Podcast episode
Lead Playbook: Fixing Your Pipeline Problem
30 Minutes to President's Club11 Jul 202437 min
Description
FOUR ACTIONABLE LEADERSHIP TAKEAWAYS Ensure there is a financial plan that walks through the pipeline conversion assumptions to keep your team and your partnering teams accountable Do not try and fix something that's working in order to compensate for low metrics, look at the indicating metrics and fix those Have Account Executives dedicate 20% of their time to prospecting a set list of walled off (named) accounts Break out your inbound and outbound metrics to make it easier to diagnose the problem if one of those two metrics is falling behind RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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You need to go and grab the customers who are not showing up at your doorstep. And the same thing goes the other way around for outbound. You can only hammer people with cold emails and cold calls for so long until they need to be softened up a little bit so that someone gets hit with an ad and they click request a demo or they try a product trial. “So again, these mixes are general guidelines.” They're not end-all be-all and you should not try to get 100% of any given channel. Today's show was brought to you by 11x, your all-in-one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying, and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else.
In fact, a great revenue kickoff that actually changes the way that your team sells. And the biggest one that you don't want to miss is our live sales kickoff masterclass. Go to 30MPC.com backslash SKO to save your seat. I'll see you there. Let's assume that the funnel is inbound, SDR outbound, AE outbound. Let's start with inbound. Let's assume that our financial plan says “40% of our pipeline needs to come from inbound leads.” That's a certain number of MQLs or a certain amount of pipeline dollars or close one rep. And you see that that is not trending to where it needs to be. Talk to me about how you break down the funnel into pieces. Where are the different places that I can look to diagnose the problem? We'll start at the tippity top of the funnel, Armand.
But that's what I like to do is don't be like, all right, you know, I know you got 200 accounts in your patch and now act like an SDR, but only do it one day a week. And that doesn't work. You end up automating too much and you end up burning out. You miss a Friday because you had a mental health day or you took the company at a day off and then you're all out of whack. “You want to take a small subset of accounts, 10, 12, 15.” You want to say, I only need to get two deals out of these, but every account is going to have monster deals inside of them. Then you get your two accounts and then you know what happens the next quarter is? They're like, you know what? I still want to keep these six because these six, I'm getting close. I need six new ones though to replace the ones that I got into my pipeline and the ones
And so those are difficult conversations, but there was that need to be had because ultimately, you know, outbound is a numbers game. Like you have to have the right messaging and that takes time. But like if you only call three people a week, it doesn't matter how good your messaging is if they're all in meetings. “And so you have to have some kind of activity levels that tell you I'm going to get some” kind of repeatable process in place that will spin off the amount of pipeline I need. I tend to agree that. Look, I want my AEs being more strategic, but that does not make you immune or nullified from any sort of activity metrics. Usually those activity metrics are forcing function for the activities to actually happen, which gets you to the meetings.
And that's where you start to get confusion. Let me give you a good example of that. I was working with a customer, we pulled the two out, added a couple of things that they were missing in there. And what we found out was inbound was booking tons of meetings, but those meetings weren't holding. But when they held, they qualified really, really well. And so what do we do? We put in a, how do you make sure the meeting holds process? “But outbound, booking good amount of meetings,” they were holding, but they weren't qualifying. And so that was a totally different fix for a totally different channel. But because before I got there, they'd smushed it all together. They were just working on qualification stuff with the sales team. And so therefore they were never gonna fix that problem because they had it smushed together with other things.