Sales velocity — one formula, four levers

Sales velocity compresses the whole machine into one number: revenue generated per unit of time.

Velocity = (number of open opportunities × average deal value × win rate) ÷ sales cycle length (days)

Take: 30 opportunities × £40k × 25% ÷ 90 days = £300,000 ÷ 90 = £3,333/day ≈ £300k per quarter.

The formula matters because its four inputs are the only four levers any salesperson has:

1. More opportunities (30 → 36): more prospecting, better lead flow, partnerships. → £360k/quarter.
2. Bigger deals (£40k → £48k): multi-year terms, more modules, selling trust-wide instead of department-wide. → £360k.
3. Higher win rate (25% → 30%): better qualification, better discovery, multi-threading stakeholders. → £360k.
4. Shorter cycle (90 → 75 days): mutual close plans, early procurement engagement — in the NHS, starting the information-governance and DTAC paperwork during the evaluation rather than after it. → £3,333 becomes £4,000/day → £360k.

Note the interactions: qualifying harder cuts lever 1 but raises levers 3 and 4 (you win more, faster) — usually a net gain, which is why experienced teams celebrate early disqualification.

When an interviewer asks "you're behind target — what do you do?", structuring the answer around the four levers ("first I'd check which lever is actually broken…") is a ready-made framework.

5. Forecasting: commit, best case, and telling the truth

A forecast is your formal prediction of what you will close in the period. It is not the same as your pipeline: pipeline is everything open; forecast is what you're prepared to be held to. Most teams use categories like these — each deal gets exactly one:

• Commit: "This will close this period. Hold me to it." Verbal agreement done, procurement in motion, close date validated by the buyer. Missing a commit deal is a serious event.
• Best case (or upside): could genuinely close this period if things break right, but something material is unresolved — a sign-off pending, a competitor still in play.
• Pipeline: real and qualified, but not predicted to close this period.
• (Closed — already won this period — sits alongside as bankable.)

The forecast rolls up: your numbers feed your manager's, theirs feed the VP of Sales (the executive who owns the revenue number), whose commit goes to the CEO, CFO and board. Hiring plans, cash management and — at a venture-funded scale-up, which describes much of UK health tech — investor communications hang off it.

Hence forecast accuracy is valued almost as much as attainment: a rep who says £180k and delivers £185k is more useful than one who says £400k and delivers £220k, because the VP can build on the first number. "I'd rather give you a smaller number I'll hit than a big one I hope for" is a sentence worth having ready.

Voice from the field

As Jason Lemkin advises in SaaStr's "Dear SaaStr" series, a rep's forecast should stick to roughly three categories — commit, most likely and best case (his "most likely" maps onto this module's best case) — because a start-up's pipeline forecast loses all consistency with more than that; and commit should mean exactly what it says: a deal the rep is confident will close, with the boxes genuinely ticked, not merely hoped for.
— Jason Lemkin, SaaStr

Three failure modes, all named jargon you should recognise:

• Slipped deals ("it pushed"): a deal whose close date moves to a later period. One slip is life — NHS procurement alone can slip a quarter through no fault of yours. Serial slipping usually means the date was never buyer-validated. The antidote: ask the buyer "what has to happen at your end between here and signature, and by when?" and date the plan.
• Sandbagging: deliberately under-forecasting — hiding deals you know will land in "best case" — to look heroic when you "beat" the number. It corrupts the roll-up as badly as over-forecasting: the VP under-commits to the board, under-hires, misplans.
• Happy ears: the opposite disease — hearing polite buyer noises ("looks great, send us a proposal") as buying intent, and forecasting hope. The cure is exit-criteria thinking from section 2: forecast on verifiable buyer actions (named budget, agreed paper process, dated signature steps), not on tone.

Field note

In most real organisations the forecast call is a negotiation, not a measurement. Reps learn their manager's reflexes — a manager who habitually adds 10% to whatever they hear teaches sandbagging; one who punishes every miss teaches deals to hide in best case until the final week. So a team's "commit" is often the equilibrium of that game rather than the state of the deals, which is why experienced leaders insist on inspecting the underlying opportunities instead of trusting the category labels.