Scenario: Flow of Prospective B2B Client Journey
- Initial Excitement: Capturing new leads or potential clients come in.
- Incremental Progress: They make some progress.
- Deal Closure: Closing the deal takes FOREVER!
We are already familiar with the time-consuming and tedious nature of B2B pipelines.
Recent research states that B2B businesses often involve more decision-makers, complex evaluations, and a higher level of scrutiny before finalizing a deal. So, it takes a longer time to convert leads into potential customers.
How can you convert leads into paying customers faster?
It’s simple - by speeding up your pipeline!
In this guide, we will explain the foolproof ways that would let you grow revenue quicker, make your marketing and sales team more efficient, shorten cycle times, and get deals across the finish line sooner.
So, let’s get started!
5 Key Benefits of Pipeline Acceleration
Here are the five key benefits of B2B pipeline acceleration.
#1: Fast Revenue Growth: You’ll close more deals per month when deals move through your pipeline quickly. The combined efforts of your marketing and sales teams can significantly reduce deal closure times, enhancing sales pipeline velocity and revenue.
For instance, if your team starts closing deals in 30 days instead of 50, your sales pipeline velocity would be $3,000+ per day instead of $2000.
#2: Increased Team Productivity and Efficiency: Shorter sales cycles achieved through combined effort allow reps to handle more deals at once. So, even without expanding headcount, you can get more done and ramp up your team’s productivity and overall efficiency.
#3: Lower Total Cost Per Deal: Accelerating your pipeline can help minimize the time spent on each deal. This results in a lower average cost per closure.
The outcome? Enhanced margins and overall profitability.
#4: More Predictable Forecasting: A fast and consistent pipeline velocity helps simplify revenue forecasting. It can help predict sales for upcoming quarters while maintaining accuracy and fewer fluctuations.
What’s more? A rapidly accelerating pipeline can empower you to adapt swiftly to ever-evolving industry trends and customer preferences. This can help you gain a competitive edge without hassles.
#5: Better Customer Experience: Customers appreciate quick sales cycles, as they lead to faster time-to-value and onboarding. Moreover, fast response times and efficient processes contribute to a positive impression. This increases the chances of successful conversions and customer satisfaction.
As you can see, accelerating your pipeline brings benefits beyond just closing deals faster.
The partnership between marketing and sales enables sustainable predictability, productivity, revenue growth, and satisfied customers.
8 Best Tactics to Accelerate Your Pipeline
Let’s understand the eight best tactics that can help accelerate your pipeline.
1. Map Your Customer’s Journey
Ensure marketing and sales teams are on the same page and embark on the process by understanding your customer’s journey.
Analyze every touchpoint and interaction. Scrutinize progression from prospects to customers.
Consider crucial aspects like -
- First contact channel - referrals, ads, outbound efforts, and more
- Content consumption - videos watched, downloads, blogs read, etc
- Website engagement - pages visited ranked by relevance
- Sales conversations - calls, demos, meetings, etc
- Total time spent and lead progression through each stage of the pipeline
This comprehensive observation can help your teams identify-
- Areas for improvement
- Points where prospects fall out of the journey
- Reasons for delays
- Stages with longer cycle times
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Current pipeline velocity
This can help optimize the pipeline, thereby reducing friction and improving conversion rates. Most importantly, this holistic perspective alone will reveal crucial opportunities to accelerate deals you’d never catch otherwise.
2. Streamline Lead Generation
An efficient lead generation process is pivotal for accelerating your pipeline.
How can you achieve the goal?
Begin with optimizing your content strategy.
Perform market research and leverage data analytics to identify your target market’s preferences and needs. Next, develop compelling content and campaigns that address their pain points and resonate with their needs.
Use a mix of formats to appeal to various audience segments, such as -
- Whitepapers
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Videos
Next, automate email campaigns and personalized content delivery based on the lead behaviors.
