Podcast

Accelerate Deals & Crush Quotas: Mastering Sales Velocity

Below is the transcript for the podcast episode “Accelerate Deals & Crush Quotas: Mastering Sales Velocity”, featuring Jeremy and Sarah with the Altify podcast. You can watch the full podcast episode via the video below.

Introduction: Moving Beyond Volume

Jeremy: [00:31] Welcome to the Altify podcast. You know, sitting down and looking through the notes for today’s deep dive, I was immediately reminded of—well, pretty much every single sales kickoff meeting I have ever sat through in my career.

Sarah: [00:43] Oh yeah. The classic SKO, right? The VP of sales gets up on stage, the intro music is pumping, the lights go down, and there is always that one slide that just completely dominates the screen behind them.

Jeremy: [00:56] And let me guess: it’s a giant bar graph pointing up and to the right.

Sarah: [01:02] Exactly. Up and to the right. Always. And the underlying message of that entire week, the drumbeat that everyone marches to, is always the exact same thing: Volume. Just pure volume.

Jeremy: [01:15] It is the absolute classic mantra, isn’t it? Just, you know, “more.” We need more calls, we need more emails, more meetings logged in the CRM, and ultimately more revenue because everyone is just completely obsessed with that gross volume number.

Sarah: [01:21] The bottom line. They are. And look, I get it. I really do. The bottom line is what pays the bills. It’s what the board cares about, it’s what investors care about. But reading through this information on sales velocity, it really struck me that focusing entirely on volume is a bit like—well, like a runner just staring dead ahead at the finish line, completely ignoring their actual running form.

Jeremy: [01:46] Oh, that’s a really good way to put it. Right? Like you might get there eventually, but you’re going to be totally exhausted, your joints will hurt, and you probably won’t even clock a very fast time.

Sarah: [01:59] That is a perfect analogy. And honestly, that’s the exact pivot we need to make today for everyone listening. We really need to stop looking just at the, you know, the total volume output…

Jeremy: [02:04] Yeah.

Sarah: [02:10] …and start looking under the hood at the “how.” And that is exactly where this concept of sales velocity comes into play.

Jeremy: [02:16] Yeah, it’s like this hidden metric. It really is. It’s the metric that actually dictates whether or not you are going to hit that bottom line without completely burning out your entire revenue team in the process.

Defining the Sales Velocity Equation

Sarah: [02:28] And just to be super clear right up front for you listening: when we say the word velocity, we are not just using some corporate buzzword for like “working faster.”

Jeremy: [02:35] No, absolutely not. We aren’t telling you to just talk faster on your Zoom calls or, you know, skip your lunch break so you can send 10 more emails, right? Please take your lunch breaks. No, sales velocity is actually a physics problem. It’s a very specific, tangible mathematical equation.

Sarah: [02:55] And the premise here is honestly really exciting once it clicks because it shifts the whole paradigm.

Jeremy: [03:00] Exactly. Instead of trying to just brute-force your way to growth by trying to double your headcount—which is incredibly expensive—or doubling your working hours—which is impossible—you can make these tiny, almost invisible adjustments to four very specific levers, and the output of those tiny adjustments grows exponentially.

Sarah: [03:14] I just love that approach. It feels so much less like hitting a wall with a hammer and more like actual mechanics, like you’re finally tuning a high-performance engine. So let’s actually get into this equation. If we were standing at a whiteboard right now, you know, drawing out the physics of sales, what does this formula actually look like?

Jeremy: [03:31] Okay, so visualize a standard fraction, just a line across the middle. You have a numerator on the top and a denominator on the bottom. In the numerator of that top part, you essentially have three distinct growth engines, and they’re all multiplied together.

Sarah: [03:43] Okay, so three inputs on top. What are the three?

Jeremy: [03:49] First, you have the number of opportunities. You can think of this as the pound sign or the hashtag. It is the sheer number of qualified deals that your team is actively working right now.

Sarah: [03:54] Makes sense.

Jeremy: [04:01] Second is the deal value. So, the dollar sign. When you actually win a deal, what is the average monetary size of that win? And then the third lever on top is your win rate percentage. Basically, out of all the deals you work, how often do you actually get the signature and close?

Sarah: [04:12] Okay, I’m tracking. So that’s the number of deals times the deal size times the win rate. I mean, that’s the good stuff. That’s the revenue engine right there.

