Have you ever felt like your sales department was a "leaky bucket"? The team works 10 hours a day, the CRM is bursting with leads, but the end-of-month result... is the same again.
Working with many sales processes, I've noticed a recurring pattern: companies focus on quantity, completely ignoring speed.
Today, I want to talk about Sales Velocity – the only metric that truly tells you how quickly your company is making money.
The "More Leads" Myth
I often hear: "We need more leads to increase sales." This is a trap. I've frequently seen situations where the sales department receives hundreds of contacts that don't fit the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) at all.
The result? With a monthly sales cycle, the conversion to "Won" hovers around 20-25%. What does this mean in practice?
-
Over 75% of your leads go straight to the trash.
-
Only a few percent remain in "In Progress" status.
-
Your salespeople waste 3/4 of their valuable time talking to people who will never buy anyway.
What is Sales Velocity and why is it your "GPS"?
Sales Velocity isn't just another clever term from a marketing textbook. It's a formula that combines:
-
Number of sales opportunities.
-
Conversion rate.
-
Average contract value.
-
Length of the sales cycle.
Why is this so important? Because Sales Velocity gives you information about the quality of your leads and the efficiency of your process, which you won't see in a revenue report alone.
What does this metric teach us?
If your conversion is 20% and the cycle lasts 30 days, your "speed" can be dramatically low, despite high team activity.
From my experience, calculating Sales Velocity allows for brutal honesty within a company:
-
Marketing diagnosis: If velocity drops, even though leads are increasing – we have a problem with their quality (lack of targeting).
-
Sales team effectiveness: If the cycle lengthens – the sales process is too complicated, or salespeople are "freezing" topics that should have been closed as "Lost" long ago.
My lesson for leaders:
Stop measuring only how much you sold at the end of the month. Start measuring how quickly that money flows through your pipeline.
With a 25% conversion rate, every lead that isn't your target is an operational cost that kills your Sales Velocity. Sometimes fewer, higher-quality leads will make the company grow faster than ever before.
And how does Sales Velocity look in your company? Do you measure speed, or just the final result?