🕵🏻‍♂️ Account & sales velocity

Author

The Trenches Community
April 16, 2024

Dear Trencher,

Here is why account velocity could be an important metric. And how it can help us understand why many B2B companies invest too much in later-stage sales, and not enough in demand and pipeline generation.

Imagine a marketing and sales process as a production line:

  • The input into the system are the target accounts

  • The final output are won deals.

Let's say you take the accounts through several stages:

1. PRIORITIZATION

Identify the accounts that are more likely to have a need, and that you can reasonably win and retain over the long time.

2. DEMAND GENERATION & NURTURING

Create awareness, nurture and develop relationships with multiple buyers, and qualify the need.

3. ACCOUNT DEVELOPMENT

1:1 Account Development, including: 

  • Expanding the relationships with the buying center

  • Account research and buying center mapping

  • Creating personalized offers

  • Planning and running specific multi-channel follow-up activities

The goal is to book a discovery call with an AE (declared need).

4. OPPORTUNITY DEVELOPMENT

The goal is to qualify and develop a sales-qualified opportunity.

5. PIPELINE

The goal here is to drive consensus in the buying committee, and eventually win the deal.

---

You can measure the overall throughput of your system by measuring sales velocity: how much revenue your company can generate over a given period.

But what this doesn't tell you is, where are the bottlenecks in your system?

Because the complete chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Over the past year, the bottleneck for many companies has been their ability to generate qualified pipeline (high ACV opportunities that you can win and retain over time).

Some companies try to solve this bottleneck by hiring more SDRs and allocating more budget to demand capture.

Unfortunately, they experience diminishing returns.

A much more sustainable way to increase sales velocity is to

1. Target better accounts (accounts that are more likely to have a need, and that you are more likely to win and retain over the long time)

2. Increase the effectiveness of the earlier stages. And that effectiveness could be expressed in terms of account velocity, i.e. the number (actually, the total value) of accounts you can move through the stage per, say, month.

You should still look at total throughput (pipeline and sales velocity) because local tweaks can be dangerous. And accounts don't always flow from left to right (they skip back or skip our stages altogether).

However, account velocity should give you an insight into where the bottlenecks are and where you need to improve.

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Upcoming community events

When:

Thursday 18th April: 4 pm CET - 8 am ET.

Join us to learn and discuss:

  • Territory/market-based account selection vs clusters

  • 4 criteria you must pay attention to define accounts that are likely to become sales opportunities

  • 3 ABM lists, and how to work with them to generate sales opportunities

As always, we share live real examples and answer all questions.

Save your spot and sign up somebody from sales - it always pays off (according to our attendees).

BEST SHARE FROM THE TRENCHES COMMUNITY

QUESTIONS FROM FELLOW TRENCHERS

Hi all, I'm a single marketing resource our company has for Northern Europe with budget constraints too.

We sell very complex tech solutions with long sales cycles. I have been running a 12-week email marketing campaign to generate some leads by giving them scores based on their level of engagement. It is coming to an end now and I'm looking for ideal ways to keep the engagement going.

Some ways I could brainstorm are:

  1. Give a break and analyze the results and start phase 2 after 6 weeks gap

  2. Take out the engaged audience and create a campaign for them

  3. Work on an always-on campaign for new people coming into our database.  and have event/ webinar/topic-specific campaigns

Can anyone share the ideal or the right way they managed to build the pipeline? and which one to prioritize. 

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