Deal Velocity Matters More Than Deal Count
A deal count tells you how many opportunities are in the CRM and says little about how quickly they’re moving. Eric Housh opened a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast by describing what Max Bevan hears from business owners constantly: the pipeline is full, and nothing is moving and nothing is closing. Max, our principal account executive at Fast Slow Motion, called deal velocity the ultimate goal. This post covers what he meant by it, what shapes it, and who needs to be looking at the data behind it. It’s part of a group of posts that start with Why Your Sales Pipeline Isn’t Closing Deals.
What Max Means by Deal Velocity
Max described deal velocity as the speed of the pipeline: how fast it’s moving, how it’s connected, and how things are progressing. He didn’t give a formula or a benchmark in the conversation, and he was clear that the way a business tells that story depends on its own setup. That setup includes the sales process, the products, what the procurement cycle looks like, and how the CRM has been structured so it works for the business.
Why a Full Pipeline Can Still Sit Still
Max didn’t set velocity against deal count directly, and the framing in this post comes from how the episode opened, with a pipeline that looks full while deals don’t advance. What he did say is that a top-line stage like discovery or proposal doesn’t tell you much until you look at the details underneath it. A count of deals at each stage can look healthy while the activity, meetings, and buyer context behind those deals say something different, and Stuck Deals Look Healthy Until You Check the Details walks through those details.
What Shapes Your Velocity Story
When Max talked about scaling, he named pipeline, throughput, and revenue targets as the things a business should be thinking about. He suggested looking at average deal size or contract value and asking what has to be true to hit the numbers, then building the discipline and tooling to support it. The CRM has to support the deal model in a way that holds up, which means deciding which stages are required and what information reps should capture.
Two Views of the Same Data
Max described two audiences. Sales leaders need to understand, at the individual level, what helps a deal progress and which stages it has to pass through, and the CRM has to be built out so that’s visible. Executives and management need to know which KPIs the CRM is producing to tell the story of actuals versus forecast.
He summed it up as a combination of two things: whether the business has a process, and whether it has a system that shows the data behind that process, so leaders can tell whether the process is being followed. He added the question that makes both useful, which is whether people are actually looking at the data and having real conversations about it.
What Supports Velocity in a Deal
Max listed several things that can support and drive velocity. Activity levels and outbound outreach came up, along with automation for efficiency, calendar tools, deal rooms, and other types of tech. He said it isn’t always straightforward, and that a business has to know where its people currently stand before deciding which of these to try.
His approach to testing was to name the result you expect, such as a higher close rate, a larger average deal size, or better-quality deals. Then you implement the change, run it through UAT and training, watch the data, and keep refining. HubSpot Automation That Keeps Deals Moving covers the automation piece, and A Healthy Sales Pipeline Is One Reps Can Explain From Memory covers what it looks like when the CRM matches what reps already know.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.