How to build a high-converting B2B sales pipeline

Building a high-converting B2B sales pipeline isn’t as easy as before. CMOs and sales leaders, especially those with upwards of $40 million in revenue, are feeling the pinch. At Belkins, we talk to these leaders daily, and they share the same frustrations: 

• They’re spending more to acquire prospects who barely convert. 
• The effectiveness of tactics such as SEO declines and costs of pay-per-click ads (PPC) rise, driving up customer-acquisition costs (CAC). 

The sad part is that as these tactics lose steam, budgets are tightening. Yet the pressure to drive qualified leads remains constant. The implication? There’s no room for guesswork.

You need a proven process for generating a predictable flow of qualified sales opportunities. Drawing from our experience and insights from industry leaders, we’ll walk you through how to build a high-converting B2B sales pipeline. You’ll learn the common mistakes to avoid and discover the nonnegotiables of a successful B2B sales pipeline strategy.

Mistakes companies make when building a sales pipeline

Poor pipeline management processes

In our experience, many businesses understand the need to organize leads and pipeline activities in a CRM instead of a spreadsheet. However, only a few recognize the value of a well-managed sales pipeline. This is the most common mistake we see.

As Yuriy Boyko, our head of account management, asserts:

A consistently updated CRM ensures accurate forecasts, reduces lost opportunities from delayed follow-ups, and provides team members with a complete interaction history. This enables reps to collaborate, share suggestions, or continue working on deals if an assigned rep is unavailable.

Here are 3 of our best practices for managing a sales pipeline that will convert:

• Choose the right CRM. At Belkins, we use HubSpot. Some teams try to save costs by using basic CRMs, but they ultimately spend more on workarounds or upgrades when their tool lacks advanced functionalities. And if you still use spreadsheets, it’s time you switched! Spreadsheets are unscalable and can’t match a CRM’s comprehensive capabilities.
• Automate repetitive tasks. Use your CRM to automate deal stage transitions, lead scoring, task reminders, follow-up scheduling, etc. Automation reduces errors and frees your team to focus on high-value activities.
• Assign a dedicated pipeline manager. “Ideally, have a person besides the sales rep to handle follow-ups and operations,” Yuriy advises. This ensures reps focus on selling, not administrative tasks like moving deals in the pipeline.

Inadequate pipeline coverage ratio

A great pipeline coverage ratio shows you have enough opportunities to meet sales quotas. Sales veteran Chris Orlob notes that companies on track to become unicorns often maintain a 3:1 pipeline coverage ratio, meaning they have $3 in the pipeline for every $1 revenue. However, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all rule. 

Pipeline coverage varies based on market maturity, competitive position, and sales strategy. Startups entering new markets may require a 5:1 ratio to account for lower conversion rates. In contrast, dominant players like Salesforce thrived with a 2:1 ratio until mid-2024, when it shifted to 3:1 due to evolving market dynamics.

To forecast success more accurately, benchmark your pipeline coverage against your historical data.

No fixed lead qualification criteria

One of the biggest opportunities for building a high-converting sales pipeline lies in lead qualification. Many companies market to the wrong audience, resulting in a massive pipeline with low-quality prospects. The outcome? Sales reps waste time and resources to nurture prospects who are unlikely to buy. 

Effective lead qualification involves removing low-quality leads with frameworks like CHAMP, SPIN, or MEDDIC. It also involves using a lead scoring system to rank prospects by assigning points based on their behavior and characteristics, reflecting their likelihood to convert. This approach ensures your reps focus on high-potential prospects likely to close quickly.

Sending the wrong outreach messages

Bombarding a prospect with generic messaging is outdated. Cognism CEO, James Islay, recently said,

Prospects are now protective of their attention and will ignore (or even report) irrelevant outreaches. To engage buyers, you must personalize your outreaches and avoid self-centered messages like:

• “I’d like to introduce you to [your company]” — Instead of starting with your company, highlight the pain your prospect is experiencing and demonstrate how you can address it. For example: “Many [prospect’s industry] companies face [specific pain point]. Here’s how we’ve helped others solve it.”
• “Our product/service works by…” — Avoid lengthy explanations about how your offering works. Instead, share a compelling customer success story with measurable outcomes. For instance, “One of our clients, [client name], achieved [specific result] in [timeframe] using our solution.”
• “Can we schedule a quick demo?” — Reframe this as a softer, more engaging ask like: “Are you interested in hearing more about how we can help you [solve specific problem]?”

As Chris Orlob aptly summarizes,

🎥 Related video: The cold truth: email, LinkedIn, and calling outreach insights uncovered 

How to build a B2B sales pipeline in 8 steps

The fundamentals of pipeline building haven’t changed. So what’s the challenge? Poor execution. Below, we break down each step with insights that’ll aid your execution. We’ve also included resources to help you understand the 8 steps for building a high-converting B2B sales pipeline. Ready? Let’s go.

Clarify your ideal customer profile (ICP)

Don’t sell to everyone in your total addressable market (TAM), even if your solution is industry-agnostic. Instead, focus on your sweet spot — the small market segment that urgently needs your solution. That’s your ICP. This audience is usually more responsive, leading to shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates. Once you’ve saturated this segment, expand your outreach to secondary or less ideal segments. 

