Seasoned SaaS marketers track actionable metrics that align closely with revenue acceleration. But then, marketing teams are under relentless pressure to prove their impact on revenue.
Lead counts and vanity metrics can tell a partial story. Amidst all this, a powerful metric often goes overlooked: pipeline velocity.
However, pipeline velocity is more than just a buzzword since it measures the speed at which opportunities move from initial contact to winning it. This means the velocity can be high or low, depending on how quickly it moves through the sales cycle.
Marketing operations (MarkOps) can use pipeline velocity as a key metric to track and better understand their campaigns' performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize strategies for accelerated growth. Hence, MarkOps dashboards should include pipeline velocity.
Let's explore why including pipeline velocity in a MarkOps can be a game-changer.
1. Offers Quick and Accurate Insight in the Sales Health
Marketing teams get the real-time health check for sales processes. Traditional metrics can only reflect past successes or failures. But pipeline velocity provides an immediate glimpse into how your sales and marketing efforts are now converting leads into deals.
Pipeline velocity in the MarkOps dashboard provides executives with a quick assessment of how their campaigns affect sales momentum. This helps adjust tactics on the fly to improve outcomes.
Here’s how quick and accurate sales health insight helps MarkOps:
2. Helps Early Identification of Bottlenecks
MarkOps manages and optimizes end-to-end marketing processes. This requires drilling into pipeline velocity by campaign, lead source, and content type. Such pinpoint accuracy reveals areas of lead stagnation or an overall slowdown.
Identifying and addressing such bottlenecks in sales helps maintain a healthy pipeline and achieve consistent growth. Pipeline velocity identifies areas of slowdown—whether at the top of the funnel with lead generation, the middle with lead nurturing, or in the closing stages of the sales process.
For example, a noticeable plummeting velocity at the proposal stage indicates prospects need more conviction in their value proposition or adjustments in their pricing model.
Here’s how identifying bottlenecks early through pipeline velocity can help MarkOps.
3. Improves Revenue Forecasting
Pipeline forecasting is a key metric that is considered when predicting future revenue.
Pipeline velocity directly influences pipeline forecasting, thereby impacting revenue forecasting predictions.
Using pipeline forecasting tools, you get a dynamic view of sales efficiency by incorporating factors like deal size, conversion rates, and sales cycle length.
For instance, a consistent increase in pipeline velocity due to successful marketing campaigns and streamlined sales processes helps forecast an uptick in revenue with greater confidence.
This enables -
- Better planning for growth initiatives
- Efficient resource allocation
- Enhanced budget adjustments
Conversely, low pipeline velocity signals a potential revenue downturn, prompting early resource allocation interventions.
Better revenue forecasting contributes in the following ways:
- Make Data-Driven Projections
Pipeline velocity allows analyzing trends for projection. Revenue forecasting through pipeline velocity considers whether the velocity stays consistent or improves over time. Analyzing such patterns supports revenue projections backed by hard data rather than just hope and sales rep optimism.
- Adapt to Market Shifts
A sudden velocity drop in a healthy-looking pipeline is an early warning bell indicating underlying market issues. For example, a new product launch or market shift can slow progress. This needs immediate adjustments to address growing challenges.
Such agility ensures that forecasts remain relevant and aligned with the current market conditions and internal capabilities, avoiding surprises at the end of the quarter or fiscal year.
4. Improves Cross-functional Collaboration
Align marketing, sales, and customer success teams for enhanced collaboration so that each team has insights into how quickly deals move within the pipeline. Tracking pipeline velocity helps them work together, aligning team goals with the company's growth goals to speed up the sales cycle.
For example, a pipeline analysis may reveal a slower pace of deal closure associated with prospects' lack of product knowledge. This helps drive collaboration between sales and marketing teams to develop more detailed product documents.
- Data-Driven Problem Solving
A sluggish pipeline velocity requires teams to collaborate and troubleshoot impending issues. Navigate issues by posing questions like —
- Did a marketing initiative inadvertently attract the wrong lead type?
- Does a new common sales objection need to be addressed in marketing materials?
- Are leads dissatisfied with product demos, indicating product refinements?
Such data-driven collaboration sparks valuable resolutions that are otherwise challenging in isolation.
