A Harvard Business Review study found that the odds of qualifying an inbound lead decreases by 400% after the first 5 minutes

High velocity sales is a disruptive sales model that uses online lead generation, inside sales and other techniques to fill up your pipeline fast. Digital marketing is becoming an important source for generating leads and there are countless techniques to optimize ads to ensure that high quality leads could be generated in a quick yet affordable manner.

Strategizing High Velocity Sales

PPC, Facebook lead ads, organic search, email marketing, webinars, etc are some of the techniques employed to generate leads in a high velocity sales model. If you are not using this web based leads generation techniques, you are probably missing out on a great sales opportunity.  Another very important thing to remember when strategizing high velocity sales is to nurture leads before sending them to your sales team. Nurturing techniques varies from adding more questions to your lead ads form to sending them to your website before converting them via a web form. The more input you get from the potential lead, the more qualified they would be.

Changing Buyer Behaviour

Today’s buyers do lots of research about the products that they are interested in regardless of the price point and the type of product. According to a study by Google and CEB marketing leadership council, about 57% of the customer buying journey is complete before they choose to interact with your company. As such, your sales reps need to be educated about your products more than before.

Distribute Leads Effectively

Since leads generated in high velocity sales are further along in the buying cycle, you would need a strategy in place to respond to these leads, keep following up with them and close the sales. The first step would be to figure out a way to distribute leads to your sales team. With leads being generated in shorter intervals, trying to manually do this with an excel sheet could work against you. Response time for inbound leads is extremely time sensitive. If you take too long to respond, the chances of qualifying them reduces. A Harvard Business Review study found that the odds of qualifying an inbound lead decreases by 400% after the first 5 minutes. There are many automated distribution techniques. You could send them all to a manager that would manually transfer them to the sales team, rotate them equally or use a rule based distribution engine that would decide who to send the leads to based on criterias set by you.

Automate your Follow ups

Once you’ve figured out a way to effectively distribute leads, the next step would be to follow up with them effectively. If you have under 20 leads in your pipeline at any given time, it’s relatively easy to manage the opportunities. In a high velocity sales environment, you could have way more leads in your pipeline, you may even have hundreds of opportunities that need to be followed up with. With this in mind, the follow up process needs to be automated as much as possible and your CRM needs to automatically let you know when to follow up with a potential lead. Instead of having just a status for your opportunities, break down your funnel to multiple pipelines and stages so that your sales process is more systematic. Capture all your incoming leads to a “Pre Sales” pipeline and move the high potentials to “Sales”. Besides being able to visualize leads in a more systematic way, you would also be able to analyse the marketing sources that are bringing you more quality leads.

Business Intelligence

The final step in implementing an effective high velocity sales model is to create the right performance metrics that would help improve both marketing and sales. First of all, all marketing sources need to be attributed well. Most companies are effective at keeping a record of leads coming from online sources but fail to attribute offline sources. With call tracking solutions and messaging APIs being more accessible than ever, there is no reason why these offline sources can’t be attributed as well. Once the marketing sources are attributed well, it’s absolutely imperative for managers to be able to analyse performance metrics of their sales reps. Most importantly, your BI system needs to track the response time, follow up activities, pipeline status and conversion analysis for each rep.

While a High velocity sales model can be quite tricky to set up, it can reward you with a highly scalable revenue generation operation. So if you haven’t already, it’s time to dip your toes in and test if it could work for your company.