Maximizing Growth with a Commercial Sales Revenue Acceleration Platform

Introduction

Commercial Services companies today face the constant pressure of a rapidly accelerating economy.

Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are giving large enterprise organizations an edge in hiring, optimizing employee workloads, lowering costs, accelerating revenue, and increasing profit margins. This allows them to compete with smaller local commercial services businesses for talent, customers, and revenue – squeezing those businesses.

Today, many small to medium-sized businesses find themselves grappling with bottlenecks like workforce shortages, long sales cycles, fragmented sales teams, and inconsistent results from their sales and customer success, teams who are finding it hard to keep customers long-term while competing with large enterprises on cost.

These issues slow businesses’ growth and create frustration among sales reps, who struggle to meet targets despite their best efforts.

Using revenue acceleration platforms is key to breaking free from this cycle. These tools leverage the same AI, machine learning, and data-driven insights that big companies use to grow but at a much lower cost.

Accelerating sales growth, improving sales productivity, and using buying signals enriched with property information, account data, and contact data for decision-makers – these are just a few ways that revenue acceleration platforms can boost sales success.

These platforms allow companies to align their sales process, marketing team, and customer relationship management with success teams or customer service teams, streamlining operations, automating tasks, and providing valuable data. This leads to faster deal closures, improved customer relationships, and ultimately, sustained revenue growth.

Let’s dive into how these platforms work and why they’re game-changers for commercial services businesses.

What is Revenue Acceleration?

Revenue acceleration work is the art of speeding up your business’s growth by aligning the efforts of sales, marketing, and customer success teams. It’s about cutting inefficiencies and creating a unified strategy that drives more revenue and deals through the pipeline faster, ensuring a smoother experience for both your sales team and customers.

Revenue acceleration basically means eliminating anything that stands in the way of growing sales within the ethical bounds of providing excellent delivery for potential customers.

At its core, the revenue acceleration plan involves:

• Sales enablement: Providing sales reps with tools, resources, and data to close deals faster and more efficiently.
• Customer engagement: Building personalized relationships based on intent insights, customer data, and understanding your buyer personas and target audience.
• Sales and Marketing automation: Automating repetitive tasks like follow-ups, lead nurturing, and data entry to keep the focus on high-value activities.
• Revenue operations (RevOps): Unifying departments to work toward common revenue goals with shared metrics and seamless communication.

But what does this look like in “real life?” Let’s make a quick comparison.

Imagine two sales reps starting their day. Using traditional lead generation methods, James spends 1- 2 hours on each account, scrolling through LinkedIn, checking out the company’s website, researching, sending Loom videos, and crossing his fingers, hoping for a response.

Meanwhile, Sarah opens Convex, her sales intelligence platform (the first tool in an effective revenue acceleration tech stack), refreshes her “Signals,” and almost instantly sees a list of pre-qualified prospects who’ve already shown interest in her products and services (through buyer intent signals).

With two clicks, Sarah uses Generative AI to send a personalized email or to create a script for phone calls (or she could use the insights to send a quick Loom video), and in 3 to 5 minutes, she’s on to the next account.

Who do you think will close more deals at the end of the day?

If you guessed Sarah, you’re spot on. While James spends 1- 2 hours per account, Sarah can cover 20+ accounts in the same 2-hour window.

This accelerates sales growth by eliminating unnecessary tasks so Sarah can focus on what matters—potential customers who are “in-market” and ready to buy. Think of Convex as a sales assistant who works 24/7, “teeing” up deals for sales.

Benefits of Revenue Acceleration

Let’s return to the previous analogy to understand the benefits of adopting a revenue acceleration strategy. Going beyond just speeding up deals, Sarah is able to:

1. Shorten the sales cycle: By reaching-out to qualified leads who’ve already shown an interest in your products and services, you can eliminate the time it takes to move deals through the sales funnel.
2. Improved lead quality: Sales intelligence and lead generation tools like Convex use buying signals to create what are called “signal strength” profiles, scoring leads on their likeliness to make a purchase. They also integrate with top sales automation tools like Salesforce, allowing you to track your lead all the way through the sales cycle so your sales team can focus on high-potential leads that are most likely to convert. Once there, tools like Hubspot or Salesforce offer insights on the entire customer lifecycle, including customer success data, allowing you to understand the true value of those leads better.
3. Better customer relationships: The world is full of noise today. Ads, calls, emails, and the like. Personalized interactions based on customer data are a must if you want to cut through the noise and create stronger relationships which lead to higher retention rates among both new and existing customers.
4. Increased revenue: Streamlining your sales process helps you close more deals faster, which directly contributes to revenue growth- that’s pretty obvious, but if you can accelerate deals, while also increasing bandwidth and eliminating excess steps, you create an exponential effect- as we saw in the sales rep comparison.
5. Competitive advantage: A well-implemented revenue acceleration platform gives you the edge over competitors by delivering faster, more efficient service and an enhanced customer experience.

