Revenue Velocity: What's Holding You Back?

Activity in the green, but revenue in the red? Time to review your Revenue Department as Ian explains. 

Summary: Sales and marketing activity isn't a guarantee that we’ll hit our revenue targets. When revenue stalls, the problem is rarely effort or tools; it’s misalignment within what we call the Revenue Department. This article explains why reviewing sales and marketing together, through a single revenue lens, is often the fastest way to unlock sales velocity.

Your sales and marketing teams are busy, campaigns are running, there is activity in the pipeline, and the CRM is humming. But something feels a little off: the quality of the opportunities seems low, deals are moving slowly or fading away late in the process, and forecasts feel optimistic.

The typical response is to try to crank the handle or apply pressure on one of the functions: we need more leads from marketing, we need sales to get better at closing, or we need the latest shiny AI tool, fresh hires, or maybe it's the pricing or the targets

Optimizing marketing for more leads in isolation just means sales complain about the quality, more tools create silos of process, data, and insight, and hiring ahead of having a sufficient pipeline creates stress across the revenue system.  

The truth, of course, is that it’s not often one function, tool, or process that’s slowing down our revenue velocity.

Time for a Different Approach

In today's disrupted B2B buying journey, sales and marketing don’t operate in sequence anymore, buyers don’t experience them that way, and the lines have blurred. A marketing audit or a sales GTM review will only tell part of the story.

So here at Velocity B, we think in terms of the Revenue Department, which is not necessarily defined by an org chart but rather by the people, systems, and processes that create awareness, convert demand to revenue, and build trust to grease the wheels for the next opportunity.

The Revenue Department has, rather obviously, one goal: revenue.

Review Through a Clear Revenue Lens

Reviewing sales and marketing through this single revenue lens combines a shared understanding of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), the holistic buyer journey (not just which bits are marketing and which are sales), and how we remove friction from first touch to closed deal.

This can’t be a McKinsey-esque, drawn-out forensic project that distracts the team from the revenue-generating day job; the juice wouldn't be worth the squeeze. 
It’s a pragmatic focus on a single goal and the cross-functional outcomes that the business needs from the Revenue Department.

Awareness

• Positioning within the category

• Visibility within a focused ICP

• Well-understood intent signals 

Revenue

• Accurate assessment of sales velocity

• Understanding where opportunities slow or die and why

• Synchronization of the sales process and how buyers buy

Trust

• Credible positioning and messaging

• Proof points that sales can depend on

• Pipeline of customer stories, advocacy, and references

The Benefits of a Revenue Review

One of the biggest benefits of reviewing the Revenue Department rather than its individual operations is that it fosters cohesion, reinforcing the mission of generating revenue.

Team cohesion

Taking a revenue-centric approach breaks down operational silos, goals, and metrics individual teams are working toward, and creates a set of clear priorities that ladder up to outcomes that make a difference to the business, and each cog in the revenue engine can see the impact it has.

Aside from internal operational performance elements, reviewing the Revenue Department through the lens of the customer, as suggested in the ART model above, identifies gaps in our shared narrative across the combined revenue team.

Build confidence

Just doing this process, even before the business sees the tangible benefits, builds business confidence in the revenue leaders.

The C-suite and board see a commitment to creating momentum and change, and the team that looks to them for leadership has a sense of purpose and direction.

Create Velocity, not more work

Once we have that shared goal and clarity of the gaps across the revenue team, it becomes much easier to deploy the people, resources, and tools to make the most impact, as the team is prepared for change.

Many teams don’t need a new strategy; they need clarity on which parts of the current one are actually working. And with a prioritised list of actions, based on their impact on the overall company goals, this change can be quickly implemented.

What Teams Have Discovered

A review of the entire sales and marketing revenue team can reveal results that have surprised the leadership teams we’ve worked with. Here are some examples:

Conflicting metrics

This is a common pattern we see in larger teams. One large technology vendor we worked with discovered that the metrics and goals of individual teams, set in operational silos, conflicted with each other and the overall revenue goals.

In one simple example, the web team valued web pages by vanity metrics during a content audit and proposed deleting poor-performing pages (those with low traffic) to improve the overall engagement metric, considering them irrelevant. However, these pages described a product line that generated considerable revenue from a very small audience and were essential to support a revenue target.

The sales heroes superpower

Another recurring dynamic we’ve seen over the years is that sales teams often have top performers who perform seemingly heroic acts that carry the company across the line at the end of the quarter.

One professional services company found itself in this situation, and the review enabled them to uncover their superpower and optimize their pipeline process, sales enablement, and messaging to improve the performance of the entire team.

Obsession with the new

Often, we find the revenue challenge can be solved closer to home, through account management and customer success, as many revenue teams are geared toward new logo business, and yet existing customers can represent a much more accessible revenue stream.

This manifests itself not just in sales team focus, structure, and compensation plans, but also in the support customer-facing teams get from sales enablement and marketing.

They lack content marketing that recognizes that when a persona moves from prospect to customer, they have different needs or product marketing that supports onboarding, upsell, cross-sell to new products, or supports a case for renewal.

Where do you start

You are looking for velocity, and we need to keep this tight and not distract the team from the revenue-generating day job.

Working with our clients, we have developed a short, rapid assessment that looks across sales and marketing. The output is a clear score, a high-level diagnosis, and a prioritised practical plan that identifies quick wins and highlights areas that need more focus.

With this insight, you can surgically apply change where needed, not kill the patient.

From Review to Results

Most teams aren’t underperforming because they lack talent, tools, or data, or because they're doing the wrong things; they’re underperforming because the right things aren’t connected. Auditing your Revenue Department is the first step in unlocking that potential velocity.