Sales.

Sales Velocity

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Of the four numbers that decide how fast your pipeline turns into cash — how many deals you open, how many you win, what each one is worth, and how long each one takes — which have you known was the problem all year, and why haven't you moved it?

The idea

Sales velocity has no single author — it grew out of B2B sales operations as a way of putting one number on the question every operator eventually asks: how fast does pipeline become revenue? The equation is simple: multiply the opportunities you open by the rate at which you win them and the average value of each, then divide by the length of your sales cycle in days. The result is revenue per day, and every improvement you could possibly make to sales lives inside one of those four variables. The trap is treating the levers as equally available, because they are not — they fight each other. Push deal size up and cycles lengthen; flood the pipeline with opportunities and win rate falls. Most people pull the lever that feels most like selling — more leads — when the cheapest gains are usually hiding in the denominator nobody owns: time.

The framework

01
Compute the number before you touch a lever.
Pull four figures from your CRM for the last full quarter — opportunities opened, the percentage you won, the average value of a won deal, and the average days from first meeting to signature. Multiply the first three, divide by the fourth, and you have revenue per day: the single number every sales initiative should be judged against. Do it from the actual data, not from memory; most founders remember their win rate as higher and their cycle as shorter than the CRM does, and a baseline built on either error will flatter whatever you do next.
02
Rank the levers by what you can actually move — not what you'd like to.
The four levers are not equally available. Opportunity volume usually depends on marketing budget and market size; win rate on product and competition, which shift over years; deal size on pricing and packaging, a decision you make once and then defend. Cycle length is generally the only lever that sits entirely inside your own process — how fast you qualify, who you are talking to, and when the paperwork starts. Score each lever with one question: could we move this twenty per cent in ninety days with the people and money we already have?
03
Start with the denominator — time is the lever that costs nothing.
Cutting a ninety-day cycle to sixty lifts velocity by half without one extra lead or one extra dollar of spend, which is why cycle length is where most operators should look first. The mechanics are unglamorous: reach the economic buyer in the first two weeks rather than the last; agree a mutual close plan with dates the customer writes, not you; and disqualify stalled deals instead of nursing them, because a slow no consumes the same calendar as a fast yes.
04
Move one lever per quarter and hold the other three as controls.
Because the levers interact — bigger deals lengthen cycles, a wider funnel lowers win rate — moving two at once destroys your ability to know what worked. Choose the one lever your ranking produced, name the specific intervention in a single sentence, and deliberately leave the other three untouched for the quarter. Then re-run the equation. If revenue per day moved, you know exactly why; if it didn't, you've eliminated a lever honestly instead of wondering.

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