Presales: Pipeline Momentum & Acceleration

In presales, it’s highly important to have a good pipeline momentum. In this article I want to discuss what that means, why it’s important, and some good practices to achieve or optimize this.

Definitions

Pipeline

Let’s quickly recap what the pipeline is. When we say the pipeline, we are referring to the sales pipeline. The sales pipeline is a visual representation of the buyer’s journey through the sales process. Here it is in ASCII art:

   ┌───────────────┐
   │     LEADS     │
   └───────┬───────┘
           │
   ┌───────▼───────┐
   │   QUALIFIED   │
   │   PROSPECTS   │
   └───────┬───────┘
           │
   ┌───────▼───────┐
   │ OPPORTUNITIES │
   └───────┬───────┘
           │
   ┌───────▼───────┐
   │   PROPOSALS   │
   └───────┬───────┘
           │
   ┌───────▼───────┐
   │  NEGOTIATION  │
   └───────┬───────┘
           │
   ┌───────▼───────┐
   │    CLOSED     │
   │  (WON/LOST)   │
   └───────────────┘

So the sales pipeline is really nothing more than visualizing the journey of the potential customer being a lead first, then once we deem the customer qualified, they become a prospect, then we see oppurtunities, next we make proposals, and then finally comes the negotiation and hopefully closing the deal.

Pipeline Momentum and Acceleration

Pipeline momentum refers to the speed and consistency at which prospects move through your sales pipeline. It’s not just about having deals in the pipeline - it’s about those deals actually progressing from one stage to the next at a predictable and good pace.

Pipeline acceleration, on the other hand, is the art and science of increasing that momentum. It’s about reducing the time it takes for a prospect to move from lead to closed deal, while maintaining (or improving) your win rates.

Think of it like this: If your pipeline is a highway, momentum is the traffic flow, and acceleration is adding more lanes and removing bottlenecks.

Why Pipeline Momentum Matters

Momentum matters for two reasons. First thing, the slower the pipeline, the less deals are closed per period of time, meaning less revenue - typially it also means more effort and resources, so higher costs. Secondly, time kills deals. The longer a deal sits in one stage, the higher the chance it dies.

Expanding on the second point:

1. Competitive Pressure

While you’re taking three months to get through technical validation, your competitor might be closing deals in six weeks. Speed to value often trumps the “perfect” solution.

2. Internal Champion Fatigue

Your internal champion (the person advocating for your solution) has limited political capital. The longer the process drags, the more that capital depletes. I’ve watched champions get reassigned, leave companies, or simply lose interest.

3. Budget Cycles

Budgets are approved in cycles. Miss the budget window, and you’re waiting another year. Or worse, that budget gets reallocated to more urgent priorities.

4. Technology Debt

The longer the evaluation, the more the customer’s current pain points accumulate. Sometimes they’ll implement a band-aid solution just to stop the bleeding, reducing urgency for your comprehensive fix.

Common Pipeline Killers

Before we talk about acceleration, let’s identify what slows pipelines down:

The “We Need to Think About It” Stage

This is where deals go to die. Usually means insufficient discovery or lack of urgency creation. It’s very important to always keep in mind: doing-nothing is a competitor! It’s an option for the customer too! So you’re not just competing with other companies, you also must convince the client that your solution, including the costs, time, and risks, is better than doing nothing.

Over-Engineering the Demo

Spending three weeks building the perfect demo for a prospect who just wanted to see basic functionality.

Committee Paralysis

When too many stakeholders get involved without clear decision-making authority.

Technical Validation Loops

“Can you show us how this works with our ERP system? What about our CRM? And our data warehouse?” - before you know it, you’re in month four of discovery.

Procurement

Deal is technically approved but stuck in legal/procurement for months.

Strategies for Pipeline Acceleration

Here are some tips that helped me in the past to accelerate the pipeline.

Build Reusable Content Assets

This is probably the most important point. Instead of building everything from scratch for each deal, collaborate with Product Management, Product Education, and Value Engineering to create reusable content for core and advanced product use cases. Have playbooks! Have clear standard processes!

What I mean by this:

Core Use Case Libraries: Pre-built demos, ROI calculators, and integration guides for your top 5-10 use cases. Instead of spending two weeks building a custom demo for each financial services prospect, have a solid fintech demo ready that you can quickly customize.

Industry-Specific Content: Work with Product Marketing to develop industry playbooks. E.g. healthcare prospects need to see HIPAA compliance (never been in a healthcare project), manufacturing needs OEE metrics, retail needs inventory optimization - build these once, reuse as much as possible.

Technical Validation Kits: Pre-built PoC environments, API documentation packages, and architecture diagrams that can be quickly adapted. This turns a 4-week PoC into a 1-week customization exercise.

Champion Enablement Materials: Sales decks, technical one-pagers, and business case templates that your internal champions can use to sell internally without you being in every meeting.

What that means?

Sales Decks: These are polished, visually engaging presentations tailored for your champions to share with their teams or stakeholders. They typically highlight the key benefits, features, and differentiators of your product or service, framed in a way that aligns with the audience’s priorities. The deck is concise, persuasive, and designed to spark interest and facilitate discussions.

Technical One-Pagers: These are concise documents (usually a single page) that dive into the technical details of your offering. They’re meant for more technically inclined stakeholders, like IT or engineering teams, and include specifics like system requirements, integration details, security features, or performance metrics. They’re written to be clear and digestible, enabling your champion to confidently address technical questions.

Business Case Templates: These are customizable frameworks that help your champion build a compelling case for adopting your solution. They typically include sections for outlining the problem, your solution, ROI projections, cost-benefit analysis, and strategic alignment with the organization’s goals. The template makes it easy for your champion to justify the investment to leadership or finance teams.

My take: This is the difference between scaling as an individual contributor versus scaling as an organization. One great SE building reusable content can 10x the effectiveness of the entire presales team. It’s compound interest for sales engineering. So this is something you should always do! How exactly you do it, and how much customization the reusable assets need (if any), really depends on your prospects, projects and organization.

Automization

Automate the repetitive stuff, focus on the high-value interactions.

The goal is to eliminate manual tasks that slow down your pipeline and don’t require human judgment. Examples:

Follow-up sequences: CRM workflows that automatically send follow-up emails after demos, PoCs, or no-shows. Don’t let deals die because someone forgot to follow up.

Demo scheduling: Tools like Calendly or Chili Piper that let prospects book directly into your calendar with automatic room setup and demo environment prep.

Document generation: Templates for MSAs, SOWs, and technical proposals that auto-populate with deal-specific info from your CRM.

Pipeline hygiene: Automated alerts when deals haven’t moved stages in X days, or when key activities are overdue.

My take: Every hour you spend on administrative tasks is an hour not spent on discovery, relationship building, or closing deals. The compound effect of automation is huge - it’s not just time savings, it’s consistency and reduced human error.

Parallel Processing

Instead of sequential stages, run activities in parallel where possible and if it makes sense. E.g., while technical validation is happening, start the commercial discussions. While legal reviews the contract, begin implementation planning.

Other Tips

• Do your homework early. The more you understand about their environment, pain points, and decision process upfront, the fewer surprises later.
• Don’t let prospects become passive participants. Create shared timelines with clear next steps for both sides.