To create your ICP, identify patterns and commonalities in your most successful deals. Consider factors like:

• Industry or sector 
• Company size 
• Pain points addressed 
• Decision-makers involved in the buying process 

You can also analyze the customers of your direct competitors. Next, use these insights to create a comprehensive ICP, including: 

• Firmographics (e.g., revenue, employee count, location)
• Psychographics (e.g., motivations, challenges, and goals)

Map your pipeline stages

Sales pipeline stages represent the steps in converting a prospect into a customer. Mapping these stages standardizes your sales process. That way, every team member understands the actions required at each stage and their role in moving deals forward. Plus, a unified process makes it easy to identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and improve conversion rates.

While pipeline stages may differ between companies, a typical B2B pipeline includes:

• Lead generation: Identify and engage target businesses.
• Lead qualification: Assess interest and product fit.
• Demo or meeting: Showcase solutions for specific needs.
• Proposal: Present pricing and value details.
• Negotiation and commitment: Resolve objections and finalize terms.
• Deal closure: Complete paperwork and ensure smooth handoff.

If these stages aren’t granular for your business, use the tips below to define yours:

• List every step. Write all the steps in your selling process, from prospecting to closing a deal.
• Remove non-essential steps. For example, low-cost products with a straightforward decision-making process could skip discovery calls and go to demos or proposals. 
• Ensure stages are factual and inspectable. For each step, ask, “Can we easily verify that a step occurred?” For instance, “prospect interested” is not a good pipeline stage because it’s based on a hunch. A factual alternative is “discovery call completed,” which is an observable action showing progress in the sales process.
• Name each stage in the past tense. Using past-tense labels lets you avoid confusion about whether the action has already occurred or still needs to happen. For example, change “send contract” to “contract sent” or “schedule demo” to “demo completed.”

Allocate a percentage of your revenue to marketing

Companies need marketing to drive the pipeline. According to a study by Insight Partners, marketing contributes 49% of the pipeline, making it the biggest contributor for new businesses. 

Source

The report admits that founders, outbound business development representatives (BDRs), and account executives (AEs) often make the highest pipeline contribution in early-stage companies, especially those whose solutions have a high average selling price (ASP). Still, marketing plays a crucial supporting role. 

Source

Even with limited resources, marketing can produce valuable sales enablement materials such as case studies, video testimonials, white papers, and demo videos. These assets empower your sales team to engage and close prospects. With more budget, you can invest in tactics like content creation or events to attract high-quality prospects. Whatever you choose, ensure you have a solid strategy. 

For instance, at Belkins, we created a solid content marketing strategy and partnered with quality marketers, some of whom got us 100+ attributable leads. The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re an early-stage or sales-led company; your pipeline-building efforts will benefit from allocating a portion of your revenue to marketing. 

According to a 2024 Statista report, B2B companies in product and service industries typically invest an average of 6.1% and 6.2% of revenue, respectively. However, the ideal percentage for your company will depend on your industry and growth objectives.

Create an omnichannel customer acquisition strategy

Single-channel lead generation (e.g., cold email outreach) isn’t as effective as it once was. Here’s why: according to Dreamdata, it takes an average of 62+ touches across 3 or more channels to close a B2B deal, implying that a multichannel or omnichannel strategy aligns with the current buying behaviors of B2B leads. 

Multichannel and omnichannel outreach differ. 

• Multichannel outreach involves using multiple platforms (e.g., organic search, social media, paid ads, emails, and calls), but the efforts are often disjointed and uncoordinated.
• Omnichannel outreach unifies all touchpoints to provide a cohesive, seamless experience across the buyer journey.

Since adopting an omnichannel strategy internally and for client campaigns, we’ve achieved:

• 15–20% higher conversion rates
• 15% higher average contract value (ACV)
• 20% lower customer acquisition costs (CAC)
• 50% more revenue growth

Another reason to adopt an omnichannel approach is that people have different communication preferences. So you risk missing some prospects when relying on only 1 channel.

For example, sales coaching expert Jason Bay doesn’t take cold calls, which is surprising given that he teaches cold calling. He also prefers not to receive LinkedIn DMs, even though he’s active on the platform. The best way to reach him? Email. Conversely, Jack Reilly, principal revenue enablement manager at ZoomInfo, prefers phone calls.

📚 Learn more: Omnichannel lead generation for B2B: How to do it right 

Define your lead qualification criteria

This helps your BDRs and sales development reps (SDRs) to hand quality prospects to AEs. It also lets AEs focus on high-intent prospects who match your ICP and are ready to buy. At Belkins, our go-to qualification frameworks are BANT and MEDDIC.

BANT

• Budget: Does the prospect’s budget match the cost of your solution?
• Authority: Does your prospect make purchase decisions?
• Need: Does the prospect have a problem your product or service can solve?
• Timeline: Is the prospect ready to buy? 

