TABLE OF CONTENTS
Samir Majumdar
Samir is the CEO and Co-founder of Veloxy. After spending 20+ years creating corporate systems, boosting revenue, and eliminating inefficiencies, Samir started Veloxy to help sales professionals shorten sales cycles, accelerate pipelines, and close more deals.
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Salesforce is arguably the best customer relationship management system for B2B companies. While it checks a lot of boxes for Sales Managers, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to unlock Salesforce’s potential to accelerate sales at your company.
Using the applicable insight and practices in this guide, you’ll not only help optimize and get more ROI from your Salesforce instance, but you’ll also improve sales team morale and your reputation as a champion at your company.
Because sales acceleration is an ongoing and evolving strategy, we’re sharing the methods and tools that will create a true and sustainable competitive advantage for today—and for years to come. This is a comprehensive guide, so we invite you to use the table of contents to skip to the juiciest parts.
Before you continue reading...
There are sections of this guide that presumes you’re using Veloxy Sales AI Software for Salesforce, which easily and automatically accelerates sales by predictably optimizing customer engagement. If you’re not already empowering your salespeople with Veloxy, you can rapidly deploy it and receive training at no cost for 30 days.
Start here: Speed up your selling activities in a few clicks
If you’re using another sales acceleration software, most of the principles will still apply. Of course, we’d prefer you to switch over and experience an ROI in the first month, which is what happens to most of our users. It’s all about crushing quota!
Table of Contents
1. What is Sales Acceleration?
Let’s start by sharing what Sales Acceleration isn’t. Sales acceleration isn’t merely selling faster to sell more. Customers never enjoy the feeling of being rushed to buy, and salespeople never enjoy the feeling of being under the gun to sell.
Those two pain points, alongside the following three, are what has created the demand for a renewed approach to sales acceleration.
No need to fret. All of the aforementioned pain points and more can be extinguished by today’s approach to sales acceleration. Sales acceleration is a straightforward, three-pronged strategy that helps customers move through the pipeline with greater speed by:
When you step back and consider today’s approach to sales acceleration, you find yourself asking a familiar question, “Is this the path to sales utopia?”
YES, by enabling sales acceleration in your Sales Org, you will not only experience higher quota, customer experience, and sales morale metrics, but you’ll also demonstrate to the C-suite the predictability behind your sales success. And isn’t that Sales Utopia?
Now let’s dive deeper into the specific way to accelerate your sales.
2. How to Accelerate Sales: 7 Best Tactics
While the strategy of sales acceleration is clear-cut, some of its tactics can be evasive or too numerous to sift through. Furthemore, some tactics work better for inside sales teams than outside sales teams, and some are more market-specific than others. This is why I’m sharing the following 10 tactics that can help every manager accelerate the sales process, starting with one that you won’t find anywhere else!
A. Use the Sales Acceleration Formula
I’m going to share with you a sales acceleration formula only known to Veloxy customers and many Salesforce users. This will not be referencing the popular book by Mark Roberge, ‘The Sales Acceleration Formula’, however, I would recommend you invest twenty dollars on the read. Roberge offers a very thorough, department-wide approach to accelerating sales that includes training, hiring, personnel management, sales enablement, and sales technology.
Veloxy’s Sales Acceleration Formula focuses on the impact that your sales process, sales technology, and customer engagement has on your selling activity versus non-selling activity ratio:
As you can see, we place a higher emphasis on the negative impact manually prioritizing leads has on your sales cycle. Using intuition, or heaven forbid an alphabetical list or randomized Excel spreadsheet, is still being used by over 20% of salespeople. When sales managers approach our team at Veloxy, lead prioritization based on the data analysis of customers’ propensity to buy is always our first priority—especially when it’s automated and empowered by artificial intelligence.
Sales acceleration is an ongoing strategy, which is why we put together this helpful calculator spreadsheet for you to use right now.
