Enjoy a Sales Boom Without the Bust: 3 Simple Steps to Increase Your Sales Pipeline

If it’s executed correctly, outbound prospecting can be the single biggest contributor to an expansion-stage company’s sales growth. What can you do to ensure that kind of success?

In a guest post for OpenView Labs earlier this year, sales consultant and best-selling author Aaron Ross posed a question that many expansion-stage sales leaders might have thought was a no-brainer: Is your business ready to triple its sales pipeline in a matter of months?
“Of course we’re ready,” you may have thought to yourself. “Who isn’t ready to triple their sales pipeline?”
But as the former Salesforce.com executive explained in his post, a lot of companies — especially businesses just entering the expansion stage — aren’t prepared to take that step. Yet, all too often, those organizations rush into building an outbound prospecting team (the activity that Ross suggests can triple pipeline in just a few months), only to discover that they don’t have the people, processes, and market to justify it.

What to Do If You Are Ready to Increase Your Sales Pipeline

Then again, there are plenty of businesses that do have the growth, team, structure, and customer base to warrant outbound lead generation. And for companies that fall into that category, outbound prospecting very often is a no-brainer.
That doesn’t mean, however, that simply creating and implementing an outbound prospecting initiative will automatically triple your pipeline. To do that, you need to ensure that you manage your program the right way.
Thankfully, Colleen Francis, the founder and president of highly respected sales training organization Engage Selling Solutions, has answers. And if your goal is to not only boost sales pipeline this quarter, but to create a self-perpetuating pipeline machine that delivers results well into the future, Francis says there are three critical steps you must take.

1) Determine Your Revenue Goal and Work Backwards from There

Before you do anything else, Francis says it’s critical to get clear on the number that you want your outbound prospecting team to hit. From there, you can work backward to determine the quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily numbers your team needs to deliver to hit those targets.
“Your number could be $1 million or it might be $5 million, but you can’t develop a strategy for your pipeline until you know what it is,” Francis explains. “That number is the foundation for everything else. It will help you determine how big your pipeline needs to be and which activities will help you get there.”
Typically, Francis says companies should plan on their pipeline being three or four times their revenue target. But she also urges expansion-stage companies to be flexible with that number in the early stages of outbound prospecting. “You might do a lot of research and develop these hypotheses for what your revenue target should be,” Francis says. “But until you get on the phone and start talking to customers, you won’t really be able to settle on an accurate number.”

2) Track and Manage Against Leading — Not Lagging — KPIs

Too often when evaluating their outbound prospecting team’s success, managers only look at the actual sales (the closing of the business). Of course that metric is important, but Francis says it’s a lagging indicator. And if you rely only on that number to manage your team, you won’t be able to adjust to major roadblocks quickly enough.
“Think about it this way: If you have no sales closing today, it indicates that your team has not been performing well for months,” Francis says. “And by the time you’re at the point of no business, you’re already well into trouble. In fact, you are at the point of no return. There’s no way you’ll be able to compensate quickly enough to meet your target.”
That’s why Francis recommends managing your outbound prospecting team with these leading KPIs:

• Number of qualified leads in the pipeline
• Sales cycle length
• Total length of time to qualify a new prospect
• Qualified to proposal ratios
• Number of evaluations / short lists per year
• Number of new (first) client meetings per month
• Cold lead to qualified ratios with conversion rates

“Those metrics not only help you build an appropriately sized pipeline and respond to issues in real-time, they also help you scale your team,” Francis points out. “For instance, if you know how many calls need to be made to generate a certain number of opportunities, you can build your team based on that number.”

3) Execute a Wide Range of Prospecting Activities

The biggest mistake Francis says she sees companies make is focusing too much on just one prospecting activity or one source of leads.
“Naturally, the best quality leads are the ones that come to you directly, so a lot of businesses will simply perform activities that generate inbound leads,” Francis says. “That’s fine, until you hit a month or a quarter when you aren’t getting the volume of inbound leads that you need to support your targets. To create true consistency and predictability, you have to be much more proactive. Otherwise, you put yourself at risk if one particular source dries up.”
Deciding which mediums and activities are best for your business is largely dependent on who your customers are, what their needs are, and which methods are most relevant to them. But the point, Francis says, is to engage in as many prospecting activities as you can to create a continuously full pipeline of high quality leads. “The more diverse and plentiful your prospecting activities are,” Francis says, “the more likely it is that you’ll build a living, breathing pipeline that perpetually replenishes itself.”

How to Avoid Prospecting Booms and Busts

Francis’ last piece of advice to growing companies is to avoid getting too excited about having a good month, quarter, or year. Because the moment an outbound prospecting team thinks that its job is done, is the moment its bubble begins to burst.
“Everyone gets excited when a deal closes,” Francis says. “But what many sales leaders forget is that for ever deal that closes, they must be generating three or four new opportunities in their pipeline to replace that deal. And if the outbound prospecting team is too busy celebrating its wins, that will create this ebb and flow of boom and busts that lead to sales inconsistency.”
The solution, Francis suggests, is to develop an outbound prospecting culture that takes a more holistic view of the company’s sales goals and objectives.
“You have to coach your reps to look at the bigger picture and continuously focus on the next step, rather than the one they just completed,” Francis says. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t celebrate or reward big wins. It just means that you have to avoid celebrating them for too long, or thinking that those wins mean you can take a break.”

Have you run into problems with sales inconsistency? What methods have you tried to hold onto your momentum following a boom?