11 proven ways to increase your B2B sales pipeline

In 2022, 53% of sales reps hit their quota. Fast forward to Q1 of 2024 and that has plummeted to 43%. Go-to-market expert Chris Walker attributes this decline to shrinking B2B sales pipelines, with 75% of CROs and CEOs citing pipeline creation as their top revenue challenge. 

These percentages aren’t 100%, meaning some reps still meet their quotas and a few companies hit their revenue goals. To ensure your pipeline thrives, we’ll share the tactics we at Belkins use to meet our revenue goals, alongside best practices from industry leaders.

What is the root cause of pipeline problems?

Misaligned teams are the culprit.

For efficient pipeline growth, marketing and sales must target the same buyers. However, in a 2023 study, LinkedIn found that the average alignment between B2B marketing and sales teams was just 16%. Even worse, brand and demand marketing alignment was a mere 5%. This misalignment is the root cause of pipeline problems. As Chris puts it:

Why? Marketing KPIs aren’t aligned with business results.

For instance, many companies define pipelines with subjective metrics. They might qualify a lead as an opportunity merely because an SDR booked a meeting. Without rigorous qualification criteria, such leads do not convert, resulting in wasted resources and unmet goals.

Aligning sales and marketing is tricky. At Belkins, we sometimes grapple with this challenge, too. However, deliberate management practices help us stay aligned and achieve revenue objectives consistently. In the next section, we’ll share our approach to fostering alignment and driving results.

11 effective ways to increase your B2B sales pipeline

1. Align sales and marketing with revenue
2. Analyze your closed-lost deals for insights
3. Switch from volume-based to omnichannel outreach
4. Align BDRs and SDRs with revenue
5. Follow up consistently
6. Lean into AE self-sourcing
7. Prioritize prospects you’re likely to win
8. Foster a founder brand
9. Hire passionate salespeople
10. Leverage employee advocacy
11. Build a strong brand reputation

1. Align sales and marketing with revenue

Your sales and marketing teams must align for your pipeline to increase and drive revenue. Here are 4 ways to make this happen: 

• Agree on what makes up a qualified lead. Establishing clear lead qualification criteria is essential for filtering out poor-fit leads. When sales and marketing agree on what makes a lead qualified, they can work toward shared goals. The high intent revenue opportunity (HIRO) framework is helpful here, as it defines pipeline quality using 2 benchmarks:
  • Leads must come from sources with a lead-to-win rate of at least 3%.
  • Opportunities must reach a pipeline deal stage with a historical win rate of 25% or higher.

If win rates fall below these thresholds, marketing must revisit its criteria for pipeline qualification. By focusing on high-intent leads with clear conversion benchmarks, teams can avoid wasting resources on opportunities with low conversion potential.

• Audit roles and define responsibilities. Misaligned teams often suffer from unclear roles. We avoid this by conducting a thorough audit to define each person's responsibilities in the sales process.
  • Sales executives (SEs). Our SEs handle sales calls and post-sales follow-ups.
  • Sales development representatives (SDRs). Our SDRs manage the pre-sales process and move deals through the pipeline stages. SDRs take ownership of this process and must explain any lapses.

After the audit, we share a documented plan with team members and hold a summary call that clarifies roles, prevents confusion, and ensures accountability at every stage.

• Communication and weekly calls. “One month of noncommunication can lead to misalignment,” says Brian Hicks, VP of Sales at Belkins. That’s why we hold weekly meetings to review shared KPIs, track progress, and address challenges.

Our Slack channels are a centralized hub for real-time updates, questions, and collaboration. Though we ensure short response times, sales executives can directly call SDRs for urgent matters.

• Pair SDRs and SEs. Pairing SDRs with SEs helps us foster collaborative support. With a shared goal of closing deals, SDRs and SEs support each other to avoid errors and missed steps. This unified approach ensures we remain on top of potential opportunities and drives better results.

2. Analyze your closed-lost deals for insights

By analyzing why you lost specific deals, you can identify gaps in your sales strategy and uncover patterns that can inform better decision-making. A recent analysis of our closed-lost deals and churned clients revealed a noteworthy trend: Most scenarios that fell into these categories were deals with companies that had fewer than 10 employees.

Our sales team closed a tiny percentage of these deals, and even when they were successful, the delivery team found a high likelihood of client churn within the first 3 months. This scenario proved detrimental to both our team and the client.