Get access now: Sales Acceleration Calculator
In addition to easily calculating the aforementioned sales acceleration formula, you’ll also be able to calculate our second sales acceleration formula. This formula focuses not just on how much more time you’ll be spending on selling activities and your improved lead prioritization—it focuses on the length of your sales cycle.
B. Leverage Automation and Sales AI
When salespeople aren’t selling, they’re sacrificing the opportunity to deliver value to their customer base. As you already know, the average salesperson spends over 60% of their day not engaging with customers. There are plenty of disparate solutions for this quandary, however, integrating automation and sales artificial intelligence is by far the most efficient and productive path you can take.
We enjoy referencing the findings from Salesforce’s 3rd State of Sales Report because they really hammer home how much of an immediate impact automation can have on your sales team’s daily activities. Imagine eliminating or greatly reducing all of these yearly numbers:
What would it mean to your end of year revenue goal if each salesperson had 685 more hours of customer engagement.
Feels like a personal Eureka! moment, am I right? While you’re thinking about all of the positive possibilities, what if I told you that Sales AI could add a multiplier effect to that number in the form of sales efficiency?
Artificial intelligence for sales leverages machine learning, which is a set of automated methods for tracking and analyzing your customer data and sales intelligence so as to discover more valuable and timely customer insights and behavior patterns.
With those extra 685 hours of selling time, your salespeople will now know the right time and the right talking points for each and every customer. I could make the argument that your sales reps will sell more with Sales AI in the time saved by automation than they would in their original allotment of 707 hours without it.
In short, automation and sales artificial intelligence helps salespeople be more themselves. Your reps are the best at creating and nurturing personal relationships, so why waste their time and limit their commissions by having them perform duties best suited for a clerk or administrative assistant? Keep your salespeople selling efficiently with automation and AI for sales.
C. Attract the Right Sales People
While you implement tactics to help enable your sales team with the right tools and processes, you should also look at attracting the right talent. Staff morale is one of the hidden benefits of sales acceleration tactics, however, there are still going to be people who resist change, progress, and continual improvement—and this is a problem.
Start attacking this issue by performing a sales team assessment. Like yourself, we like to keep things simple, which is why we recommend using the below chart for plotting your sales team.
While this is not an actual sales acceleration formula, it does highlight the impact of sales personnel on revenue.
Likelihood of Acceleration = A + B + C + D + F
Imagine for a moment that A’s are valued at 100, F’s are valued at -100, B’s at 50, and C’s and D’s at 0. If you had a team of 5 salespeople, and you had one of each plotted on the chart, your likelihood to accelerate sales would only be 50%. See how powerful the A’s and F’s can have on your sales acceleration strategy?
In conclusion, after performing your sales team assessment, work with human resources to develop a plan to attract more A’s to your organization.
D. Survey Your Leads and Customers
In today’s world of mobile apps, it’s a common practice for app developers to constantly survey their customers on user experience. By doing this, they discover new feature requests, bugs that need to be fixed, and other continual improvement initiatives.
While your customer engagement is not an ‘app’, it is indeed a ‘service’ and an experience that should be continually improved. Coupling that with the fact that customers are demanding more value and more attention than ever before, you should definitely initiate a customer engagement survey to discover some of the following:
The number of focal points is almost endless, which is why we often recommend to sales managers that they should let their customers dictate the talking points—especially having them define what “value add” means to them.
Now more than ever, buyers want more value-add to be initially brought to the table without pitches because they see that as a clear signal that the salesperson can be trusted with their business. By deploying the sales acceleration tactics of Sales AI and personalization, your sales team would be able to rapidly identify the right talking points and content preferences at the right time, every time. Not only does this accelerate sales, but it would give your sales team one of the strongest competitive advantages in the industry.
But what do I mean by personalization? Let’s dive into that all important tactic now.
E. Personalize Your Outreach
There is personalization, and there is a personalized experience. Gone are the days where merging a customer’s first name and company name bore fruit for sales teams. Customers are too smart to fall for that, even when their name is used in email subject lines or static photos.
