Lead Playbook: Fixing Your Pipeline Problem

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1. 6:04

   of each of these top of funnel mixes and say, we should just get more of that one. And the reason for that is all you have prospected before. It's similar to why multi-channel outreach is important. Some people only respond to cold emails. Some people only respond to cold calls. “Some people need to get a message on LinkedIn in order to reply,” but it's not like you can do only cold email or only cold calls or only LinkedIn if you truly want to capture the entire market. There are a lot of SMB companies that will start 80 to 90% at inbound. They'll have these super small deals and they'll just get demo request after demo request after demo request. And this was the environment that I came into

   In LinkedIn direct message outreach

2. 8:57

   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.

   In Inbound and outbound mix

3. 16:13

   as many of these MQLs as humanly possible. Could you run us very quickly through just the conversion metrics that you typically see down the funnel? So of these accepted leads, let's say you accept a hundred leads, how many people will actually convert to a meeting? And then how many of those meetings will convert to an opportunity? “And inbound, I'm expecting at least 70%” of people that come through the system to book a meeting. They're further down the buyer's journey, right? So 50 to 70%, I think is a really strong number. Then of the people that book a meeting, you should have an 80% meeting hold rate. And then you should have an 80% of those should qualify into pipeline

   In Meeting booking rates

4. 22:59

   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 that I dequeued out or don't look good or whatever, then you just give them six more. And now they walk in with more momentum because some of those accounts are warmed up. Give them only enough accounts that meet the criteria of those big deals. “That's the way to do AE prospecting is very different than SDR prospecting, where it's” just like, here's your account list. Make sure you're touching everything. Now, we only give you 10 or 12, your job is to get two monster deals out of those. Yeah. I remember there was one time where we were trying to get our AEs to do even more outbound and one of the people suggested something they did at a previous company, which is what

   In SDR and AE operating model

5. 28:03

   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.

   In Activity-to-pipeline math

6. 33:15

   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.

   In Opportunity conversion rates

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