Jeremy: [04:23] It is. But here is where the physics part really kicks in. You draw a line under all of that topline goodness and you divide it all by the denominator. And that denominator is L: the length of the sales cycle.

Sarah: [04:38] Ah, the time component. Right, it’s the average amount of time it takes your team to either win or lose a deal.

Jeremy: [04:42] And because it sits right there in the denominator, it essentially divides your success. Mathematically, the bigger that number gets—meaning the longer it takes you to actually close deals—the smaller your final velocity number becomes.

The Power of Marginal Gains (The 10% Scenario)

Sarah: [04:56] Okay, I want to pause right there because that is such a crucial mathematical relationship to understand. In basic math, if you divide something by a really big number, the end result shrinks dramatically.

Jeremy: [05:02] Exactly. So if your sales cycle just drags on for months and months and months, it honestly doesn’t even matter how huge your deal size is on the top of the fraction; the velocity, which translates to the actual revenue you bring in per month, just gets completely crushed.

Sarah: [05:20] Precisely. It acts like a drag coefficient on your sales car. You can have this massive, powerful engine, but if you have a giant parachute dragging behind you—and that parachute is called “long sales cycle”—you just aren’t going to go anywhere fast.

Jeremy: [05:31] Yeah, you’re just burning gas.

Sarah: [05:43] I was looking at the specific math example… and I have to be completely honest, at first glance, I was a little skeptical.

Jeremy: [05:43] Really? Why is that?

Sarah: [05:49] Well, it just seemed a little too “magic wand” for me. You know how these theoretical models can be. But then when you actually sit down and run the numbers, the leverage is totally undeniable. Let’s walk through that specific scenario.

Jeremy: [06:00] Let’s do it. It’s a brilliant case study because it uses very standard, realistic numbers. So imagine a midsize B2B sales organization. Let’s say they have exactly 50 salespeople on the floor.

Sarah: [06:08] Okay, writing this down. 50 reps.

Jeremy: [06:16] And every single rep has a pretty standard annual quota of $1 million. So the company’s total annual target is $40 million. Let’s say currently the whole team works a total of 200 deals. The average size is $200,000. They have a win rate of 25%. So they are closing about 1 in 4. And their average sales cycle takes three months.

Sarah: [06:41] Okay, let me just do the mental math on that really quick. 200 deals times 200K times a 25% win rate, and then we divide all of that by the 3-month cycle length. According to the breakdown, that comes out to a sales velocity of exactly $3.33 million per month.

Jeremy: [06:55] Right. And if you multiply that by 12 months, you get roughly $40 million for the year. So technically, they are hitting their number… but here is where the strategic shift happens. The leadership team decides they need to grow. Instead of hiring 50 more people, they focus strictly on the velocity levers. They set a goal to improve each of those four variables by only 10%.

Sarah: [07:50] See, that’s the part where my skepticism flared up initially. Is a 10% lift across the board actually realistic?

Jeremy: [07:57] It is actually incredibly achievable because you aren’t asking anyone for a massive overnight transformation. You are just asking for marginal gains. You aren’t telling your reps to magically double their deal size; you’re just asking them to go from 200k to 220k.

Sarah: [08:17] Right. And you aren’t asking them to win every single deal. You’re just asking them to go from winning 25% to winning 27.5%. That’s winning maybe one extra deal out of 40.

Jeremy: [08:35] Exactly. And for the denominator, you just shave the sales cycle down from 3 months to 2.7 months. That is literally just closing a deal a week or so faster.

Sarah: [08:41] But what is the actual impact on the final velocity number?

Jeremy: [08:47] This is the fun part. The monthly sales velocity jumps from $3.33 million all the way up to $4.93 million.

Sarah: [09:04] Wait, that’s practically 5 million a month! If you annualize that, it’s basically $60 million a year. So they went from 40 million to 60 million in revenue without doubling headcount?

Jeremy: [09:17] That is a massive jump. It equates to a 48% total uplift in overall revenue.

Lever 1: Opportunities (Quality Over Quantity)

Sarah: [10:07] Okay, I’m completely sold on the math. Let’s go through them one by one. Lever number one: Opportunities. Now, the instinct here for most reps is usually just “fill the funnel.”

Jeremy: [10:26] That is definitely the natural instinct. But it is almost always the wrong move. If you just start dumping more garbage into the top of your funnel, you’re going to completely tank your win rate because the leads are bad.

