I heard this during an audio broadcast about a company’s first-quarter results.

Problem:
The word “accelerate” is the wrong verb for this sentence.

Explanation:
Putting aside for this blog post the problematic misuse of “need” (a throwback to the pop-psychology movement of the 1960s), “accelerated” is problematic here and most probably is not what was intended.

I heard “We need to accelerate this pace.” from a group president talking about the growth in the number of subscribers to his company’s services.

The verb “accelerate” means to increase the speed of. One of the meanings of the noun “pace” is the rate of growth.

We get “We need to increase the speed of the rate of growth.” when we apply these meanings to the statement.

The “speed of the rate” is nonsensical.

What the speaker was trying to say, as he revealed in subsequent statements, was that he wanted his company to increase the growth rate, not “increase the speed of the rate of growth”.

I suspect that he made this common English blunder because he wanted to sound more sophisticated — using a four-syllable word instead of a two-syllable word.

Solution:
“We need to increase this pace.”