Mass email blasts used to work. Then IT teams built smarter barriers. Then email companies got smarter to improve deliverability. But then the email recipients’ personal demands outpaced any improvement in engagement. Salespeople were about to give up, until the introduction of personalized experiences replaced basic personalization.
What do I mean by personalized experiences? Creating content and talking points that are so focused on the customer that they’ll actually think you typed out their first name and company name—when you really didn’t.
Thanks to the proliferation of sales intelligence and artificial intelligence, sales teams now have the power to group their customers into tighter clusters. Here are three ways you can create personalized experiences at scale:
By personalizing your experiences with customers, while also doubling or tripling the amount of time you spend with them, will only further your acceleration efforts.
F. Focus on the Right Dashboards and Reports
Of all the non-selling activities that keep salespeople from engagement, sales meetings are what managers are most reluctant to scale back on. This of course is for good reason, because they can work with their reps on prioritizing the right pipeline activities and strategizing on how to close more opportunities.
But what if you’re looking at the wrong reports, and you’re spending too much time sifting through the numbers?
The customization found in Salesforce dashboards and reports is otherworldly. However, this happens to be one of its most common pain points, as most sales teams spend too much time fixing reports and filtering a report’s results.
To properly accelerate sales without scaling back on sales meetings, you need the right dashboard and reports with the right decision-making details. Going back to the artificial intelligence tactic, imagine how powerful a sales meeting becomes when your surface-level dashboards and reports are accompanied by buying signals. This hyper accelerates the process of identifying who to engage with and why during a sales meeting because it removes a lot of the festering intuition and guesswork of years past.
With Veloxy, all users have an optimized dashboard and set of reports customized around some of the most successful sales managers and Salesforce users in the past decade (see the previous tactic on surveying customers). Not only do Veloxy users spend less time on meetings that take them away from customers, but they also seize the use of too many static spreadsheets.
Furthermore, Veloxy dashboards and reporting are accompanied by guided selling—specific best practice engagement recommendations based on historical data. This acts as a virtual sales manager assistant for reps because it offers the same advice without interfering with their engagement timeline. This not only makes the rep’s job easier and efficient, but the manager’s as well.
G. Collaborate with the Marketing Department
In the past 20 years, there has long been a disconnect between sales and marketing on what makes a marketing/sales qualified lead. Rather than mending fences and moving forward, this disconnect can persist for not just a few years, but decades. It evades the attention of many sales managers, not to mention the C-suite.
Here’s the key to collaborating with marketing. Start by sharing the sales acceleration formulas with a marketing colleague, and ask, “I would like to demonstrate to the C-suite that marketing plays a key role in accelerating sales—what’s missing from this formula that can represent your team’s role in generating more revenue, faster?”
This is all about ownership, as well as collaboration. You’re not stepping on toes. You’re not saying that you can’t find a way to plug in marketing’s role. What you are saying is that you value marketing’s role in accelerating sales, and you want to take an extra step toward building a stronger collaborative relationship.
Secondly, ask a marketing colleague this, “Do you have 15 or 30 minutes this week? I’d like to share with you a series of data-driven insights and other customer intelligence discovered by some of our sales solutions. I’m confident you could use this for marketing campaigns.”
Not only does marketing want to be more involved with the sales process from start to finish, but your customers want access and value from more points of contact than just sales. In addition to marketing, both B2B and B2C customers welcome receiving value from customer service, product management, and a variety of other industry-focused departments.
3. How to Accelerate B2B Sales: 4 Best Tactics
Let’s narrow our focus to B2B, shall we? Moving aside tactics for process, all B2B sales teams need to check off four boxes in order to truly accelerate sales in today’s digital-first world. These four boxes include sales enablement, sales productivity, Salesforce adoption, and sales engagement. By not optimizing just one of these key components, your sales team will fail to accelerate sales to the point of company-changing revenue and life-changing recognition. Let’s start with the process that gets the most attention.
