How to accelerate sales pipeline: 11 proven tactics

Every experienced B2B salesperson knows this drill: You get new leads, nurture them, close a few, and lose others. But the constant in your pipeline? Long sales cycles.

According to Dreamdata, B2B sales cycles take 6 to 12 months from the first touchpoint (e.g., demos, trials, negotiations, etc.) until the account is closed as won. That’s up to a year of chasing prospects, with quotas looming and commissions hanging in the balance.

But what if you could speed up your sales pipeline and convert deals faster?

In this article, we’ll share 11 pipeline acceleration tactics based on our experience of partnering with hundreds of companies. A quick note before we dive in:

11 effective ways to speed up the sales pipeline

From ditching unqualified leads to sales multithreading and down to training, there are many ways to speed up lead movement through your pipeline.

Free your sales pipeline from unqualified leads

The litmus test for unqualified leads is a low conversion rate in the second pipeline stage. Clogging your pipeline with such leads is like running a sports car on low-grade fuel — it’ll sputter, slow down, and underperform.

To accelerate your pipeline, prioritize lead quality over quantity. Unqualified leads — those lacking budget, authority, or a genuine need — waste your team’s time and resources. Here are 3 ways to address this:

• Analyze similarities between the fastest-closing deals. Analyze your fastest-closing deals to identify the common characteristics. Which industries are these accounts in? What is their company size and revenue? Are these companies concentrated in specific cities or countries? Are they startups or established enterprises? Who were the decision-makers? Use these insights to refine your ICP and focus prospecting efforts on similar accounts.
• Go beyond basic lead qualification. Using basic frameworks to qualify leads, such as BANT and SPIN, is helpful but rudimentary. The most successful teams analyze deeper to score leads and identify ideal sales prospects. For example, Dealfront’s lead scoring is based on points and takes into account website visits, page views, and form fills.

At Belkins, our recent analysis found that clients with fewer than 10 employees churn within 3 months. Why? Our sales team was closing a very small percentage of these deals. And if the deals were closed, we found that the delivery team had a high likelihood of churning such clients after the first 3 months.
To address this, we stopped working with such clients and redirected them to our partners’ companies. This strategy saves time, optimizes resources, and ensures better outcomes for all parties.

• Clean your CRM. Dig into your CRM and remove leads that do not meet your lead qualification criteria.

Align your sales and marketing team

This is the common scenario — the sales team blames marketing for poor-quality leads, while marketing blames sales for neglecting marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). This age-old problem is the root cause of most pipeline issues. Aligning sales and marketing is challenging, but these 2 tips can drive instant improvement:

• Set rigorous lead qualification criteria. Both teams must agree on what defines a qualified lead. This implies collaborating to refine your ICP and lead qualification standards. That way, the marketing team delivers leads that meet the sales team’s expectations.
• Encourage regular communication between both teams. The sales team should share key insights, including prospect pain points, reasons they buy, why they choose you over competitors, and customer success stories. These inputs help marketing create effective content, ads, and sales enablement materials, making attracting and converting your ICP easier.

Nurture leads with buying intent

B2B leads with high-buying intent engage with your brand.

They could download gated content, watch webinars, engage with posts, read articles and case studies, and click ads. These actions do not mean they will all commit to buying at once. Some leads could get held up because they:

• Need more reassurance about your product’s effectiveness
• Are not convinced your value proposition appeals to their immediate needs
• Lack the financial resources to complete the purchase 
• Have gatekeepers preventing the purchase

If you sell a complex or expensive product, you may face tougher pushback due to increased executive scrutiny. A lead nurturing process can help you tackle some of these challenges. 

For example, you can send educational emails, host webinars and events, and share case studies to demonstrate your product’s value. These tactics help you lower objections and remain top of mind, making prospects more likely to choose you when they’re ready to buy.

📚 Learn more: 8 tactics for B2B lead nurturing (with examples)

Proactively following up warm leads

Warm leads are more likely to convert, but inaction can turn them cold. Sales reps should prioritize qualified leads they’ve built rapport with. They should also consistently follow up on promising opportunities.

While this seems obvious, we’ve observed sales reps hesitate to engage warm leads — sometimes out of neglect, other times out of fear of appearing desperate. Regardless of the outreach channel, here are 3 things you can do to engage leads without sounding desperate:

• Personalize outreaches. Personalization goes beyond using a prospect’s name in your email opener or subject line. It’s about tailoring your outreach messages to the audience’s pain points and goals. Thanks to AI misuse, spammy and generic outreach has become more common. To stand out, do your research, understand your prospect’s pain points, and use this info to craft a compelling value proposition.
• Set follow-up expectations. Proactively let prospects know you’ll follow up, as Brian Hicks, our VP of sales at Belkins, recommends. For instance, you might say: “You plan to decide within the next 6 weeks, right?” (pause for their confirmation). “Perfect! How about I do a weekly check-in to ensure we’re aligned with your timeline?”
• Implement a strong pipeline management process. A strong pipeline management process includes a well-tuned follow-up system that prevents opportunities from slipping through the cracks. For example, at Belkins, we manually tag deals in our CRM to ensure timely follow-ups.