If you want to accelerate sales growth, the first step is to identify potential customers faster. The next is to remove any roadblocks to sales success and ensure that your team has the engagement strategies to keep customers coming back.

Building an Effective Sales Acceleration Strategy

Ready to build a sales acceleration strategy that drives results? Here’s how to get started:

1. Start with an Internal Assessment

The first step is evaluating your current sales processes:

• Where are the bottlenecks in your deal cycle? Where are you losing sales? Are your sales reps spending too much time on lead research, outreach, or administrative tasks instead of selling?
• How effectively are your sales, marketing, and customer success teams managing customer interactions throughout the deal cycle?
• Are you leveraging cross-departmental data to align your teams and improve the buyer persona targeting?

Use sales enablement tools, CRM, and pipeline management tools to analyze these gaps and pinpoint inefficiencies in your handling of potential and existing customers.

2. Align Sales, Product, and Marketing Teams

Alignment is the foundation of any successful revenue acceleration strategy. This means getting your sales leaders and managers, sales team, marketing, and any customer support/ customer success/ customer services teams (whichever type of team you have) on the same page with shared goals and metrics.

• Use insights from your customer success teams and marketing campaigns to inform your sales team’s approach to outreach, the true benefits of your products and services, and customer testimonials.
• Leverage marketing automation and sales automation to seamlessly transfer leads through each sales funnel stage, keeping all the teams focused on the right tasks.

By further aligning sales efforts, you ensure that each department works together to drive revenue growth and improve sales success.

3. Implement Sales Acceleration Strategies

Once you have team alignment, it’s time to implement the right tools and strategies to improve your sales productivity through the entire customer’s lifecycle:

1. Revenue strategy: Build a revenue strategy that ties together all aspects of your sales process with your long-term growth goals.
2. Deploy Sales Acceleration tools: Platforms like Convex will allow your sales team to increase the deal flow without losing bandwidth.
3. Use Sales and Marketing automation: Automate routine tasks like follow-ups, lead scoring, and customer tracking. This helps your sales representatives focus on closing deals, not chasing unqualified leads or managing workflows.
4. Measure your Results: If you have the budget, using “RevOps” software to track KPIs, manage pipelines, and ensure accountability can be helpful, but these metrics can just as easily be managed in a tool like Hubspot or Salesforce with a little work.

True revenue acceleration happens when you build an effective strategy, deploy the right platforms, and have internal processes to track and measure your results in a continuous feedback loop. This will lead to a focus on building scalable systems for accelerating deals and generating consistent revenue growth.

Implementing a Commercial Sales Revenue Acceleration Platform

Now that you understand the strategies behind revenue acceleration, it’s time to look at how to implement a platform that will integrate seamlessly into your existing infrastructure or replace what’s not currently working. This will boost sales success and ensure that your team is equipped to see customer needs and convert more potential customers into loyal buyers.

If you haven’t already, go back to the previous section and start with an internal assessment of your revenue bottlenecks and create a strategy to overcome them. It doesn’t have to be sophisticated; you can just put some ideas on paper that will lower barriers to entry for sales.

Next, take a look at your budget and answer this question: At this moment, what could you realistically invest in creating a system that allowed you to grow sales effectiveness exponentially? Most revenue acceleration tools will range between $100 and $1000 per month and take 30 days or so (depending on your sales cycle) to begin seeing results – but if you choose the right tool and your team adopts it into their regular workflow, you will see results.

For those of you considering Convex, teams that use our suite of tools see a 9x median ROI. This is based on 1-year averages and assumes a lifetime Value (LTV) retention rate of 95% and a 45% margin, which brings us to our first point.

1. Integrate Revenue Acceleration Platforms

The foundation of any good growth strategy starts with having the right tools to eliminate roadblocks to your sales opportunities.

