Sales Velocity: What It Is and How It’s Measured
If you’re responsible for sales at your company, you’ve probably heard of “sales velocity.” But what is it, exactly? And how can you measure it?
Find out what this metric is, why it’s so valuable, and how you can hit the accelerator.
What is sales velocity?
Sales velocity is a metric used by sales leaders to measure how productive and effective their team is. Where other metrics give you a general idea of how much new business your team is bringing in, how much your customers are worth, or how much it costs to acquire them, sales velocity answers one very simple question: how much money is the team making every day?
Measuring this is crucial. For one, it keeps the team grounded. It’s easy to get carried away with celebrations when you land a big deal, but then you lose track of the pipeline as a whole. Big deals are fun, but a few big deals here and there won’t keep the business growing. That’s where this metric comes in. It gives you the big-picture view of how much money is coming in overall while giving you more detail than a metric like monthly revenue.
A sales leader can use sales velocity to get a better idea how efficient their sales pipeline is in a way that doesn’t have to correct for average deal value or similar parameters. That’s because of the way sales velocity is calculated in the first place.
How is it measured?
Calculating sales velocity is pretty simple, and you only need four numbers: the overall number of opportunities in your pipeline, your average deal size, your win rate, and the average length of your sales cycle. Now here’s the formula:
Sales velocity = (Opportunities x Deal Size x Win Rate) / Length of Sales Cycle
When you plug your numbers in, you’ll get a simple result: how much money the team is bringing in each day. Here’s an example with some real numbers.
Sales velocity = (100 opportunities x $1,500 x 0.34) / 15 days
Sales velocity = $51,000 / 15 days
Sales velocity = $3,400 per day
With this number, you can compare your team’s performance to industry benchmarks, track the effectiveness of your tactics, and find team members who need help pumping up their numbers.
5 factors that can impact sales velocity
Now that you know how to measure sales velocity, let’s dive into a few of the factors that affect it. Note that these won’t all be in your direct control, but you can usually plan strategies to try and influence them.
- Number of opportunities: Makes sense, right? The more opportunities you can bring in, the more influence you’ll have over your sales velocity. So one way you can increase it is to bring in as many quality opportunities as possible.
- Deal size: Are you charging enough for your product or service? Maybe the deals you’re closing aren’t quite big enough? By writing out the formula, you can determine if deal size is bringing this number down.
- Win rate: Is your win rate up to industry benchmarks? What are some things you can do to bring that up across the team?
- Length of sales cycle: If deals are lagging in the pipeline a bit too long, that can negatively impact your sales velocity.
- Resources: While this isn’t shown in the formula, the resources your sales team has to work with will absolutely affect your sales velocity. Any initiative that can improve your this needs resources. So if you don’t have the resources you need, you might struggle a bit.
How to quickly accelerate sales velocity with Unito
What are some of the biggest problems that keep your sales team from closing deals? Having to jump back and forth between their pipeline and other tools, reaching out to other teams for support through email, manually contributing to reports, and more. All manual tasks that keep your team away from what they do best: closing deals.
That’s where Unito comes in.
Unito is a no-code workflow management solution with some of the deepest two-way integrations for the most popular sales tools on the market, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Excel, and more. With a Unito flow, you can automatically copy data from one tool, push it to the other, and keep everything in sync everywhere. That means salespeople can stay in their tool of choice, all while collaborating with teams that call a project management tool or software development platform home. Here are just a few examples of what a sales team can do with Unito: