Effective pipeline management plays a crucial part in growing your business.
The ability to track the progress of opportunities your sales team is working on is the equivalent to keeping score in a basketball game. Every lead generated by marketing, sales call made, email sent, or meeting booked adds points to the scoreboard.
To score more points than your opponent, you have to have a reliable process in place and continuously improve your skill sets.
Situations arise when a player enters the game, and they have to contribute to the team quickly. Whether you’re a new sales rep, building a B2B sales program, or starting your own business, you need to generate a robust pipeline from square one.
In June of 2019, I chose to play the game when I made the most challenging career decision of my life. I quit my cushy job as a Marketing Director with a SaaS company to go all-in on starting my growth agency.
At the time, my pipeline looked more like a drinking straw. I knew I needed to hone my pipeline generation skills.
That’s when I received two signs from the universe.
First, I met Michael Jordan, my childhood hero. This epic encounter gave me the inspiration to put in the work necessary to reach my goals.
“The game has its ups and downs, but you can never lose focus of your individual goals and you can’t let yourself be beat because of lack of effort.” – Michael Jordan
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Second, I was accepted into HubSpot’s Sales Skills and Pipeline Generation Bootcamps. These 8-week intensive sales coaching programs are offered to HubSpot partners who want to step up their game and apply the Inbound Sales Methodology. Since sales legends, David Weinhaus and Dan Tyer lead the programs, acceptance is highly competitive due to the limited capacity and huge demand.
Thanks to my fantastic Channel Account Manager, Sophie, I got into the program and even had a chance to meet my new heroes at Inbound 2019. As you can see, the 45+ minutes I spent with the three of them was the best meeting ever.
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To help you build a strong sales pipeline and grow your business, I’m sharing my biggest takeaways from the boot camps:
Find your most significant source of motivation.
Sales is a tough racket. You have to put yourself out there to get the desired results. You often face rejection, which leads to self-doubt. To keep going, you have to define what motivates you.
The first assignment from the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp was to create a vision board. This powerful act helps to clarify the “Why” in putting yourself through this tough profession.
I put my vision board on my desktop background and iPhone wallpaper. This way, I always have it in front of me.
Get your sales reps to do this, and they’ll brush off those rejections and stay motivated to keep at it.
Get the right sales tools.
You can build a house with a screwdriver, but it’ll probably take you a long time. To sell more effectively and efficiently, you have to stop wrestling with outdated technology. I’ve been using HubSpot Marketing Starter and CRM but recently added Sales Hub Pro to my aresenal, and it’s been a game-changer.
Here are some of the things I’ve been able to do more efficiently:
- Create email templates and sequences to automate the task creation in my process.
- Create multiple meeting links for various situations. If you’ve gone back and forth trying to schedule and reschedule a meeting, you know it causes friction—and you lose momentum.
- Automate deal, task creation, and data entry. The greatest thing about a dynamic CRM is the fact that you don’t have to spend an hour a day on non-revenue generating activities.
- Integrate a phone system into HubSpot. Speaking of data entry, the time it takes to log phone calls into your CRM adds up. The native integration with Aircall helps to track inbound and outbound calls.
- Send Products and Quotes with E-Signature and Buy-now links. A significant friction point in the sales process is sending a proposal, waiting for a signature, then sending an invoice. This feature also helps you improve efficiency.
- Send HubSpot Video Emails. The most powerful sales tool is the ability to create video emails from the CRM. In highly competitive situations, you can humanize the experience and gain a competitive edge.
Before you jump in on your own, there are a few crucial considerations before you implement any technology upgrade. The technology enables a solid strategy, so schedule a quick chat with me to overcome common pitfalls.
Write a powerful positioning statement.
A positioning statement helps you to articulate what you do and for whom quickly. It also engages your prospective customer with the value you’re uniquely qualified to deliver. You can have multiple positioning statements depending on the solutions you offer and the roles of your target audience.
Until you know it by heart, it helps to print them out. The trick is to make it more conversational and less robotic. Here’s an example of one of my positioning statements.