Communicate the insights on lead quality with the sales team. This can help you create strategies for more targeted lead generation.
Besides, share the lead generation data with the sales team. This can help them personalize outreach efforts.
What’s more? They can tailor communications to address specific pain points and highlight how your SaaS product and service can resolve the lead’s pain points.
The best way to move forward is to develop a unified lead-scoring system that combines insights from both teams. This approach can ensure a comprehensive evaluation of leads based on marketing and sales criteria.
3. Identify Qualified Leads
It’s easy to consider every new lead a hot potential deal and act on it immediately.
However, understand that not every lead holds equal potential.
Strategically qualify leads that are more likely to convert rather than investing your sales time on every lead.
Focus on qualified leads by -
- Analyzing people who are constantly engaging with your brand across various platforms
- Scoring leads based on behaviors, such as content downloads, page visits, repeat engagement, etc
- Prioritizing existing customers and identifying additional pain points that could lead to upgrades
Frequent lead qualification enhances the overall quality of your pipeline. It ensures the pipeline is populated with deals ready to progress quickly.
4. Encourage Reps to Focus on Early-Stage Opportunities
Leads aren’t ready to talk to sales during the early stages of their journey.
They’re more focused on researching potential solutions. Attempting to pitch sales too soon can deter them.
Instead, adopt a value-centric approach by:
- Offering Educational Content: Share insightful guides, blog posts, tools, and more that address their pain points. Providing genuine solutions can help establish credibility.
- Providing Free Trial Access: Empower leads to experience your product firsthand within a time-limited trial period. This hands-on encounter can help showcase your SaaS product’s capabilities.
- Highlighting Peer Perspectives: Leverage case studies, user reviews, and client testimonials to build trust and establish social proof. Real-life experiences from existing customers can enhance your credibility in the market.
- Facilitating Community Engagement: Create opportunities for leads to interact with satisfied customers through community forums. This allows them to ask queries, gain unbiased information, and participate in helpful discussions.
The key here is to nurture relationships before actively selling.
Providing value rather than a sales pitch encourages prospects to develop more interest.
Once they develop trust in your firm, they’ll be way more open to a conversation.
5. Automate Workflows
One of the grave mistakes that B2B firms make is taking a long time to respond to leads. This can dampen momentum and result in lost opportunities.
So, if you want things to move faster, contact leads as quickly as possible. This can enhance engagement and increase the chances of conversion.
Now, the question is - how to do it?
Leverage an advanced marketing automation tool!
It can help you respond to new leads within minutes or hours before momentum dies.
Here are a few crucial ways to use automation for responding to leads -
- Send personalized and gradual email series over 8-15 days. This ensures the sharing of valuable content without pitching too hard.
- Track target leads visiting your pricing or contact sales page. Follow up ASAP.
- Integrate lead information from your website to your CRM upon conversion, maintaining up-to-date data.
- Run tailored campaigns based on user behavior. For instance, if a lead downloads report “A,” send email sequence “A.”
- Gain a comprehensive view of marketing activities and their outcomes on a unified dashboard. This allows multiple stakeholders to make the right decision.
- Deploy advanced AI chatbots to provide informative answers to user queries on the website. The idea isn’t to replace your team.
Leverage automation to engage leads until your sales reps can get back to them. Observe how Revlitix does it.
6. Offer Valuable Content and Assets
Your website is the main point of contact for potential leads. So, ensuring the website contributes to accelerating deals is imperative.
Here’s how to do it -
- Offer seamless navigation for visitors. Ensure your website allows them to access vital information, such as -
- Incorporate sales enablement assets, including ROI calculators, proposal templates, third-party reports, and compliance documents.
- Enhance engagement by adding compelling videos that highlight your product’s USP.
- Offer gated content to help visitors understand your SaaS products and services without unnecessary back-and-forth.
The more queries and information prospects get through your website, the less time your team will need to spend answering them 1:1 down the line.
