If you read our last blog, you’ll know that harnessing the power of sales velocity can drive up sales team performance, scale success, and accelerate revenue growth. You’ll also understand that to do so, you should pull one or more of four recognised sales velocity levers – number of opportunities, deal size, win rate, and length of sales cycle. But which lever should you pull to drive the biggest impact for your business right now? Today we’re exploring how to harness the power of sales velocity to overcome your revenue challenges.
Let’s start by diagnosing some of the biggest challenges impacting sales velocity in the current environment. We’ll consider their root causes, and most importantly the opportunities for sales teams that adopt a new approach to not only meet their goals, but exceed them by transforming their behaviours.
The biggest sales velocity blockers impacting revenue growth in 2025
Are the number of qualified opportunities in your pipeline decreasing?
This is a common problem experienced by many sales teams right now. Generating a consistent pipeline of opportunities is the first, and perhaps most critical, step in driving predictable revenue growth. After all, if you don’t have the opportunities in the first place how can you push them through your pipeline faster?
We’ve identified several root causes – all of which might resonate with you:
- A mindset problem: Too often sales reps operate a maintenance mindset, i.e. prioritising existing accounts over proactively seeking new opportunities.
- Lack of targeted account planning: Reps may lack a strategic approach to account planning; as a result not only are they leaving new business on the table but also opportunities to drive more value from existing accounts
- Failure to identify ideal customers and/or ineffective qualification: The inability to identify ideal (and most profitable) customer profiles means time is wasted on low-potential leads, thereby clogging your pipeline and reducing conversion rates
- Boring generic messaging and/or poor positioning: reps that rely on generic one-size-fits-all messaging get ignored in a crowded marketplace, where expectations for personalised engagements are high
- Limited social selling acumen: under-utilisation of social platforms results in fewer touchpoints and missed opportunities to engage in a timely manner
Is your average order value dropping?
Declining deal sizes is one of the most pressing problems facing sales leaders today. But the solution is not as simple as just upselling to your existing customers. The challenge here is multi-faceted:
- Unplanned approaches: if approaches lack a structure, they’ll fail to identify the highest-value opportunities
- Superficial questioning limits deal size: if reps use only superficial questioning, they’ll fail to uncover broader needs, leading to smaller transactional deals
- Poor solution positioning: Misaligned solutions make it harder for risk-averse buyers to see the value of larger purchases, so they default to smaller, safer options
- Lack of value creation and/or emotional connection: if reps cannot clearly express the value of products and services, and engage on a deeper level clients will struggle to see their relevance resulting in transactional-only sales
- No compelling business case: ROI is king – fail to get the opportunity across in a way that excites the buyer and they’ll hesitate to make a larger commitment
Why is your win rate declining?
This is a universal problem across all sectors of industry and commerce, and a problem that will persist throughout 2025 if not tackled effectively. Sales leaders need to identify the root causes and find sustainable solutions fast:
- Poor qualification is wasted time: spending excessive time on poorly qualified leads and low-potential deals will never be a winner
- Lack of multi-threaded deals: more decision-makers mean lower chances of consensus. Reps must engage multiple stakeholders effectively
- Failure to uncover real needs: if reps don’t have a deep understanding of buyer needs, deals will inevitably stall
- Product-led pitches are too generic and/or proposals are poorly aligned: It’s time to look through the buyer lens. Failure to resonate with all stakeholder needs will lead to disengagement
- Failure to anticipate and handle objections: salespeople who avoid or overlook objections will only drive up uncertainty and drive down win rates
Is the speed of sale decreasing?
Lengthening sales cycles are the enemy of predictable revenue growth. If you are to accelerate the speed of sale you must identify what’s holding your reps back, what’s creating delays amongst your buyers, and how you can transform behaviours to boost momentum:
- Lack of urgency: the discovery stage is a missed opportunity to drive momentum if it’s not tackled with urgency and prioritisation
- Single stakeholder over-reliance: focussing only on one stakeholder will inevitably slow down approval and stall sales
- Failure to tackle objections head-on: unsolved objections create hesitation and inhibit fast decision-making
- No solid business case: weak business cases that don’t align to buyer needs will extend decision-making timelines
- Inability to secure buy-in: ineffective presentations that fail to immediately unite stakeholders around a common ambition will result in the need for more meetings, building delays from day one.
But now for the good news…
If any or all of these root causes resonate with you then you definitely have plenty of opportunity to drive sales velocity to overcome your revenue challenges and get yourself firmly on the road to predictable revenue growth.
Every challenge is an opportunity, a chance to grow, and a lesson to learn. Don’t believe me? Here are a few statistics to change your mind:
- Sales reps that adopt a hunter mindset generate 40% more opportunities
- Teams that target high-potential prospects achieve 68% faster conversion times
- Effective social sellers are 78% more likely to outsell their peers
- Strategic approaches can increase deal size by 40%
- Effective qualification increases win rates by 311%
- Multi-threaded deals close 32% faster
We could go on and on, but let’s get to the point.
In today’s dynamic sales environment, boosting sales velocity and achieving revenue growth requires more than just working harder. Your sales reps need to work smarter.
We’ve showed you the challenges, now here’s the solution
Here are three things you can do right now:
- Take Flume’s free sales velocity calculator to pinpoint where your sales team is right now, and how your business can improve.
- Take a look at our sales velocity training programmes. Our tailored approaches to each lever will equip your sales teams with actionable strategies to generate more opportunities, close deals faster, and increase deal sizes. Pinpoint the KPIs that will have the biggest impact in the quickest time and create focus, clarity, and confidence in goal achievement
- Take our new Sales Velocity scorecards – ground-breaking new sales tools designed for Sales Leaders to pinpoint exactly where to focus their energies to improve and accelerate their current sales velocity
