need more visibility into your pipeline health, check out comprehensive solutions like Factors!
There you have it—10 strategies that help you speed up your sales pipeline velocity and close deals faster.
It may seem like a lot to take in. But even implementing a few of these tactics to begin with can go a long way.
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Funnel accelerating activities are tactics and initiatives that help speed up lead progression through the stages of your sales funnel. This includes:
The goal of funnel acceleration is to reduce delays, bottlenecks, and friction points at each step so leads flow smoothly into closed customers.
Some key ways to improve overall pipeline velocity include:
Combining multiple acceleration tactics results in compounding effects on velocity. Small gains add up!
The basic formula for calculating total sales pipeline velocity is:
Pipeline velocity = (Opportunities x average deal size x average win rate) ÷ length of average sales cycle (in days)
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