We also pair sales development representatives (SDRs) with sales executives (SEs) for every deal. The SDR moves deals through the pipeline stages after the initial sales call, while the SE manages the sales call and subsequent follow-ups. This approach fosters accountability and speeds up deal progression.

📚 Related post: Sales follow-up strategies that close 50% more deals

Automate some sales activities to buy back time for reps

According to HubSpot’s 2024 Sales Trends Report, sales professionals free up 2 hours daily by using AI automation tools for administrative tasks. This is huge, considering that sales reps spend an average of 2 hours per day on active selling — 25% of their time. 

This regained time can be redirected toward high-value sales activities like engaging prospects, advancing the pipeline, and closing deals. Below are a few ways sales teams use AI and automation to boost productivity:

• Automate manual tasks. Save time by automating tasks like lead scoring, qualification, task reminders, and appointment setting. For example, our CRM alerts account executives (AEs) to follow up on deals with over 2 weeks of inactivity. We also use Chili Piper’s Concierge to qualify inbound leads and schedule appointments automatically. This tool alone increased our inbound lead-to-appointment conversion rate by 50%.
• Optimize messaging. AI-powered conversation intelligence tools like Gong analyze sales call recordings to uncover common objections, concerns, and successful strategies. These insights help coach teams to address objections more effectively and close deals faster.
• Improve personalization. Top performers use AI to speed up research and advance personalization. For instance, say you’re prospecting a large enterprise account and want to identify its major corporate goals. Tools like ChatGPT or Claude AI can summarize company news or earnings, helping you identify an enterprise account’s key goals without examining the document manually.

Share thought leadership content

In 2024, Full Scale founder Matt Watson generated about $350K in MRR — 70% of the company’s revenue — through LinkedIn, podcasts, and newsletters. At Belkins, many of our fast-closing deals also originate from the thought leadership content by C-level executives like Michael Maximoff, Vladyslav Podoliako, and Brian Hicks.

The takeaway? Thought leadership content is powerful for accelerating sales pipelines, especially founder-led ones. 

Employees’ brands are impactful too. No B2B brand should prevent employees from building personal brands. Savvy companies like Salesloft actively support their employees’ visibility, recognizing that it boosts brand awareness, builds trust with prospects, and attracts inbound leads.

For instance, Salesloft published a blog post showing how AEs use Rhythm, its proprietary AI tool, to prioritize sales tasks and hit sales goals. Interestingly, the article is a compilation of its AEs’ LinkedIn posts, which collectively garnered 600+ reactions, 35+ comments, and 7 reposts. Not bad for zero ad spend.

Use multithreading to increase the odds of closing deals

Relying on a single contact in an organization is the perfect way to lose opportunities and waste resources. Your contact could change roles, leave due to a layoff, or move on to advance their career. Sales multithreading, the practice of engaging multiple leads in an organization, is a smart way to minimize this risk. 

Today, deal closures require the involvement of 6–10 decision-makers, called the buying center. Engaging decision makers early increases the deal success rate and shortens cycle length. To use multithreading effectively, we recommend 2 things:

• Directly suggest specific stakeholders. If you know the stakeholders typically involved in purchasing your solution, propose involving them in your next conversation. Instead of asking indirect questions like “Who might feel left out if they’re not involved in this conversation?” as most salespeople do, take a direct, professional approach. As sales expert Belal Batrawy recommends, you might say:

In my experience, successful implementations happen when our clients involve {specific roles, e.g., CMO or finance lead} early. It ensures we can address everyone’s priorities and move forward smoothly. It doesn’t have to happen today, but I want to be sure you’re comfortable involving them as we progress. What do you think?

This approach positions you as an expert advisor. It also tests the buyer’s readiness to move the deal forward.

• Understand what matters to each stakeholder. You must understand each stakeholder’s priorities and address their concerns.
  • End users. Show how your solution simplifies tasks, boosts efficiency, and seamlessly fits into their workflow.
  • Champion/sponsor. Equip them with success stories and data-backed proof to help them advocate for your solution internally.
  • Purchase influencers. Demonstrate how the solution aligns with the company’s broader goals and strategic vision.
  • CFO/budget owner. Focus on financial impact — ROI, cost savings, and long-term value.
  • Legal/compliance team. Emphasize compliance and data security, and provide clear contract terms to address their concerns.

Track job changes

New opportunities can open up when a satisfied customer (or engaged prospect) moves to a new company.

New hires often want to make an impact quickly, so they may already consider repurchasing products and services that helped them thrive in their previous role. At a minimum, they’re a warm lead that should be easier and faster to close. You can capitalize on this change if you respond speedily and strategically.

• Automate job tracking. You can manually track job changes using LinkedIn. However, this slow approach can lead to errors or dated information. Sales intelligence tools like UserGems and Seamless.AI automatically track job changes and categorize them as warm leads in your CRM. It also includes the leads’ updated contact information.
• Research their new job role. Don’t just jump straight into prospecting. Read through their job description to understand their new goals. In the meantime, send a congratulatory message. You may also gift or share valuable information to show your excitement or commitment to helping them succeed. You might send this:

• Send a job change outreach. After a couple of weeks, start the sales process by sending an email tailored to their pain points. Your goal is to get a reply, not a meeting. 

• Protect existing deals. When employees leave, their replacement often reviews existing vendor relationships to ensure alignment with the company’s needs. Reach out to the new person to position yourself as a trusted partner and prevent churn. Here’s an example of a message you can send:

Run paid ads to retarget leads

Once prospects signal interest — by visiting your website or downloading a content upgrade — use paid ads to retarget them. Retargeting leads helps strengthen mental availability and keep your brand top of mind.

You can run retargeting campaigns on LinkedIn, Google, and other social platforms your ICP uses. B2B paid expert Roman Krs suggests these tips for effective retargeting ads:

• Avoid ad fatigue. Ad fatigue describes the feeling audiences have after seeing the same ad creative too many times. Prevent this by having multiple ad creatives. Offers can include testimonials, case studies, thought-leadership content (gated or ungated), product demo videos, and demo requests.
• Split the budget evenly across creatives. Some creatives will outperform others. However, showing your audience multiple variants of the ad lets you maintain freshness and keep them engaged.
• Use video ads. Video ads capture attention better than text or images. They don’t need to be high-budget productions — a simple product demo or repurposed content from podcasts and webinars can work just as well.

Coach your sales reps

David Kreiger, the president at SalesRoads, says he avoids hiring SDRs out of college, unlike most sales teams. Why? He understands that the impact of a top performer exceeds the cost savings from hiring inexperienced folks.

However, the real challenge with new SDRs isn’t inexperience — it’s inadequate training.

For instance, Cognism CEO James Islay once praised SDR Kay-leigh Johnston after an overwhelmingly positive cold call experience with her. James praised the interaction on LinkedIn.

The shocker? Kay-leigh was only 5 months into her role.

As James concluded, Kay-leigh is proof that “good training and systems mixed with the right hire can cut through the noise and generate pipeline for the team.”

If you’re a bootstrapped company with a tight budget, hiring experienced sales reps might be impractical. Our recommendation? Hire for talent and sales passion, train for skill. Ensure your training includes role plays that mimic challenging, real-world scenarios.

Cut down on pointless meetings

Rethinking meeting scheduling and prioritizing the ones that drive true results can save your team up to 30% time. 

• Ask, “Can this meeting be an email?” Avoid scheduling a meeting when you can communicate your information via asynchronous channels like email, Slack, or Loom. For instance, there’s no need to hold meetings for updates or information sharing.
• Don’t meet just because it’s on the calendar. One Redditor shared that he and his manager have a weekly one-on-one meeting time blocked out on their calendars. However, his manager checks before their weekly one-on-one to confirm if there’s anything important to discuss. If not, they cancel the meeting.
  This approach ensures they have time to discuss essential issues while avoiding time-wasting meetings without clear agendas.
• Avoid large meetings. During David Sacks’ time as Paypal’s COO, he enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting that included over 3 to 4 people was deemed suspect and subject to adjournment. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk echoes the same idea. “Unless somebody’s getting enormous value from the information they’re receiving or contributing to the meeting itself, they should not be there,” says Elon.

Accelerating your sales pipeline with Belkins

Implementing all these tactics will boost your lead quality and accelerate your sales pipeline. However, if you lack time or expertise, consider cooperating with appointment setting agencies like Belkins.

We help companies with limited internal resources generate appointments with ready-to-buy leads. The outcome? Your in-house team can focus on closing deals. Our leads boast a 15% average close rate, yielding our clients an ROI of 200% or more.

Case in point. We helped a U.S.-based software development agency to book 48 appointments and generate $900K in new project revenue within 4 months.

This client, an on-demand software development company providing outsourcing teams to global businesses, serves Fortune 500 and NYSE-listed companies. The company hired us because it operates in a highly competitive market. The target customers — companies with 200 to 500 employees and $200M+ in revenue — were receiving similar offers from competitors. So they needed a prospecting strategy that stood out.

Through brainstorming and testing, we developed an outreach strategy that resonated with their prospects. Monthly appointments increased from 10 in the first month to 20 by the fourth month. This resulted in 5 closed deals, a 10% close rate, and $900K in new revenue within 4 months.

Ready to achieve similar results? Contact us to get started or explore more customer success stories.