A. Accelerate Sales Enablement
As you and I both know, sales enablement is the practice of giving your sales team everything they could possibly need to succeed on an efficiency level. This is a combination of the “right” technology, the right training, the right content, the right data access, and more. The reason this process gets more attention than the other three is because sales enablement can take up, on average, 10% of company revenue.
Now that you’ve picked up your jaw off of the floor after contemplating what 10% of fifty million dollars is, what do I mean by “right”? Not all tools and content is right for your salespeople, let alone your customers. You should be looking for “sales enabled” content, tools, and more. For something to be truly considered sales enabled, it has to make each of your reps’ sales process more intuitive and streamlined so as to predictably maximize usage and sales morale.
Here are three critical areas that need to be sales enabled for accelerating sales:
Now that you’re ready to tackle these three critical enablement areas, let’s dive deeper into each one.
B. Accelerate Salesforce Adoption
Death. Taxes. Salesforce adoption challenges. Sales managers have experienced this certainty the past 20 years with varying results when presented with solutions. While the age and tech familiarity of salespeople used to be the most common cause of a lack of adoption, the balancing of selling with admin tasks and data entry associated with Salesforce has taken over as the number one deterrent.
It’s one thing if the admin tasks and data entry made up a percentage of a salesperson’s day during work hours, however, most salespeople working to meet quota are postponing these adoption barriers until they get home. This not only creates a negative impact on employee morale, but the spouses and partners of the salesperson aren’t too pleased either.
There is no question about it. Salesforce is the most powerful CRM on the planet. With that being said, they leave some of the responsibility to the end users, such as sales staff, marketing staff, and even IT staff who can add their programming talents to customize the platform’s integration into the organization and its tech stack.
But what if over 75% of all Salesforce users are from small to medium sized businesses that don’t have either the manpower or time to invest in full customization? This is where Salesforce automation comes in to accelerate adoption and sales acceleration.
Salesforce automation is a feature of an application, or set of applications, that automates time and resource-consuming tasks such as data entry, lead prioritization, proposal generation, and more. Some automations are triggered by clicks, events, or triggers such as saved records, while others are constantly running around the clock with no involvement from sales staff.
When Salesforce is automated by Veloxy, for example, our users experience a 200 to 350% increase in selling activity, not to mention more free time when they get home, too. Salesforce automation defines efficiency gains, and now I’ll share how those gains can extend to actual customer interactions
C. Accelerate Sales Engagement
While data entry is an inhibitor to Salesforce adoption, looking up prospects, manually prioritizing outreach, writing and sending one-off emails, and engaging at the wrong time are all frequent inhibitors to sales engagement.
Luckily for you and your sales team, Salesforce isn’t the only resource that can be automated. Sales engagement platforms are now being driven and differentiated by artificial intelligence capabilities made specifically for salespeople.
Picture this. You start your day at 8am. You turn on your computer and smart devices. Staring back at you from all of your devices is an optimized list of leads and customers that are subconsciously expecting you to engage with them at recommended times (by subconsciously, we’re referring to Sales AI learning when customers are more open to engagement). Yes, sales engagement with artificial intelligence is kind of like having a crystal ball.
Without hesitation, your salespeople will maximize their daily engagement while also reaching the right contacts at the right time, every time.
You save over 160 hours a year by not manually selecting people to call. You send templated and personalized emails at the time each unique buyer is active in their inbox. And when you do want to look up a prospect, all of their and the account’s actionable information is on one screen.
This is the way sales engagement was meant to be, and a missing key component for accelerating sales productivity.
D. Accelerate Sales Productivity
If your sales team is empowered with everything they need to succeed, and two of those components—Salesforce and their sales engagement solutions—are fully optimized to maximize selling time, you are hereby accelerating the productivity of your team.
There is one unique way to further maximize your team’s sales results that most organizations are failing to achieve.
Your goal should be to consolidate your sales technology footprint. Here are some polarizing statistics on technology stacks:
There are two problems found in these statistics.