Whether you start with a true sales acceleration platform like Convex or RevOps software, all your teams must be on the same page. And I mean all the teams: Leadership, sales, marketing, or customer success (this will be company-specific based on how you’ve structured your teams), but they all need to be aligned around common goals and metrics. Here’s how to make it work:

• Lower barriers to sales. First, you need a tool to identify prospects and create the shortest path to revenue.
• Cross-departmental data is key. Second, you need a tool that clearly showcases the bottlenecks in your sales and revenue strategy. Salesforce, Hubspot, and most RevOps software can all do this but tracking critical metrics such as revenue per channel or platform, sales pipeline health, deal velocity, and customer engagement will all affect the number of deals that close. This allows your sales team and marketing team to collaborate effectively and share data seamlessly.
• Integration to eliminate tasks. Make sure your platform of choice integrates well with your existing CRM and tools in your integrated tech stack. When data flows freely between systems, it enables sales representatives to track leads efficiently and stay on top of follow-ups. Your team will be able to stay up to date on customer progress and ensure no opportunity is lost.
• Streamline and Automate for efficiency. Your sales team shouldn’t be chasing unqualified leads, they should be closing marketing and sales qualified leads, this means using tools like Zapier, Pipedrive, and others to automate follow ups and other tasks that allow sales to focus on closing instead of sending hundreds of check-in emails on a weekly basis.

By integrating the right tools, platforms, and software correctly, your teams will gain visibility into the entire sales funnel and be empowered to make data-driven decisions that streamline the sales cycle.

2. Eliminate Friction Across Deal Stages

As Sarah’s story illustrates, identifying potential customers quickly is key to accelerating the inflow of new business, but it’s equally important to ensure that you eliminate any roadblocks in your deal cycle. We alluded to this in the previous section with integration and automation, but removing friction will always create a smoother sales process. This involves:

• Automate data entry, data transfer, and follow-up tasks to keep deals moving through the pipeline. This reduces human error and helps your team stay focused on closing deals rather than managing administrative tasks.
• Provide your customer success teams (or any type of backend customer service team) with the tools they need to deliver personalized engagement at every stage. By keeping customers engaged with relevant nurture sequences, upsells, content, and engagement strategies, you’ll ensure they remain invested throughout the entire buying journey and customer lifecycle.

In short, by eliminating unnecessary steps and friction points, your sales team can focus on accelerating deals and closing more deals efficiently.

3. Measure Success

Implementing a revenue acceleration platform is only the beginning. To ensure long-term success, you’ll need a feedback loop. Whether this is a sales manager, head of sales, director, or VP who can focus on the bigger picture or a regular quarterly review with individuals on your sales team (or both), you must be able to continuously monitor and measure performance across all stages of your sales process. Here’s how:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Track the following KPIs to evaluate the success of your revenue acceleration strategy:

• Revenue growth: Are you seeing a significant boost in sales after implementing the platform? If not, why? Are your team adoption rates low? Are people actually tracking relevant metrics? These are all direct indicators of whether your strategy is working or not.
• Revenue Per Channel: Which sales channels are most effective? Which are the least effective? Which platforms are driving the most sales growth? This will show you how to adjust your strategy moving forward.
• Sales cycle length: Measure the time it takes to move leads through your pipeline. Has your platform helped shorten the sales cycle and increase efficiency?
• Customer satisfaction: Survey your target audience and measure customer retention rates. Are your website visitors and ideal customers satisfied with the service and experience they’re receiving?

Finally (and I realize this may or may not be relevant to you- depending on your organization structure),

4. Optimize Customer Success Teams

Just like in Sarah’s example, for sales to focus all their attention on closing new business, there needs to be a support team focused on critical activities like retention, customer feedback, and better targeting to expand your customer base. These individuals are the “unsung heroes” in the sales process, playing a key role in tracking engagement, helping to nurture relationships, and ensuring that potential customers turn into long-term clients.

Two great ways to optimize the lifetime value of a customer are:

1. Use data from customer engagement to refine your team’s approach continually. Monitor how well they manage touchpoints across the customer journey and use that data to improve their outreach strategies.
2. Provide support tailored to your buyer personas to maximize retention and ensure customer satisfaction at every step of the journey.

Creating a feedback loop between sales and your follow-on teams will create better results across your organization.

Conclusion

I’ll probably sound like a broken record at this point but integrating the right platform, automating critical tasks, and tracking results with precision are the key to seeing consistent growth and profitability.

By focusing on key steps like the ones we’ve covered, you’ll ensure that every stage of the sales process is optimized for revenue acceleration. Most business owners and managers find the key to true revenue acceleration is removing friction, aligning all the teams, and staying agile.

Your future sales success lies in the systems you build today—so start by implementing a revenue acceleration system that drives scalable growth and generates long-term results.

Ready to see how Convex can streamline sales and eliminate friction across your sales process? Schedule a demo with our team today!