Sales Velocity – The Forgotten Stepchild
When improving sales performance, most sales managers think about volume and deal size. But velocity is a critical factor that improves overall sales performance considerably. Improving the velocity of deal flow will help you close more business and more business per rep (that’s more revenue without more expense!)
See the Bigger Picture – The “UnSexy” Provide an Opportunity
Naturally, sales managers focus their attention on the big spotlight deals. This can leave other good opportunities to languish. Tracking sales velocity of opportunities, and measuring against a historical average, provides an alert system to neglected deals. By accelerating good deals that may be taking too long, dropping bad opportunities that are just drawing out the inevitable, and managing the overall pipeline velocity, sales teams can significantly increase overall sales throughput.
Heal the Process, as well as the Symptoms
Long term improvements in velocity and throughput come from fixing systemic and process issues. First assess where the biggest roadblocks are by analyzing historic sales velocity and identifying areas of greatest potential improvement. Then focus management on fixing issues by applying resources and streamlining processes. These may be resourcing issues, overweight processes, infrastructure problems or system inefficiencies. These process improvements can make a considerable improvement in business gross margins. But change is not easy—Arming yourself with data quantifying the problem and the upside opportunity if fixed can make the difference between getting the necessary changes approved or not.
You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure
Any improvement starts with understanding the problem. Start with a thorough analysis of your sales velocity—stage by stage, for different segments and over time. Enodo Pipeline Manager™ helps you analyze your sales velocity by segment and over time. With Enodo, you can drill deep into the data to identify the root cause of abnormal performance. Enodo enables you to track historical performance, set targets for future pipeline management goals and apply sales velocity metrics to future sales objectives in order to more accurately plan resource needs.