- Aligns Incentives
Integrating pipeline velocity into shared performance metrics ensures marketing and sales teams work on aligned objectives. This way, MarkOps focuses on generating a high volume of leads and their quality based on their purchase readiness.
Such alignments will have the sales team nurturing leads that are more likely to close, fostering a cooperative relationship between the two functions.
5. Ensures Proper Decision-Making
Data-driven marketers can leverage pipeline velocity to gain a clear view of how ideas move from prospect to opportunity and then to a customer. Thus, MarkOps functions to inform decisions around resource allocations, strategy refinements, and prioritizing initiatives.
Pipeline velocity points out where to double down on effective strategies and where to stop efforts that aren't working. It guides key decisions, like whether to invest more in a lead source that's performing well or try and improve a channel (say, social media) that's underperforming.
For example, consistently rising pipeline velocity indicates that recent marketing strategies or sales methodologies are working well. This means making more investments could yield even better results.
Conversely, low pipeline velocity demands a strategic pivot that promotes asking key questions:
Here’s how to further benefit from data-driven decisions.
- Resource Optimization
Knowing pipeline velocity helps optimize resource allocation for MarkOps. A certain campaign showing a significant increase in velocity demonstrates the effectiveness of initiatives. This way, marketing teams know more about quick-converting campaigns that attract high-value prospects.
Accordingly, allocate budgets (and resources) towards the right mix of lead generation and fast revenue realization.
- Prioritizing Initiatives
Prioritize initiatives that directly impact sales efficiency. For example, pipeline analysis helps determine whether marketing a specific product feature or service enhancements could significantly reduce the sales cycle.
MarkOps can then prioritize such initiatives, focusing on high-potential activities to accelerate growth.
6. Gives You a Competitive Edge
Pipeline velocity in the MarkOps dashboard helps evaluate departmental performance in real time. Identify opportunities to optimize the sales cycle and deliver value to customers faster.
High pipeline velocity suggests that marketing initiatives reach qualified prospects before competitors. This can be a key differentiator in a fast-paced SaaS market where buyers have many options.
Marketing teams offer a competitive advantage to your SaaS business by quickly identifying and scaling successful strategies. This advantage helps win over customers who evaluate similar offerings and search for providers that meet their needs.
Here’s how to use pipeline velocity to gain a competitive advantage:
- Proactive Experimentation
Let marketing teams engage in proactive experimentation with new tactics and channels without fear of risking overall performance. This freedom of successful experiments can boost growth, whereas the unsuccessful ones are quickly identified and halted.
This approach drives agility and innovation, keeping your SaaS brand ahead of the competitive curve and sidelining the risk-averse or slower-to-adapt businesses.
- Enhanced Customer Insights and Ideal Customer Profiling
In a B2B buying process, 50-90% of the buyer’s journey is complete before interacting with sales personnel. MarkOps' access to pipeline data analysis helps identify customers' pain points and tailor messages.
Analyze factors affecting pipeline velocity to gain insights into customer preferences and behavior. The velocity patterns help determine an ideal customer profile by analyzing the following:
- A niche industry segment
- Specific job titles
- Common pain points
Specific segments might move through the pipeline significantly faster, indicating a better product fit and a higher likelihood of conversion. Such segment-driven profiling helps tailor marketing messages to resonate with prospects.
How Can Revlitix Pipeline Help?
Revlitix offers a range of features tailored to enhance your marketing operations dashboard through deep pipeline analysis.
You can map the pipeline and funnel for forecasting while setting the revenue target. Then, there are patterns in the pipeline to track for MarkOps.
With Revlitix, you get —
- Customizable Funnel Analysis: Visualize pipeline stages, spot conversion bottlenecks, and model the impact of changes to lead flow (aligning with velocity as a driver of success).
- Data-driven Forecasting: Revlitix's forecasting algorithms use your historical data and current trends to improve revenue prediction accuracy.
- Actionable Insights: Identify where leads stall, prioritize optimization efforts, and refine your ideal customer profile based on real-world velocity patterns within your data.
Transforms pipeline velocity from a mere metric to a strategic asset, enabling SaaS businesses to navigate the complexities of growth with greater ease and efficiency.
Conclusion
Integrating pipeline velocity into your marketing operations dashboard is a transformative approach. When used effectively with purpose, this metric can unlock growth, optimize resources, and help maintain a competitive edge.
