Building Sales Pipeline - a rant
Everyone needs to focus on building sales pipeline, but how you go about doing that varies a lot from business to business. Lately the fad is to ask marketing to take over this Activities like search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, trade shows, whitepaper downloads, ebooks, social media, etc. are driving prospects to your website – I’m not going to argue with you over that. I’m writing this blog right now to – you guessed it – hit a keyword and drive traffic to our website. I blame HubSpot for brainwashing me.
But what is the quality of this traffic? I’m expecting zero quality leads from the hour it takes me to write this blog. B2B sales VPs and business owners (who we typically help) are just too busy to find and read this blog article. If you are out there and reading this, go ahead and prove me wrong! You are focusing on growing your business, so the burden is on us to go and find you in an intelligent way.
Despite very good intentions (and large budgets), is your marketing team able to achieve the required pipeline value of 3x quota? Are you hitting your goals for new customer acquisition or developing enough new relationships with contacts broader and deeper in your clients’ organizations? Why are B2B marketing efforts not translating into quality sales pipeline for so many firms? Asking your sales reps to “call the leads” does not drive revenue growth when the leads are junior contacts or at the wrong organizations and have zero chance of buying. You need a smarter approach to convert more of your marketing leads into opportunities.
Businesses are reaffirming the value of outbound prospecting as a way to build sales pipeline. Recently Vorsight & The Bridge Group surveyed 1,150+ B2B sales reps on the source for their best opportunities. This research called “Sales Speaks” is filled with a bunch of surprising and counter-intuitive findings. For example sales reps report that only 31% of leads meet their ideal customer profile, however they call to follow up on 84% of the leads.
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Huh? This makes no sense. Why would you expend all that effort chasing down the 70% of people that we all know have zero chance of buying?
And further only 26% of sales reps report having an SLA between sales and marketing for what is expected on each side.
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How can we build sales pipeline when we don’t have ground rules and expectations in place between sales and marketing? Finally check out where sales reps report sourcing their best opportunities:
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Are you building sales pipeline and growing your business fast enough through marketing efforts alone? Or is your sales team required to generate their own opportunities through intelligent outbound prospecting?