First, there is an overwhelming sense of urgency to build the largest and most powerful technology stack. If there’s a trending application getting all of the buzz, rest assured it’s finding its way into your stack and the stack of some of your competitors. What these organizations are failing to realize is that this cripples user adoption and return on investment, creates stranded and unused applications (that are still being paid for), and an overall sense of unfulfillment. We call these technology stacks ‘leaning towers’, because unlike the Leaning Tower of Pisa, they’re sure to fall over and take your productivity (or lack thereof) with it.
Second, influenced by the first problem, many organizations mix-and-match applications. For example, they’ll choose three applications that fall under the ‘Sales Engagement’ category because one has a virtual call recorder, another has personalized email cadences, and the third has geolocation leadfinding. We’ve seen this occur hundreds of times, where sales reps cannot agree on using one application for sales engagement, which then doubles or triples the manager’s job of onboarding him or herself to each application.
As we can agree, the fewer screens your sales team has to familiarize themselves with, the better. If you need help choosing an optimal sales technology stack for your team, check out the optimal list below.
4. Sales Acceleration Tools
Now what is a sales acceleration blog post without a list of valuable solutions?!
Sales Managers such as yourself are overwhelmed with cold emails, cold calls, online ads, and several other touchpoints by 100s of software companies trying to get you to use their product. We’re here to make your trialing and buying experience easier and quicker. All of these recommendations have a 4 star or higher rating on the world’s largest software review site G2.
A. Sales AI
Nothing will modernize your Sales Org faster than AI for Sales. While there is widespread concern around artificial intelligence, you and every other sales manager can enjoy greater peace of mind than other professions because AI doesn’t displace salespeople, it creates the need to hire more!
Sales AI is the brain behind automated data entry and lead prioritization, among other things. It leverages machine learning that never sleeps to discover trends in your Salesforce data and customer behavior. Because of this, your salespeople are more efficient and productive, generating more sales with more selling time, thereby creating the revenue needed to grow your team’s size.
i. Veloxy
The thing that makes Veloxy Sales AI one-of-a-kind is that it extends its accessibility and functionality to all of your team’s devices.
Inside sales teams are empowered from the comfort of their inbox with all of the sales intelligence necessary to create relevant and personalized messaging on each call and in each email. Furthermore, they maximize their calls and meetings by not having to enter or search for anything in Salesforce.
Outside sales teams enjoy extending AI to their favorite smartphone or tablet. They can use the prioritized call list to reach their leads and customers at the right time, with the right message, every time. And because Veloxy was designed by a former field manager, you’re always one click away from timely insight and your next deal.
B. Call Tracking
Similar to the intelligence that Veloxy provides from tracking emails, solutions such as Call Rail empower you to achieve similar intelligence from tracking phone calls.
While most salespeople are familiar with generating outbound calls with sales intelligence, a need was created to have immediate access to similar sales intelligence when customers call back. This is what most call tracking software accomplishes, accompanying contact data with source information such as website visits, online ad engagements, and other unique qualifiers that vary from vendor to vendor.
i. Call Rail
We’re huge fans of Call Rail for sales teams wanting dynamic call tracking. If your company is heavily invested in digital marketing efforts, especially the generation of inbound leads being forwarded to your inside sales team, this is your solution.
Knowing everything you need to know when a call is coming in is invaluable. What’s also valuable is the impact Call Rail’s analytics has on collaborating with marketing. Knowing the messaging and channels driving call backs helps not just with optimizing marketing spend, but outbound messaging as well.
C. Advanced Scheduling Software
You may be thinking, “How does scheduling software help a sales team accelerate sales?” While many salespeople use Outlook or Google Calendar, the benefits of scheduling software comes from customer access, customizable rules, and breadth of integrations.
So how does scheduling software help sales acceleration? The more scheduling benefits a solution can deliver a sales team, the less time they’ll need to spend on the process, and they’ll eliminate any chance of missed appointments.
i. Chili Piper
Here’s what separates Chili Piper from the rest in my book—integration. With Chili Piper, salespeople can easily schedule meetings and send invitations from the comfort of their Gmail or Outlook inbox, their favorite sales engagement or team collaboration software, and even their Zoom account. Staying on your favorite screen is best practice for inside and outside sales reps.