To address this, we implemented a new rule: We don’t assign companies with fewer than 10 employees to Belkins account executives (AEs). Instead, we direct them to our partner, Revit, or another suitable agency. This change saves our sales team from spending excessive time on deals that are unlikely to close and protects our delivery team from investing resources in projects with a high risk of failure.

3. Switch from volume-based to omnichannel outreach

Like some salespeople, Mark admits to using the spray-and-pray approach for up to 10 years. But this volume-based approach no longer works. As Mark explains, “People have said I don't want to get these emails because most of them suck. I don't want to get these cold calls because most are irrelevant.” 

You need to do 2 things to reduce this pushback. The first is to personalize your cold emails, calls, and LinkedIn outreach. The second is to switch from single to omnichannel outreach. 

Industry trends and our experiences at Belkins both show declining outcomes for single-channel outreach such as email-only campaigns. However, switching to omnichannel is beneficial and aligns with the current B2B landscape, where deals demand 62+ touches across 3 or more channels and buyer journeys last over 192 days.

Need more insights on why omnichannel outreach is the future for tech sales? Check out this video by Brian and Vlad, who have 20 years of combined experience in sales and account management.

4. Align BDRs and SDRs with revenue

In our “Future of Outbound” webinar, Joey Williams, Director of Sales Development at Chili Piper, shared how they increased their pipeline by 30% by helping SDRs optimize their targeting.

The challenge? As with marketing, ‌few SDR teams are aligned with revenue objectives, as Jack Reilly, Principal Revenue Enablement Manager at ZoomInfo, notes. Consequently, you lose promising deals when SDRs fixate on rescheduling appointments with prospects who are easy to engage, not minding whether these contacts are decision-makers genuinely interested in championing the deal.

The fix is to train your BDRs and SDRs to think like AEs, who focus on setting meetings that drive revenue rather than filling the calendar. 

Learn essential BDR skills to double your qualified leads, create high-converting messages, and consistently exceed KPIs in the dedicated Business development course: From zero to hero from BLKNS Academy.
NOTEBLOCK

5. Follow up consistently

According to business leader Robert Clay, 80% of sales deals require at least 5 follow-ups. Yet 44% of salespeople abandon opportunities after the first follow-up.

This data supports Brian's belief:

Clients appreciate meaningful follow-ups as long as you’ve established the relevance of your offer. For instance, Brian closed a deal 19 months after the initial conversation. When he asked the prospect why he reached out to him, the prospect was clear: “You are the only person I spoke with who continued to stay in touch with me.”

According to Brian, 4 things matter when following up: 

• Speed. Time kills deals. You drain the momentum out of a good deal when you take too long to follow up. As sales expert Chris Orlob notes, the fear of seeming desperate is 1 reason many salespeople avoid prompt follow-up. If that’s you, you’ll find Brian’s next tip helpful.
• Setting expectations. Brian prepares prospects to expect follow-ups if he doesn't hear from them. Here's a typical way he might say this: “You aim to decide within the next 4 weeks, correct?”(Wait for their confirmation.) “Great! Would it work for you if I check in periodically to keep everything on track and ensure we're ready for you to meet your timeline? I promise not to overwhelm you — maybe a weekly check-in feels reasonable, don’t you think?”
• Persistence. Some say 5 is the ideal number of follow-ups. Belkins’ 2024 study of 11 million cold emails revealed reply rates decreased after the third follow-up. However, Brian’s philosophy is to “follow up with every conversation until the prospect says they are not interested.”
• System. Since you’re likely juggling dozens of open deals, a follow-up system is essential to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. For example, our pipeline automatically flags deals that show 2 weeks of inactivity. This ensures AEs quickly identify prospects who need follow-ups and when. We also manually tag deals that need follow-up in the future.

📚 Related post: Sales follow-up strategies that close 50% more deals 

6. Lean into AE self-sourcing

Even when your marketing, BDR, and SDR teams are well aligned with revenue goals and supplying high-quality leads, having AEs who can self-source opportunities is critical for 3 reasons:

• Self-sourcing motivates AEs. Some AEs believe that entrusting their success entirely to other teams is risky. John Weathersby, a former Amazon sales leader, embodies this mindset. “Are you really going to trust another team with your pipeline?” John asks. “Not me. That's crazy; I control my money!”

Whether you think he’s right or wrong, here’s what’s clear: Your pipeline and revenue will benefit from having AEs with this take-charge attitude.

