What is Revenue Acceleration?
Every sales team faces the same two hurdles: finding new opportunities and winning those deals. To accelerate revenue, sales teams must deploy a consistent set of actions designed to add new opportunities to the top of the funnel while keeping active deals moving along.
So, how do revenue teams make the change to start accelerating revenue? It’s more than just deal gen – revenue acceleration is a dramatic shift in how your team sells.
Generate opportunities from your target accounts
Let’s start with a couple of truths for enterprise sales teams:
1) The sales process is fragmented – From the top of the funnel to signing the dotted line, the sales process today is more difficult and disparate than ever. Additionally, the post-pandemic world has exacerbated and added to the inequities and struggles of the modern sales professional and unfortunately, for the most part, they’re on their own.
2) Opportunities don’t grow on trees – Unlike marketing-driven organizations, where leads come in on a regular cadence, enterprise sales teams are generally responsible for the entire sales cycle. Even worse, account executives are often under-equipped to break into new accounts, and expand opportunities within existing accounts.
3) A CRM alone is no longer sufficient – Despite having more resources and larger teams, enterprise sales orgs are often the most under-equipped when it comes to sales tech and training. CRMs are, by definition, static tools, designed to track and log actions. Modern sales teams need active resources to find new opportunities
Simply put, sales is a lonely sport for the enterprise account executive. In order to bring meaningful change to the entire organization, revenue acceleration starts by equipping your team with specific methods and ideas to improve their sales process and generate new opportunities
Move beyond leads - go straight to qualified opportunities
I sell to financial services, in the NE USA region, with $250M+ revenue.
My clients include:
- PNC Bank
- Credit Suisse
- JPMorgan Chase
The inconvenient truth for sales teams is that most leads don’t result in a sale. Depending on the study, only 2-10% of leads actually turn into a win. To translate, 90-98% of the time, your reps are spending time fighting a losing battle. To reliably scale revenue, you need to tilt the odds in your favor.
To accelerate your revenue, sales reps need more opportunities, not just leads. Winnable opportunities can be generated by sales leadership or can be hunted from sales reps, but by being intentional at the top of the funnel leads to more winnable opportunities.
Move beyond leads - go straight to qualified opportunities
I sell to financial services, in the NE USA region, with $250M+ revenue.
My clients include:
- PNC Bank
- Credit Suisse
- JPMorgan Chase
The inconvenient truth for sales teams is that most leads don’t result in a sale. Depending on the study, only 2-10% of leads actually turn into a win. To translate, 90-98% of the time, your reps are spending time fighting a losing battle. To reliably scale revenue, you need to tilt the odds in your favor.
To accelerate your revenue, sales reps need more opportunities, not just leads. Winnable opportunities can be generated by sales leadership or can be hunted from sales reps, but by being intentional at the top of the funnel leads to more winnable opportunities.
Empower your revenue team with winnable opportunities
Acceleration is more than just deal generation
When looking to increase revenue, where do most sales teams start? The top of the funnel. It makes perfect sense: if we need to close more deals, we need more deals to close. However, this is only half of the battle. We need to address all the pitfalls of the modern revenue team.
Revenue Smoothing
Most sales organizations experience what we describe as “uneven revenue”. Weeks go by without a closed deal, and then a flurry of awkward deals pushed through right at the end of the quarter to meet static revenue goals. Not only is it inefficient, but it forces your reps to shift their attention to the shiny object most likely to close, ignoring the rest of their pipeline.
In a world of accelerated revenue, your revenue curves should be smooth, consistent throughout the quarter while slowly and steadily increasing in pace.
The traditional revenue curve – buoyed by a couple large deals at the end of each quarter to meet quotas
The accelerated revenue curve – predictable and steady growth, with deals flowing throughout the year
Pipeline predictability
Ever sales executive should be familiar with this issue – an uneven pipeline. It is impossible to have an efficient experience (for both your reps and prospects) when the stages of their pipeline are out of sync. An uneven pipeline requires extra attention for specific parts of the pipeline and as time goes on, this means long period of times without moving deals to closed.
To increase and accelerate revenue, sales leaders must be proactive about the health of their rep’s pipeline. This means deploying specific strategies, at the right time, to create a healthy and sustainable pipeline. The end result? More predictable revenue for your team and reps that spend more time on closing deals, not wrestling their pipeline.
An unhealthy pipeline – reps spend a skewed amount of time on one stage and ignore deals moving towards a win
A healthy pipeline – reps enjoy predictable and consistent activities to drive more deals to a win
Delivering a consistent experience
Let’s be candid – every stage of the sales cycle isn’t a blast to focus on. It’s why we have tools to help with prospecting, qualifying those opportunities, and so on. In the modern sales world, this has led to a very uneven experience from the client point of view. Of course, there’s a ton of effort to get leads into the sales funnel, and then also a ton of effort done to try and close those opportunities, but what happens in the middle?
For many sales orgs, it’s a great deal of passiveness. Hoping decision makers say ‘yes’, waiting to hear back from the fourth email on a sequence, and trying to get the gatekeeper to even open the e-sign document. For teams who want to accelerate their revenue, equal, meaningful attention must be given to each stage of the pipeline. Many reps will need ideas to move deals along through the middle stages of the sales process – but the end result is a higher win rate and faster time to revenue.
The typical sales process – tons of attention to prospecting and closing deals, opportunities are largely ignored in between
An accelerated and efficient sales process – high attention throughout the cycle speeds up time to revenue and boosts win rate
