PACE Sales Strategy & Pipeline Management 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company wants to reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC) while maintaining revenue growth. Which strategy best achieves this?
- Expand paid advertising spend across all channels
- Focus sales resources on the highest-converting market segments (Correct answer)
- Hire more outbound sales representatives immediately
- Lower product pricing to generate higher volume
Correct answer: Focus sales resources on the highest-converting market segments
Concentrating resources on segments with proven high conversion rates reduces wasted effort and lowers CAC without sacrificing revenue growth.
Question 2: The 'Challenger Sale' methodology suggests that top-performing salespeople primarily:
- Build deep personal relationships before discussing business
- Teach prospects new ways of thinking about their problems and constructively challenge assumptions (Correct answer)
- Always match competitor pricing to avoid losing deals
- Focus exclusively on inbound leads from marketing
Correct answer: Teach prospects new ways of thinking about their problems and constructively challenge assumptions
The Challenger model, based on CEB research, identifies top reps as those who teach, tailor, and take control of the sales conversation.
Question 3: Average sales cycle length suddenly increases by 30% for a B2B team. The MOST likely explanation is:
- The CRM software was recently updated
- More deals now require approval from additional stakeholders or committees (Correct answer)
- Sales reps are making too many follow-up calls
- Marketing is generating too many inbound leads
Correct answer: More deals now require approval from additional stakeholders or committees
Longer buying committees and additional approval layers are the most common cause of extended B2B sales cycles.
Question 4: A 'tiger team' approach in pipeline management means:
- Assigning the most difficult prospects to the least experienced reps for training
- Deploying a focused group of top performers to accelerate or rescue high-value at-risk deals (Correct answer)
- Creating a separate team to handle only inbound leads
- Running weekly pipeline reviews with the entire sales organization
Correct answer: Deploying a focused group of top performers to accelerate or rescue high-value at-risk deals
A tiger team concentrates senior talent on strategically important or stalling deals to drive them to close quickly.
Question 5: Which action MOST effectively shortens the time-to-close on enterprise deals?
- Providing a discount in the first meeting to build goodwill
- Creating a mutual action plan (MAP) agreed upon by both buyer and seller (Correct answer)
- Limiting contact to a single decision-maker to avoid complexity
- Sending a detailed proposal before discovery is complete
Correct answer: Creating a mutual action plan (MAP) agreed upon by both buyer and seller
A mutual action plan aligns both parties on milestones and timelines, reducing ambiguity and keeping deals on track to close.
Question 6: In a territory-based sales model, the primary advantage of geographic segmentation is:
- It guarantees equal revenue potential across all territories
- It reduces travel time and allows reps to build deeper local market knowledge (Correct answer)
- It eliminates the need for CRM tracking
- It ensures larger accounts always get senior reps
Correct answer: It reduces travel time and allows reps to build deeper local market knowledge
Geographic territories minimize travel overhead and allow reps to develop specialized local relationships and market intelligence.
Question 7: Sales velocity is calculated as:
- Number of deals × win rate × average deal size ÷ sales cycle length (Correct answer)
- Total revenue ÷ number of salespeople
- Pipeline value × conversion rate
- Quota attainment % × number of reps
Correct answer: Number of deals × win rate × average deal size ÷ sales cycle length
Sales velocity = (# of opportunities × win rate × average deal value) ÷ length of sales cycle, measuring how fast revenue moves through the pipeline.
PACE Sales Strategy & Pipeline Management 3
A company wants to reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC) while maintaining revenue growth.
Which strategy best achieves this?