Are your B2B sales cycles taking longer than you'd like? It might be time to examine your sales velocity—the speed at which you turn leads into revenue. A higher sales velocity means money flows into your business faster, which makes your business more efficient and predictable.
But if your sales velocity is on the slower side, there could be bottlenecks in your sales process that you still need to identify. Either way, it's an essential metric for all B2B sales teams to track.
So, if you want to learn more about sales velocity, how to measure it, and how to boost it, this article is for you. We'll cover:
- What sales velocity is
- How to calculate it using the sales velocity formula
- Reasons why your sales velocity can be low
- How to increase sales velocity with AI.
What is Sales Velocity? Definition + Components
Sales velocity measures how quickly your business turns potential leads into revenue. It looks at how fast deals move through your sales pipeline, how many deals you close, and how much revenue you earn from each deal.
A higher sales velocity means you're closing deals faster and bringing in revenue more quickly, a sign of a healthy and efficient sales process.
The main components of sales velocity are:
- Number of opportunities: The total number of deals in your pipeline.
- Average deal size: The average revenue generated from each deal.
- Win rate: The percentage of deals your team successfully closes.
- Sales cycle length: The average time it takes to close a deal from opportunity to win.
The Formula of Sales Velocity
So, how exactly do you measure sales velocity?
There’s a simple formula that combines the critical components of your sales process to show you how fast you’re turning leads into revenue:
Sales Velocity = Sales Cycle Length (Number of Opportunities × Average Deal Size × Win Rate)
Let’s see how this works with a quick example.
Imagine you’re a SaaS company selling HR software. You have 40 active deals in your pipeline, each worth $15,000. Your team closes 25% of those deals, and on average, it takes 45 days to close one.
Now, let’s plug those numbers into the formula:
- Number of Opportunities: 40
- Average Deal Size: $15,000
- Win Rate: 25% (or 0.25)
- Sales Cycle Length: 45 days
Sales Velocity = (40 × $15,000 × 0.25) / 45 = $3,333
In this example, your sales velocity is $3,333 per day. That means your company generates $3,333 in revenue daily based on your current pipeline.
Reasons Why Your Sales Velocity Can Be Low
Several challenges can slow down B2B sales cycles, making it harder to close deals and hit revenue targets.
Here are some of the most common hurdles—and how they impact your sales velocity:
Low Win Rates
When your team isn't closing enough deals, it can significantly slow down your sales velocity. According to one study, the average win rate is 34% for B2B deals. This means only roughly two thirds of the deals your reps pursue may never close.
Often, low win rates result from inadequate lead qualification or a failure to align your solutions with the specific pain points of your buyers. It could also be due to your sales reps being unable to close deals because of insufficient training or poor objection-handling skills.
Long Sales Cycles
The more decision-makers are involved in a deal, the longer the sales cycle. And the longer it takes to move from lead to close, the slower your velocity—and the greater the chance the deal will stall.
Lack of Personalization
Another challenge is the need for a personalized approach. Today’s buyers demand more than a cookie-cutter sales pitch. Most B2B buyers are more likely to engage with a brand when personalization is involved.
Gartner reports that 40% of B2B buyers rely on personalized product demos to narrow their list of potential vendors who can provide the best solution.
If your sales content and outreach aren’t tailored to your leads’ challenges and goals, you’ll struggle to move prospects through the pipeline efficiently, and your sales velocity will drop.
How to Increase Sales Velocity with AI
Measuring sales velocity is one thing. But improving it? That’s a whole different game.
One of the quickest ways to boost your sales velocity is by leveraging AI. It can enhance every part of your sales pipeline, from identifying opportunities to shortening the sales cycle.
Lead Scoring and Opportunity Prioritization
The first step to increasing sales velocity is bringing quality leads into your pipeline. To do that, you must fine-tune your lead scoring criteria to identify leads with the highest conversion potential.
AI lead qualification tools simplify this by analyzing past interactions, online behavior, and demographic fit data to prioritize leads. This way, your reps focus on the ones most likely to convert. For example, instead of chasing 100 prospects, AI can show you that only 20 are truly worth your time.
Our tool, Momentum, is particularly useful for lead qualification thanks to its automated alerts. After a prospect call, it sends an alert to the rep, helping them quickly qualify or disqualify leads without jumping into the CRM. This speeds up the entire process, ensuring reps don’t waste time on deals unlikely to close while also improving efficiency across your pipeline.
Personalized Customer Interactions
Engaging leads with personalized messages is essential to keep them moving through the pipeline.
After every call, send a quick follow-up.
When a lead fills out an inbound form, send them the resource they requested and offer a short call to discuss their needs.
Haven't heard from a prospect in a few days? Follow-up to make sure you're staying top of mind.
Momentum’s follow-up feature can help by creating personalized, content-aware emails right after a call. Reps can make tweaks if needed or send it as-is with a single click, saving hours they’d otherwise spend crafting the perfect message for each touchpoint with all of their prospects. Momentum will also send automated reminders when a deal starts to get stale so that reps don't forget to follow up with a prospect, which helps increase win rates and decrease sales cycles.
Centralized Sales Motions
Slow deal progress is also often tied to uncoordinated sales motions.
Telltale signs of poor orchestration of sales motions? Inconsistent follow-ups, disjointed handoffs between teams, and a lack of clear ownership over tasks. These issues often result in delayed responses, inefficient processes, and missed opportunities, slowing down the overall sales cycle.
Momentum’s deal rooms and account rooms offer a centralized solution by automatically creating Slack channels for each deal. These channels come with tools and automation to keep all documents, updates, and deal-related discussions in one place. This streamlines teamwork and reduces silos helping deals move forward faster.
Sales Coaching
Your sales reps can also negatively impact your sales velocity. If you’ve recently onboarded new reps or your current team isn't meeting expectations, it’s a sign they need more training—and AI can help with that, too.
Momentum is the perfect tool to coach your sales reps. It helps with sales coaching by providing real-time AI-generated insights from calls, allowing managers to pinpoint coaching opportunities and address skill gaps quickly. It also enables reps to improve based on actual call data, streamlining training through Slack-integrated frameworks.
So, whether you’re struggling with ramp-up time or just need to keep your existing team sharp, Momentum is the perfect solution for individualized training.
FAQs About Sales Velocity
How do I choose the right AI tools to improve sales velocity?
Choosing the right AI tools starts with identifying where your sales process could improve. Is it lead scoring, disjointed sales motions, or automating routine tasks? Once you've figured that out, find the best tools for the job and make sure they integrate with your CRM so your lead data flows seamlessly.
Sales velocity vs. pipeline velocity. What’s the difference?
Sales velocity tracks how fast your team converts leads into revenue, focusing on the speed of closing deals. Pipeline velocity tracks how quickly leads move through each stage of your pipeline.
How can sales velocity help identify sales process inefficiencies?
If you notice your sales velocity is slower than you'd like, it's a sign to examine your win rates and the length of your sales cycles. Maybe your sales cycles are too long, or perhaps you're dealing with too many low-quality leads that cause deals to stall. This is where AI can be beneficial—it can analyze these areas and help you focus on shortening sales cycles or improving the quality of your leads.
Ready to Bump Up Your Sales Velocity?
Your company’s success depends on how quickly you can move deals from the prospecting stage to close.
Momentum pushes you ahead by speeding up your deals and simplifying your operations. Our platform unifies your team, automates key tasks, and keeps everyone informed so you can focus on closing deals.
Chat with our team today and see how Momentum can help you propel your deals forward.