Sarah: [10:39] And you’ll probably increase your cycle lengths too because you’re chasing people who don’t actually want to buy.

Jeremy: [10:52] Exactly. The strategy here fundamentally has to be quality over quantity. It is far more productive to win four out of seven deals than it is to win three out of 10.

Sarah: [11:16] So the million-dollar question is: how do we systematically find those four out of seven deals?

Jeremy: [11:22] It really comes down to what the Altify framework calls “rigorous qualification.” You have to be totally willing to weed out the misaligned opportunities before they get a chance to clog up your math. This involves profiling—deeply analyzing a prospect’s organization before you even make that first deep engagement.

Lever 2: Deal Value (Whitespace Analysis)

Sarah: [12:39] Let’s move over to lever two: Deal value. How on earth do we increase deal size without just losing the deal entirely?

Jeremy: [13:07] Well, you definitely don’t just raise the price tag on the exact same item. Instead, you have to focus on maximizing your footprint within that account. The core strategy here revolves around whitespace analysis.

Sarah: [13:19] Whitespace? What does that actually mean?

Jeremy: [13:24] It’s a practical exercise. Imagine drawing a literal map of your key account’s tech stack. The white space is quite literally the blank area on that map where you aren’t currently selling to them, but you potentially could be.

Sarah: [14:16] So instead of just selling one module, you look for the future needs—those white spaces—and you pitch the comprehensive solution. Suddenly that $50,000 deal becomes an $80,000 deal.

Lever 3: Win Rate (Methodology vs. Process)

Jeremy: [15:33] Let’s look at lever three: win rate. This lever brings up a distinction: the difference between having a methodology versus having a sales process.

Sarah: [15:57] What is the actual difference?

Jeremy: [16:04] The best way to think about it is like a cross-country road trip. The sales process is your GPS system—it’s strictly linear (Step 1, Step 2, Step 3). The methodology is your actual driving skill. It’s how you navigate the road when a roadblock or a storm hits.

Sarah: [16:52] That’s a really good point. To really improve your win rate, you have to introduce tactics like spotlighting.

Jeremy: [17:24] Exactly. Spotlighting is the practice of shining a bright light on the inherent risks in a deal while that deal is still in flight. It’s asking, “Where are we currently weak?” or “Who on the buying committee does not like our solution?” You fix those weaknesses instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping.

Lever 4: Sales Cycle Length (Killing the Zombies)

Sarah: [18:10] All right, that brings us to the fourth and final lever: Lever four, the denominator, L—the length of the sales cycle. You called it the “silent killer.” Why?

Jeremy: [18:25] Because mathematically, it divides everything else you achieve. If it takes you 12 months to close a deal that should take three, you are starving to death even while holding a full pipeline.

Sarah: [18:44] You know, this honestly feels like the most emotional lever to pull because it means killing deals—the zombie deals.

Jeremy: [18:59] Yes, exactly. We keep deals on life support because we want our pipeline to look full. To actually shorten the cycle, you have to be willing to ask the really scary questions early on: “Is there an actual compelling event?” “Do they have confirmed access to funds?”

Sarah: [19:12] Shortening the sales cycle isn’t just about forcing winning deals to close faster. It’s actually about losing the losers faster.

Jeremy: [19:25] That is exactly it. If a deal is fundamentally doomed, you want to find that out in week two, not in month six. By aggressively weeding out the bad deals early, you automatically speed up the math of the whole system.

Conclusion: A Customer-First Mindset

Sarah: [21:20] As we start to wrap up… this isn’t just about clever math tricks. There is a real philosophy here.

Jeremy: [21:32] There is. Strategic B2B selling fundamentally has to put the customer right at the center. It’s all about mutual value. Qualification isn’t just about protecting your time; it’s about respecting theirs.

Sarah: [22:18] It is never just about selling something to hit a quota. It is about creating sustainable value.

Jeremy: [22:59] So, as we wrap up, I want to leave everyone with a challenge. Open up your CRM right now. Look closely at your own denominator. Start looking for the zombies. Find those deals that haven’t moved in weeks.

Sarah: [23:52] Thank you so much for breaking down the formula and the physics with us today.

Jeremy: [23:56] Always a pleasure. I’m Jeremy.

Sarah: [23:59] And I’m Sarah.

Watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FffQ8B5SM8