Time-tested Techniques in B2B Sales Pipeline Acceleration

B2B sales pipeline acceleration offers several benefits to enterprises.

Here we see some of the techniques that ensure a strong pipeline acceleration:

1. Create a clear roadmap of your customer’s buying journey using all the insights available. Focus on qualified leads to optimize the process’s spending. The lead generation and lead qualification processes need to be very agile.

• Every touchpoint and interaction should be analyzed, from the first contact channel to the sale closure.
• Study the contact points like ads, referrals, and outbound- to identify the most active outreach points.
• Also, study how the prospective consumer consumes content and the content that performs best—blogs, audio, or video content.
• Notice and analyze how they engage with a digital presence, like websites, what pages they prefer to visit, and at what frequency.
• Ascertain the pipeline velocity and customer acquisition costs (CAC), which will help optimize the deal.

What finally drives the conversion? Study the most effective communication pattern here—physical demos, meetings, or calls. Plot the time the prospective client spends on each stage of the pipeline. This will help identify spots where inefficiencies cause delays and fix them.

2. Use marketing automation to speed up your prospecting journey.

The second contact schedule can be crunched to move things faster. Automation tools will enable fast responses and facilitate faster callbacks. Most CRM platforms enable this automation.

When marketing is automated, the response to leads can be scheduled to be sent within minutes before the momentum dies down. It is more than just a response- automation can make very specific and personalized responses, even fixing the most opportune time for connecting or delivering a message.

Automated messaging can even be sent out as a drip campaign over a few days, ensuring the prospects see the value of your solution without pitching it directly. Automating the leads update from the website backend to the CRM also shortens the process of data gathering and structuring.

AI chatbots make sales services much faster, more helpful, and more intelligent. These chatbots can keep customers engaged until the human team delivers the information or services. This helps to retain customers and prevent logo losses due to delayed responses.

3. Ensure your website or digital presence is easy to use and uses the right content marketing techniques.

For most prospects, your website will be one of the first touchpoints when evaluating solutions. So ensure they don’t leave without committing to it.

Starting with the UI/ UX, ensure the site is self-explanatory and easy to navigate. Then, you won’t need to waste time explaining everything and waiting for the client to decide.

Various marketing collaterals published on the digital platform can do the job wonderfully.

4. ‍For complex B2B sales, a group of stakeholders often approve the purchase. So, the sales funnel will need the full buying committee. Address every person in the IT buying decision-makers hierarchy and ensure every person gets equal importance.

Approvals are critical, and any delays in approvals are the onus of this committee. Identify the members of this group early on in the sales journey. The messaging should be tailored to each one to prompt a fast response. Ascertain their interests, likes, dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses. The sales team should give equal emphasis to each member’s queries.

The sales pipeline can be crunched if all the members of the approval group are aligned with your product. So work for that, directly or indirectly. This strategy also works when decision-makers resign, get promoted, or move on. This is called sales multi-threading and ensures a proper positive response to a deal. This process can also be automated.

5. Rigorous data analysis will be critical. Measuring every conversion cycle, length, win-loss by-product, and many other metrics can deliver predictive analytics of successful closure.

The key metrics that would work here would be –

• the average sales cycle length per stage,
• stage-wise conversion rates and
• the overall pipeline velocity and trends.
• rates of win or loss rates by product, campaign, and
• the times were taken by the closure cycle, leads, representatives, sector, or geography.

These are just a few factors that can be measured and analyzed for faster closures.  At this point, studying the lost accounts will also add value. Learnings from these—and identifying the reason and what could have been done better—may be just what’s needed to work on a faster cycle this time. Automated dashboards can do the job better than manual calculations.

6. Special Offers and Incentives: a whole number of gifts, offers, freebies, and discounts can accelerate the sales cycle closing. These special offers could gently nudge the decision in your favor faster than a straight route. But here, these advantages provided mustn’t be shared with everyone. Making them easily and publicly available will erode the value of exclusivity. Let this remain a strategic offering but useful for accelerating the sales pipeline.
7. Use AI and ML to create look-alike modeling, which enables the sales team to identify customers with traits similar to those of their existing customers.

These will help target potential customers and hot (or warm) leads. AI and ML tools can enable this, and sales pipelines can be made much shorter with this modeling. The look-alike modeling will ensure more hits than misses. These tools will help recognize patterns and trends in new leads that can be easily identifiable with the existing customer base. It will help to build a target account list (TAL) for campaigns that will have a much higher rate of response.

8. For Velocity and penetration, ABM (Account-Based Marketing) is a very effective strategy for sales pipeline acceleration in B2B. As it enables businesses to target only relevant high-value accounts, ABM is a huge strategy for sales pipeline crunching. It will deliver much higher velocity and market penetration because the clarity on targeted accounts gives companies the power to create precise, customized messaging.

The use of ABM adds huge value to the speed of a sales pipeline. It increases accuracy, creates stronger customer connections, and provides better metrics and influence. A smart marketing leader will track critical metrics like account engagement rate, opportunity rate, win rate, target account pipeline, and revenue.

9. Business Development Representatives (BDR) and sales development representatives (SDR) play a massive role here; they can do personalized and one-on-one outreach for marketing and sales. This will help close the loop much faster.

As per Review42, ‘Businesses with aligned marketing and sales teams are up to 67% more efficient at closing deals than businesses where they don’t.’ When sales and marketing teams align, the sales pipeline can be accelerated since it becomes easier to customize the customer experience. This is the best context for sales and marketing teams to collaborate for pipeline acceleration—a common goal.

Closely aligning marketing and sales processes and teams enables a much more agile and faster exchange of information and data. This will drive a faster lead generation to the qualification loop and ensure sales in a very agile environment. Dropping data silos will drive this sales enablement.

The benefits of B2B sales pipeline acceleration far outweigh any effort that goes into doing it well. One of the easiest strategies to do it is to target only pre-qualified leads. This enables them to close the deal fast. No time is wasted, and they can start work on others if the deal doesn’t close.

Given above are several other, smarter strategies to accelerate the sales pipeline.