In our recent article, Five Emerging Trends in Account Based Marketing, we talked about the top three performance indicators for ABM strategies — new business generation, customer retention, and pipeline acceleration. In this piece, we want to further examine pipeline acceleration in relation to ABM strategy and automation.

What Is Sales Velocity and Why Does It Matter?

Sales or pipeline velocity shows how quickly accounts move through your buyer's journey. Shortening the time it takes for a client to move from interested to signing on the dotted line is valuable in multiple ways. Firstly, it means you are earning revenue sooner than you would otherwise. In addition, your client will be pleased to get their project going, and moving quickly reduces the scope for alternative suppliers to intervene. Shortening your sales cycle also means follow-on revenue will also come sooner.

So, it increases the net present value of the relationship and the value of your business. But B2B organisations have long struggled with maintaining a strong sales velocity for several reasons.

First is the length of that B2B buyer's journey. Decisions are made over several weeks, even months depending on the complexity of the purchase. When deciding on a product or service, customers need periodic reinforcement. But it is difficult for sales reps to customers to maintain long term enthusiasm when it seems a potential deal has stalled. Since your sales teams are usually managing multiple accounts, it is easy for less active contacts to fall to the wayside.

The nature of B2B buyer's journey has also shifted. It is now digital-first, customer-led and a non-linear process. In the standard ‘funnel’ model, marketing and sales teams are treated as two distinct things, organised serially. Marketing campaigns use digital channels to generate and nurture prospects. Then the most promising leads are handed off to sales for further cultivation using in-person channels.

However, research by Gartner shows that this no longer fits B2B buyers' behaviour. Rather than progressing through a tidy sales funnel, B2B purchase teams now bounce around fulfilling various ‘buying jobs’. They loop through tasks like problem identification, information gathering, and vendor selection until they come to a consensus. Customers use both digital and in-person channels simultaneously to complete their ‘buying job’, making the notion of a marketing/sales handoff a redundant concept.

That complexity is another factor slowing sales velocity. 77% of the B2B buyers Gartner surveyed described their last purchase as very complex or difficult. New technologies, products, and services are constantly emerging. However vendors often don't integrate them in a way that easily provides what the buyer needs to navigate the purchase process. The more complex B2B buyers find the process, the slower they make their way through the sales pipeline.

Unblocking the Sales Pipeline With Account Based Marketing

The above problems are rooted in a lack of marketing/sales alignment, which unnecessarily lengthens and complicates the B2B sales cycle. Too often, legacy organisational structures and workflows hinder, rather than aid, buyers in completing their purchase journey.

The solution can be found in an account based marketing strategy.

In an ABM program, sales and marketing teams to work together throughout the buyer’s journey. By joining forces before, during, and after opportunity creation, they accelerate the sales cycle.

Transforming the Sales Experience

Account based marketing recognises that the B2B pipeline is not linear and that sales do not happen in a vacuum. Your sales and marketing teams collaborate instead to identify challenges and points of friction that are slowing down specific accounts. For example, barriers to information and limits in communication channels.

A critical component of successful ABM is understanding the needs of your customers. Research shows that customers do not prioritise meeting with sales reps. If you try and force prospects to schedule a meeting, you risk the buying process stalling. Most of the key decisions now happen behind closed doors, before prospects ever meet a rep.

As shown in a recent McKinsey & Co. survey, what B2B decisions makers want are self-service options to simplify their purchase journey. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between vendors and buyers will occur via digital channels.

You want to create an efficient sales ecosystem that enables buyers to proceed on their own terms. By providing them with channel-agnostic access to high-quality information and tools, your customers can complete their buying jobs more quickly.

Avoid boring your customers with administrative tasks. Instead of making them contact sales and coordinate schedules, add an automated booking feature to your website. Or supplement in-person events and meetings with remote and self-service options such as video conferences and AI-powered chatbots. 

Identifying and Targeting High Value Accounts

Working together, your sales and marketing teams can use ABM and sales velocity data to determine key market segments, accounts and even purchasing team members.. For example, they might find that one of your verticals has lower velocity, but a higher average contract value. It could present a huge revenue opportunity, provided you can increase the sales velocity for that vertical.

Armed with this information, you can design a strategy focused on closing deals with those target accounts. By analysing marketing data, you can better understand your contacts’ browsing habits and the subjects they are researching on your site. This helps you match messaging and provide hyper-personalised content matched to the opportunity stage they’re in: early-stage (awareness), mid-stage (initial contact) and late-stage opportunities (pitch/proposal).

Furthermore, knowing the timing of when they search for that information allows you to make sure your communications are delivered at just the right movement.

After you have identified key objections that might be slowing down the sales cycle, use coordinated multi-channel touches to provide answers. In addition to content marketing and other inbound marketing tactics, you can create account-specific promoted content to reach the right people at the right time. When emailing or calling potential clients, your sales reps know exactly what concerns need to be addressed because of you have an holistic customer view. By being attentive to the things that are bothering people in your target accounts, you provide a better customer experience.

Simplifying the Sales Process

Improving sales velocity through ABM depends not only on personalised content delivery but also personalised lead nurture. You need to follow up with the right contacts at the right time. And doing this at scale, across all of your active opportunities, depends on having a coordinated marketing automation and sales solution. This is an area where an integrated marketing automation platform really shines.

Combining marketing automation and your CRM system allows you to sync opportunities and activities across your sale and marketing stack. Doing so empowers you to easily outline every step your team needs to take, from demand generation to closing sales.

For instance, a sales automation tool can monitor accounts, tracking all the touches a prospect has with your business via social, your website, calls, emails, etc. Visual tools and reporting helps to ensure that opportunities are getting enough attention and not staying too long in any single buying stage.

It can also streamline workflow by automatically generating follow-up tasks to nudge sales people along and makes sure follow-ups are promptly completed. Another advantage is the ability to pull detailed task reports that provide insight into your sales process. This helps you identify any holes in your plan and hold your sales team accountable to themselves.

Helping You Create Pipeline Acceleration

As you have learned, you can achieve pipeline acceleration by blending ABM, automation tools, and velocity-centred tactics. From initial lead generation to closing a deal, your sales cycle will become shorter, more systematic, and more predictable.

Contact 1827 Marketing to learn more about building a sales velocity strategy for your business.