Which quality is better for a sales team: speed or quality? As the kid in the old Taco Bell commercial goes: why not both?
Sales velocity is a metric that helps sales teams stay on top of both while still staying focused on their day-to-day sales motions.
Sales velocity helps answer two important questions when it comes to the overall sales function. Are we moving in the right direction? And are we moving fast enough?
In this article, we spoke with Zak Pines, VP of Partnerships at Formstack, to discuss:
- What is sales velocity?
- Why partnership programs are so important for sales velocity?
- How teams can go about improving to increase revenue
What is sales velocity?
Sales velocity is the pace at which high-quality deals advance.
To really understand this, you have to understand the difference between speed and velocity. Don’t worry — we’ll keep the physics talk quick and simple.
Speed is just how quickly something moves over a distance. Velocity is how quickly something moves over a distance in a specific direction. This is why it’s called, “sales velocity” and not sales speed.
A good business is not just trying to get money through the door by any means necessary. They’re trying to grow their business by building quality relationships with customers in the market and solving a real need. This helps their business go the distance.
Let’s assume you sell accounting software for eCommerce businesses. Your goal is to become the most trusted accounting software in North America that helps your customers manage everything from their cash flow to creating projections.
If you were measuring sales speed, you’d just be seeing how much money is coming through the door. You wouldn’t care if your customers were enjoying real value from your product or staying happy over the long term, but as a result, you wouldn’t reach that end goal of being the most trusted accounting software that owns the bulk of market share.
“Speed is important, but it has to be quality touches as well,” Pines explains. “That’s the balance you need to strike when engaging and developing opportunities. A combination of the right velocity along with quality interactions with your prospect or customer.”
Good news: there’s a simple formula for measuring sales velocity and it accounts for those “quality interactions” Pines mentions. The formula is:
sales velocity =
sales opportunities x average deal size (or average customer lifetime value) x win rate
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sales cycle length
The mutually beneficial relationship between sales velocity and partner programs
High sales velocity is more attractive to partner program managers. Just because a company joins your partner program, doesn’t mean its sales team will prioritize your products. On the other hand, if you can demonstrate that you have high sales velocity, there’s more incentive for sales teams – who want to win as many high quality deals as possible – to prioritize your solutions as a co-selling opportunity during conversations with customers.
Understanding sales velocity can also help your partner program gain more respect. Since sales velocity is an important metric for sales and revenue leaders, it’s a good idea to understand how partner programs contribute positively to it.
“If you can show that partners are helping you close deals more quickly, that is a key metric for any sales manager and sales leader. Most benchmarks show that a partner-generated or partner-attached pipeline is the highest performing pipeline that a business can generate and this is crucial for how you most efficiently grow your business through partnerships,” explains Pines.
Related: Partner-driven represents highest revenue source for top performing sales reps.
Here are some examples of the positive relationship between sales velocity and partner programs.
Accelerated revenue generation
Partner-generated or partner-attached sales opportunities inject more value into the sales process. Customers gain insight into how a solution can be implemented or how a solution can be customized to their specific industry or use case, something a vendor alone may be unable to provide.
This value accelerates revenue generation by speeding up the sales process without compromising on quality or relationship building. For example, HubSpot can sell you its software and help with technical issues, but an agency in their partner network might be better able to understand the customers’ needs and tailor their pitch accordingly.
Improved partner engagement
High sales velocity points to a smooth sales process. Sales teams within partner organizations want to focus on products and services that are likely to generate revenue. These programs usually have clear cut solutions as well as enablement materials, such as marketing materials and certification courses. Demonstrating that you have high sales velocity shows that you’re selling something worth people’s time.
You can even track correlations between changes in your sales velocity and changes in your partner KPIs, particularly those that measure partner engagement. Examples of partner engagement KPIs include per-partner revenue, partner satisfaction completion scores, partner portal usage rates, lead response time and training or certification completion rates.
Enhanced market competitiveness
An increase in a company’s sales velocity can also lead to an increase in its competitiveness. The faster a company can get customers paying for its products and services, the more market share it can gobble up. Acquiring more customers also means more opportunities to build deep long-term relationships. These relationships can help companies learn about the intricacies of different industries and use cases, generate case studies, cross-sell and upsell and even co-create new integrations.
See more: Here's how to prioritize integration partners in 2025.
What are the key components of sales velocity?
Sales velocity consists of several key components. It’s important to respect each of these components in order to get a sales process that’s not only fast, but helps you work towards your business goals in a sustainable way as well.
Number of opportunities
How many opportunities are coming through the door? It’s important that there is sufficient pipeline and that those opportunities are managed in a consistent and efficient way. A low number of opportunities may mean that you need to increase or improve your marketing materials, place more cold calls and send more cold emails.
Average deal value (or lifetime customer value)
If sales velocity were just about how quickly you could get people to sign on the dotted line, it wouldn’t be a high quality metric. Velocity implies direction and your business wants to move in the direction of growth and quality relationships. Average deal value, or in the case of subscription-based businesses, average customer lifetime value, indicates how much business customers are willing to hand over to you.
