High-Velocity Sales (HVS) and its Importance for Modern Sales Teams

Introduction:

Sales velocity is a critical facet of any sales function. It simply means how quickly sales teams can move prospective customers in the sales pipeline from leads to opportunities, close the deals and generate revenue. In short, how quickly companies are making money.

The mathematical definition is sales volume per unit of time with variables such as opportunity volume, deal size, conversion rate, and the sales cycle length. One of the key variables here identified is the sales cycle length. In the past decade with the digital and mobile revolution, consumer expectations have grown likewise, to access products and services in a flash. Organizations have taken measures to meet growing customer needs aiming to shorten sales cycles and offer prompt services and communication.

It is a long-established fact that salespeople should spend most of their time if not all, selling. Let’s try to understand how have companies been faring.  33% of the time is spent selling by Inside Sales teams as per a CSO Insights study. An Economist study points to a crazy amount of time (71%) spent by salespeople on data entry tasks. Another study suggests that sales reps have to use an average of 6 sales tools during the sales journey of a lead to a customer.  Some other studies have pointed to similar challenges faced by organizations impacting sales velocity.

Circa 2018, Salesforce launched a novel concept of high-velocity sales, a tool meant particularly for inside sales teams to improve their productivity and enable faster selling and revenue generation for companies.

What exactly do high-velocity sales means?

High-velocity is a relatively new theory, that traces its origins in the B2C sales model and tried to replicate several attributes in the B2B selling approach. The inside sales team's role typically is to browse through a list of leads, identify the best leads, connect with them, record the information, update them on the sales solution, follow up, and try to close as many prospects to customers as possible. Time spent in non-selling activities like figuring out the next action for a lead,  follow-up time, which leads to picking on priority, etc. High-velocity sales are designed to make sales reps' jobs super easy by helping them better organize, execute, and manage the sales process. Suggesting salespeople the next best actions on a lead, which leads to picking first, automating follow-ups, task reminders, and much more with better automation and integration capability.

High-velocity aims to accelerate revenue and efficiency of a sales function by enabling a better system for sales reps to plan, organize and execute their tasks predictably so that salespeople reach out to the right customers, through the right channel at the right time.

How do enable sales teams to function in the high-velocity sales way?

Reducing the overall sales cycle time, minimizing the #tools they operate separately, and increasing the time spent by salespeople in selling by reducing administrative tasks is essentially the top-level objective to achieve high-velocity sales. You must design the high-velocity sales enablement in the right way. Some suggested best practices can help you do a better job at this.

• Automate Lead Generation with real-time leads: There has been a huge shift of digital leads lately, led by inbound leads by digital content and also digital marketing leads across the range of digital assets (Website, App, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc). Integrate all the channels with your lead dashboard in real-time so that all leads are structured and land in the system instantly. Leads should be able to access leads within minutes of a customer filling a lead online. This is a huge enabler impacting customer experience positively and shortening the sales cycle.
• Automate lead qualification and allocation: For many organizations, poor-quality leads become quite a headache. Incomplete leads, invalid contact numbers, Junk leads, or even duplicate leads create huge overheads for sales reps managing the leads. An automated manner to handle each of such poor-quality leads, helping screen them before it is allocated to sales reps will significantly lower administrative time spent by them. This will also help them focus on high-quality leads and prioritize them. Similarly, automating the lead automating the entire lead allocation mechanism will free up both sales reps and managers’ bandwidth to focus on their critical tasks. Advanced features like auto-queuing, skill-based allocation, and load management can go a long way in building a very efficient sales system.

• Integrate Telephony and other channels: The first task for most sales reps is to call or message/email the prospects and speak to them. A sales process with integrated telephony and email will save critical time for sales reps in toggling across to telephony tools and back to update details in the sales CRM. Quick action features for quick composition and canned responses will save a lot of time and manual effort for salespeople
• Suggested Next Action & Prioritizations: Most salespeople spent enough time figuring out the next best action on any lead that they need to take. An intelligent system capable to suggest the next action to the sales rep will bring tremendous efficiency to the sales process. Be it a follow-up call, email with a brochure, or sending a quote prompt will save a lot of manual decision-making time generally involved in the process. Dynamic prioritization of leads suggesting the order in which sales resp should pick up leads help them reach out to high propensity leads first
• Reminders & Automation: Organizing the tasks of sales reps is one key approach to enabling high-velocity sales for companies. Automating callbacks, rule-based reminders, and alerts to notify salespeople at appropriate times to take sales actions to assist the salespeople in managing a lot of their tasks efficiently.

There are other key features to design sales processes for high-velocity operations like a single interface for sales teams to work on, automating lead nurturing activities, enablement of lifecycle communications, and drip campaigns among others which support sales teams in removing heavy lifting by salespeople and freeing up more of their time for customer engagements.

Conclusion:

We live in pretty dynamic times with technological advancements happening at tremendous speeds. Changing customer needs requires innovative and flexible solutions to help to keep pace with the changing environment. The solution should be future-proof as constant chopping and changing the needs. It is vital to design your requirements well and then choose the right solution fit for your business objective and needs. The concept of high-velocity sales is still in its infancy and more technology solutions are innovating to build powerful platforms for sales transformation.

Chakra Sales is a modern sales execution solution to productize your sales process from Lead to Order, eliminating manual activities and multiple data entries. Integrating all the associated tools, Chakra Sales creates a unified interface for sales activities with automated data capture and activity logging.

If you are looking for a customized sales solution for your fast-growing organization, do consider a free demo with Chakra Sales.