7. Provide Freemium Offerings
Letting users experience your product for themselves for free can prove a powerful move for pipeline acceleration.
It can eliminate major friction points and help users understand your offerings without hassles.
For this, consider offering a freemium plan where the users get access to premium features for free - but for a limited time!
Once the time limit is over, you can ask them to upgrade to paid plans.
This simple yet effective approach reduces the heavy sales lifting required to win prospects.
8. Develop a Robust Follow-up Process
Consistent, timely follow-up is crucial for deal success.
So, avoid dropping the ball after initial outreach or a demo call. Nurture the relationship until deal closure or sheer disinterest.
Here are a few more crucial tips to consider.
- Be it a product demo, proposal presentation, or event invite - decide the specific time to follow-up.
- Document all the details and commitments in your CRM to prevent oversight.
- Create templates for the most common follow-up scenarios, such as pricing proposals, contracts, and reference requests.
- Use multiple follow-up channels like emails, phone, LinkedIn, direct mail, and more without spamming.
The crux is to implement a structured process for follow-up that doesn’t seem forced.
Bonus Tip: Analyze the Right Metrics
Consistently analyze and optimize crucial metrics to gauge the efficiency of your sales and marketing pipelines.
Here are a few crucial KPIs to consider.
How Can Revlitix Help Accelerate Your Pipeline?
Our AI and ML-powered platform, Revlitix, can transform and optimize every facet of your sales and marketing pipeline.
Here are its robust features that can accelerate your B2B pipeline without hassles.
1. Revlitix Pipelines: Revlitix Pipelines offers AI-driven predictions that can help you analyze industry insights and market trends. Leverage this accurate data to validate your marketing strategies and streamline processes. This can help prioritize leads and accelerate revenue generation.
What’s more?
It offers a pipeline calculator that can help optimize processes without inflating your budget.
With Pipelines, you can gauge stages where drop-offs happen and streamline your funnel for more efficient conversions.
2. Revlitix Alerts: This feature offers instant alerts on potential issues affecting your funnel performance. With Revlitix Alerts, you can promptly identify and address pipeline leaks to maintain optimal performance.
What’s more? The automated AI-driven alerts can help you -
- Understand the “why” behind trends or issues.
- Act promptly to close gaps and ensure seamless pipeline performance.
- Eliminate manual monitoring for proactive pipeline management.
That’s not all! Revlitix allows you to customize alerts to align with your unique business requirements. So, turn these insights into strategies to make every marketing dollar count.
3. Revlitix Reports: Leverage this feature to connect your KPIs like never before. Revlitix Reports offer provision to integrate MarTech platforms seamlessly, thereby eliminating manual updates.
All you need to do is set goals and track your marketing funnel progress on a unified dashboard. The dashboard is user-friendly and provides complete visibility into relevant pipeline management KPIs. This can ease tracking and analyzing pipeline performance.
Besides, it provides daily reports via email or Slack, ensuring everyone stays informed. This can further help eliminate silos for enhanced team collaboration.
4. Revlitix Playbooks: Get 2x more output by optimizing existing tools and processes with Revlitix Playbooks.
It helps you identify opportunities for ROI improvement and make impactful changes.
Besides, it helps understand areas for improvement that can help build and optimize workflows for a more streamlined and efficient pipeline.
Connect with team Revlitix for a free demo today!
Summing Up
There you have it - the eight best tactics to speed up your marketing and sales pipeline velocity.
Implementing the mentioned tactics can ensure faster, data-driven decision-making for closing deals fast and sustained business growth.
Besides, leveraging Revlitix can make a massive difference. The AI and ML-powered platform can help you gain significant value for your pipeline acceleration strategy.
With Revlitix, you can gain insights into target audience behavior and patterns, receive early warning signals for unwelcome marketing surprises, and streamline processes to close deals.
The result? An efficient pipeline ensuring revenue growth.
So, connect with Team Revlitix today to accelerate your pipeline!