There are several ways that you can improve average deal size, or lifetime customer value if you’re selling a subscription-based product:
- Focus on the value that you deliver instead of the cost. When you understand a customer’s pain points and then link your solution to those pain points, you can charge a higher price point.
- Make your unique value proposition clear. Furthermore, it’s helpful to qualify your leads to ensure you’re focusing your energy in the right places. One framework you can use is MEDDIC, which stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion.
- Create customer success materials that help your customers get more out of your products and services. While this may seem more important for subscription-based businesses, it’s also important for other businesses since focusing on post-sale success can lead to more upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Win rate
Naturally, win rate impacts sales volume. The more closed (won) deals there are, the higher the sales velocity rate. There are a few ways you can improve your win rate including nurturing your leads throughout the sales funnel, aligning your sales process (for example, through demos and emails) to the customer’s specific pain points and needs and deepening your relationships with your existing clients — since a new sale with an existing customer is still a win.
“Sales velocity speaks to how effectively you engage prospects and align to helping them solve problems and the value of your product,” says Pines. “So I think the more effectively you do that as a business, the more effectively you do that with partners. That sets you up to be more competitive in the market. You’re basically outselling your competition at that point and you are winning in your market.”
Read more: The B2B buyer's guide to partnerships software in 2025.
What are some strategies to improve sales velocity?
If your sales velocity rate is low, there are some steps you can take to improve it.
Optimize sales processes
Optimizing your sales processes is one of the most effective ways to improve sales velocity.
Map out your existing processes
A sales process is a set of repeatable steps. Often, a company’s sales function operates with a set of informal activities that everyone knows they’re supposed to do. A proper sales process is documented and it’s something that you can learn even if you aren’t an early employee or an experienced sales wiz. Mapping out your sales process helps your leadership team evaluate the process, compare results at different periods and make adjustments in a measurable, controlled way.
It’s time to take your sales process from informal to formal by clearly documenting it. You’ll certainly find a few of these steps in your current activities. Keep in mind that some of the earlier steps in the sales process may overlap with your marketing team’s activities.
- Prospecting, cold calling and lead generation
- Lead scoring and lead qualification
- Lead nurturing
- Discovery calls
- Demos
- Stakeholder conversations (particularly for complex implementations)
- Implementation
Identify your key performance indicators
When you’re improving your sales process, it’s important to map out the KPIs your team will be obsessive about tracking.
Examples of important sales KPIs include:
- Monthly calls or emails per sales rep
- Number of monthly discovery calls
- Number of monthly demos
- Number of closed deals
- Average cost per lead
- Customer lifetime value
There are all kinds of sales KPIs that you can track. It’s important to track those that are most important to you. Too many KPIs can be overwhelming and as a result, people may stop paying attention to them.
Introduce automation to simplify sales activities and KPI tracking
Technology can help improve your sales process through organization and automation. For instance, a customer relationship management tool such as Salesforce or HubSpot can help you keep all of your contacts in one place, track your different interactions and conversations with them and automate certain activities such as sending out sales emails. You can also integrate your CRM with your PartnerStack PRM to host all the data you need in one place.
A real-world example of how a partner program can contribute to sales velocity
As Head of Partnerships at Formstack, Pines has seen firsthand how a partner program can increase a company’s sales velocity. He shared how Formstack, which is a Salesforce partner, landed a customer win by leveraging its partner relationship.
“If I’m a Formstack rep working an opportunity, our partner manager working with Salesforce can help us get to the Salesforce account executive on that opportunity,” explains Pines. “We can get insights on the buying team, how that customer likes to buy. So the insights will then help the Formstack rep sell more effectively and close or advance that deal faster, having that positive impact on sales velocity.”
See more: How Formstack drives 50% of new mid-market and enterprise business with partnerships.
Pines says that this is not something that they leave to chance. Whenever they have a new opportunity, they actively look to their partner community which includes a large community of system integrators (SI) to find existing relationships.
“We use a product called Reveal to see if there are existing partner relationships on an account that can help us improve sales velocity. And also if a customer has a specific use case where a partner is specialized, we’ll bring that partner in for the credibility and the experience they have around the problem that that customer is trying to solve.”
Pines also points out that it’s not just a matter of leveraging your partner program to win but promoting the impact of your partner program on sales velocity as well.
“The best way is to socialize success and have peer-to-peer sharing,” says Pines. “That’s very valuable. Whenever we have wins, we’ll share that out in Slack channels. We have a way to congratulate people for their contributions. In things like sales standups or internal enablement sessions, we have salespeople share those successes with others.”
“There could be a team member who has done a Formstack project, implemented Formstack, helped the customer achieve value for their data collection or document automation use cases. And we’ll encourage team members to share that success story across their colleagues, so others can learn about what we’ve done together and how we’ve helped a joint customer.”