Just take a look at their reviews. Eliminating fake demos and no show rates, reducing administrative tasks, and furthering a department’s goal of streamlining are common benefits shared by users across all business sizes and industries.
D. B2B Contact Data & Intelligence
Gone are the days when simple lists with name, title, and contact information. You don’t just need company intelligence, you need real-time company intelligence with Org charts and alerts.
Data and intelligence providers have become the best advocates for personalized outreach, and for good reason—they help you segment your lists into small clusters that will deliver your sales team higher response rates. Why blast one email to thousands of people when you can add 47 warm leads to a cadence that all share something in common, such as current job postings for SDRs or new chief executive officer hires.
i. Lead411
If you think alerts around job postings and CEO hires are groundbreaking in the data intelligence space, let me introduce you to Lead411.
Let’s start with the fact that they give your sales team access to accurate data and intelligence from 450 million contacts at 20 million companies. If that wasn’t enough, they share funding and IPO activity, company awards, and dozens of other outreach triggers that can start a fresh, relevant conversation for each of your salespeople.
Even better, if you’re concerned about salespeople engaging with the same prospect at the same time, Lead411 prevents your team from reaching the same prospect with unique team filters. Give Lead411 a shot—it’s also reasonably priced compared to their competition.
5. Sales Acceleration Books
If you were to stroll into your local Barnes & Noble, you’d be hard pressed to find any of our recommendations sitting on a shelf. In addition to the aforementioned The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge, we’re recommending you to complete the trifecta of book purchases with The Ultimate Sales Accelerator by Amit Agarwal and The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Performance by Andris Zoltners. With these three books on your bookshelf, you’ll further improve the odds that your sales acceleration strategy will be a resounding success.
Furthermore, the books cover two bases that are pivotal to sales success in 2022 and beyond—overcommunication and sales force management.
A. The Ultimate Sales Accelerator
This book does a great job at helping salespeople simplify the sales process. Salespeople are under constant pressure to sell, sell, and sell some more, which can complicate and rush their daily activities. The customer experience is negatively affected by such pressure, and yet it’s the key focal point for simplification and sales acceleration.
Two key points are presented. Be your customers’ trusted advisor, and consistently ask more thought-provoking and open-ended questions.
In a world of overcommunication where the divide between generations is too great, presenting yourself as something other than a salesperson will not only help you stand out amongst competitive reps, but it will also help you redefine what it means to be a salesperson in the mind of your customer.
You can read more and get your acceleration blueprint here: The Ultimate Sales Accelerator
B. The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance
The Ultimate Sales Accelerator does a great job highlighting the generational differences amongst customers and how their demands are changing salespeoples’ approach to engagement.
But what about the generational differences amongst your sales team?
Andris Zoltners revisits a seemingly archaic approach to sales acceleration—sales force performance. Over the past twenty plus years, sales managers have been scrambling to build out the strongest technology stacks without giving their team’s adoption and performance its due consideration. Similar to Agarwal’s simplicity approach, Zoltners offers readers a simple and readily-applicable framework for evaluating and improving team performance.
After this read, you’ll have an easier time attracting, onboarding, and retaining the best sales talent, as well as properly assigning any and all such “success drivers” that positively impact sales acceleration.
You can read more here: The Complete Guide to Accelerating Sales Force Performance
6. Conclusions & Next Steps: Sales Acceleration
Albert Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
This everlasting advice can easily be applied to your sales acceleration strategy. While the details and moving parts incorporated in such things as automation and sales force performance can be numerous, the steps and reasoning involved are quite consolidated and straightforward. And this can be a deterrent to most sales managers—but don’t fret, persevere! You and your team’s key performance indicators will prove your worth, and that of your newfound strategy.
If you would like a free sales acceleration consultation, please reserve time on my calendar today!
And stay tuned for updates to this post and other posts on the topic of accelerating sales.