MEDDIC

• Metrics: What measurable outcomes does the prospect hope to achieve with your solution?
• Economic buyer: Who makes the purchase decisions in the prospect’s organization?
• Decision criteria: What are the prospect’s criteria for making a purchase decision?
• Decision process: How does the prospect’s organization evaluate and approve a buying decision?
• Identify pain: What key challenges or pain points does the prospect need to address?
• Champion: Is there someone within the buyer’s organization who already likes your solution and can champion the deal?

BDRs can answer these questions through research or by asking focused qualification questions during discovery calls.

We recommend evaluating your best customers and prioritizing similar profiles to further refine your qualification criteria. For instance, we recently noticed that Belkins’ clients with fewer than 10 employees often churn quickly. So we refined our ICP and lead qualification criteria to filter out such companies, enabling us to focus on prospects with higher lifetime value (LTV).

Develop a lead nurturing strategy 

The 95:5 rule tells us only 5% of your potential buyers are “in-market,” while the remaining 95% are “out-of-market.” A Databox survey revealed most qualified leads — over 70% in some cases — are also not ready to buy.

Source

These stats imply your pipeline will comprise prospects interested in your product or service but aren’t ready to buy. By nurturing these leads, you can increase their likelihood of choosing your solution when they’re ready. Here are 2 factors to consider when developing your lead nurturing strategy:

• Nurturing channel. Your options include emails, organic social media, retargeting ads, webinars, podcasts, and in-person events. In our article on how to nurture B2B leads, Iryna Kandrashova, head of marketing at UXPressia, said, “Free online webinars work best for us as a lead nurturing strategy and bring more qualified leads compared to email newsletters or social media activity.” 
• The prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey. For example, high-intent prospects need case studies to address objections and differentiate your solution. However, a problem-aware but unmotivated prospect may need educational content (e.g., blogs, white papers) or even a brief discovery call with a sales rep to build buying urgency and guide them toward the next stage.

📚 Related post: How to nurture B2B leads: 8 tactics and examples 

Invest in building your brand

A 2024 Wynter survey revealed that 58% of B2B marketing executives source software vendors based on peer recommendations. 54% of respondents also use third-party review sites like G2 or TrustRadius. The lesson? A powerful brand makes it easy to attract prospects and build a pipeline. 

One effective way to build a strong brand is by creating expert-led content. Belkins exemplifies this by maintaining a robust online presence. We publish blog content, contribute guest posts, and host webinars. Also, we actively engage in LinkedIn, YouTube, and our private community for sales and marketing professionals. This strategy helps us attract new leads and stay top of mind.

Here are 3 tips for building a great content-led brand: 

• Create exceptional content. Thanks to AI, your audience is flooded with content. Fortunately, most of it is shallow and undifferentiated. Stand out and leave a lasting impression by creating content so good that your competitors wish they had created it. 
• Don’t make content for Google alone. As content marketing veteran Rand Fishkin notes, “Content marketing is bigger than SEO.” Focusing solely on SEO content “limits our creativity AND the likelihood that meaningful marketing improvements will happen,” Rand adds. So diversify your content formats and base your strategy on your audience’s pain points, questions, objections, or interests — not just keyword research.
• Repurpose and distribute content consistently. Maximize the value of each content by distributing them in different formats. For instance, you can turn a podcast episode or webinar into 2 blog posts, 5 LinkedIn updates, and a newsletter edition. Also, adopt the “create once, distribute forever” approach championed by content marketer Ross Simmonds.

Train your sales team

It’s not uncommon to encounter sales reps who are great at selling but struggle to build a pipeline. Chris Orlob once shared a story of a Gong rep who needed $800,000 in pipeline coverage to hit his $200,000 quota. The kicker: the rep had only $300,000 near the end of the quarter. Yet this rep had “amazing discovery skills, gave the best demos, and managed deal cycles like a pro,” Chris said.

Chris reviewed his outreach strategy and coached him on how to craft better messages. The result? The rep went from struggling to consistently being at the top of the quarterly leaderboard. What’s more, the coaching took just 60 minutes!

According to the Insight Partners report I cited earlier, 18% of pipelines come from AEs and 17% from outbound BDRs. Chris’ anecdote proves that minor improvements in skill level can lead to significant boosts in results. The takeaway? If your sales team self-sources leads, ensure they have the training to build a strong pipeline.

Building a high-converting B2B sales pipeline with limited resources

Building a B2B sales pipeline becomes harder when working with minimal resources — whether it’s a few sales reps, busy reps focused on closing deals, or an insufficient budget to hire experienced talent. This was Appruv’s situation.

As Sarah Preister, business development manager at Appruv, shared, the company was still building and expanding its sales team. And it was challenging to get new reps to understand the company and how it serves clients. 

Before partnering with Belkins, they had tried another appointment-setting agency for a year, but lead generation ground to a halt in the final 4 months of their collaboration. Partnering with Belkins changed the game.

When you lack in-house resources to build a robust sales pipeline, outsourcing to a dedicated team is your best move. But success hinges on choosing the right partner.

At Belkins, we’ve generated over 201,000 appointments for 1,000+ clients across 50+ industries while reducing CAC by 43–155%. Want us to build a high-converting pipeline so your in-house reps focus on closing deals? Contact us to get started or explore our customer success stories.