We help amusement industry manufacturers with over $3M in annual revenue generate more inbound leads, acquire customers, increase word-of-mouth referrals. They typically have fierce competition and want to stand out from the pack. Does that sound like you?
As with any messaging, you want to tailor it to your audience. You also want to test variations to see what resonates. Now give it a try yourself.
Identify and Research Good-Fit Leads.
If you have a reliable inbound lead generation machine firing on all cylinders, your sales team probably has a steady stream of leads to prioritize outreach. Otherwise, you can have them reach out to friends and family, industry connections, and even lost opportunities.
As your team is prioritizing outreach, they should also be equipped to identify good-fit leads.
Before you have them start smiling and dialing, you have to put in the time to research the company and individual. This time investment can set you apart from the spammy calls and LinkedIn messages your competitors are sending. Plus, it helps your sales reps build rapport and add value during the connect call.
Here are some of the places you can research:
- Google Alerts – This helps you identify leads who are experiencing a trigger event such as the announcement of plans for a grand opening, or hiring a new CEO. If your sales team doesn’t already have alerts set up, have them add their target accounts here.
- LinkedIn Profiles – Every sales rep already knows how to find relevant information on LinkedIn, but there’s a cool app called Crystal that helps them identify the personality profiles of the individuals.
While your sales teams have always been taught to start in the C-Suite, I’ve learned that researching and connecting with other people in the organization can drastically improve the quality of conversation with a CEO. Instead of a cold discovery to ask questions like, “What keeps you up at night…” You’ll be able to say, “I spoke with George, Mary, and Cameron to learn that you’re losing more and more deals to the competition.”
Now you’re ready to tango with the head honcho. Well, almost.
Practice Makes Perfect.
Michael Jordan didn’t become the greatest basketball player of all time with his natural talents. He practiced relentlessly and even scared his teammates into becoming better players.
What started as fumbling through the words on the script turned into more conversational and confident dialogue from a tremendous amount of role play. Even if your sales reps are already doing role-plays during onboarding and ongoing training, do more of it.
The biggest takeaway from the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp is that expanding your knowledge and skills leads to self-confidence. The boost in confidence leads to more activity and outreach. It’s a snowball effect.
Find the Gaps in the Exploratory Call
Whether you sell a product or service, you need to explore whether your prospect needs help and whether you can help. Without a deep understanding of the gap between where the prospective customer is and where they want to be, you won’t win the business.
That’s why the Exploratory Call is the New Close Call.
It’s easy to lose control of the conversation since the prospect has their objectives, so here’s a way to manage the flow:
- Introduce the call by recapping what led to the meeting. This refresher gets them back in the right head-space to solve their problem.
- Set your agenda.
- To learn more about business, goals, and challenges.
- Share some tips and ideas.
- Check to see if there’s a mutual fit.
- Discuss the next steps.
- Ask the right questions, listen, and explore. The key is to uncover the basics, specifics, and the significance of the prospect’s goals, timing, challenges,
- Discuss the value and budget. You have to position the value and address the pricing question. One of my favorite questions is, “To achieve your (specific, measurable, and meaningful) goals, what were you hoping to invest?”
- Close the call like a boss. You summarize the goals and challenges you heard, check for alignment by asking, “How did I do summarizing what you are hoping to accomplish?” Discuss the next steps of a follow-up meeting where you are coming up with an approach to meet their goals and ask them to do some “homework,” so you increase their commitment to solving their problem.
If you do an excellent job of running an exploratory call, the close happens more naturally because you’re able to present them with a solution that helps them achieve their goals.
Your Turn.
To manage your pipeline, you have to build one first. You accomplish this by having meaningful conversations and creating human connections with people who need your help.
The more you practice, the more confidence you build. The more confidence you have, the more action you’ll take. I’m sure you and your new sales reps will agree.
HubSpot’s Bootcamps have been the most significant investment in my skills and knowledge I’ve made in my entire professional career. By turning the experience into action, I’ve been able to acquire great clients and build a strong pipeline heading into 2020.
I’m far from the skill level that Michael Jordan had in his career, but I’m getting better every day. If you’d like help in stepping up your game, let’s start the conversation today.
We help entertainment and leisure companies launch, grow, and scale their business.