• You can’t rely on inbound forever. As Carrie Crowe, a former AE, notes, “Inbound can (and has) dried up in an instant. [So] if no one knows how to prospect, you're screwed.”
• Unforeseen challenges may slow down pipeline growth. For instance, due to recent recession forecasts, tighter client budgets, and a complex sales environment, some companies require AEs to self-source up to 30% of their pipeline. 

Jason Bay notes that the root cause of reluctant AEs is usually a VP of sales who isn’t truly bought in. Such leaders may fear AE pushback or feel AEs should rely 100% on leads served by the marketing and SDR team. Either way, Jason says you may need a new VP of sales if your current VP doesn’t believe in AE self-sourcing.

7. Prioritize prospects you’re likely to win

We commonly encounter companies who (rightly) believe their solution is industry agnostic. For this reason, they feel justified in pursuing their total addressable market at once. While the intention is understandable, this approach often leads to wasted resources and low conversion rates. 

A smarter strategy is to prioritize prospects you’re likely to win. Once you’ve saturated this segment, you can expand your outreach to secondary or less-ideal segments. This is exactly what we did to generate 97 appointments in 10 months for Celerway. We refined Celerway’s TAM by targeting media, broadcast, and NGOs. Next, we expanded to system integrators and adjusted our search and qualification criteria.

8. Foster a founder brand

Chris Walker generates $10 million annually through his LinkedIn and podcast content. A 10-person SDR team will need to work full time to generate $1 million each and match this revenue. Yet Chris achieves this part time, and his revenue will grow as his audience increases.

Other founders leverage their credibility, unique insights, and market knowledge to build their company's brand. At Belkins, we’ve won countless opportunities because prospects encountered our co-founders through event appearances, articles, or social media posts. Such opportunities typically close more easily because prospects already view us as trusted authorities.

9. Hire passionate salespeople

Gong AE JC Pollard says he genuinely believes in Gong and cites it as the key to his success. “I would go to war for someone to experience Gong,” says JC. Brian agrees selling is easier when you’re passionate about the product. However, he adds that there are other ways to lace your pitch with passion.

For instance, Brian isn’t just passionate about Belkins' offering. He also loves working with everyone on his team.

This passion shines through when he sells, and positive energy helps win customers over.

10. Leverage employee advocacy

Employee advocacy involves turning your employees into brand ambassadors. Here’s how to do it:

• Encourage them to share content that tells your company’s story and showcase their expertise.
• Build systems and processes for seamless content creation and distribution.

Hinge reports that nearly 64% of companies with a formal advocacy program attract new business, and 45% generate new revenue streams.

Employee advocacy works by tapping into your employees’ networks to expand reach and boost brand awareness. It also helps employees build their brands, a perk that helps attract top talent.

Gong is a good example of this strategy in action. In 2022, Gong’s LinkedIn presence was so pervasive that people wondered if they had a secret tool for hijacking LinkedIn feeds. The real secret? Udi Ledergor, Gong’s former CMO, trained employees to repost key content from the marketing team.

This approach created the perception of widespread excitement about Gong’s updates while keeping costs low. “It gets me a reach that I could not afford with my paid media budget,” Udi explained. Despite its benefits, only 17% of businesses have employee advocacy programs, according to Hinge. Building one can give you a competitive edge.

11. Build a strong brand reputation

According to Wynter, 58% of B2B marketing executives source software vendors based on peer recommendations, and 54% also use third-party review sites like G2 or TrustRadius. The takeaway? A strong brand reputation is everything!

Actively manage your company reputation by accumulating positive reviews on third-party review sites like G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, UpCity, and Product Hunt. At Belkins, we focused on Clutch because it’s the largest online review site for service companies like ours.

When we first joined, most companies averaged 30–40 reviews. Today, we’ve earned over 200 reviews on our Clutch profile. This has made us Clutch’s number-one lead generation agency in the U.S. and secured Belkins the coveted top spot on the Clutch Leaders Matrix. The payoff is a generation of 85 leads at a cost per lead of $140 from our Clutch profile. 

Outsourcing pipeline generation

We’ve highlighted our top strategies for increasing pipeline quality and volume. However, if you lack in-house expertise or resources, executing them will be difficult. This is when outsourcing pipeline generation is a better move. We have helped hundreds of companies to sustainably increase their B2B sales pipeline. 

An excellent example is the story of Alectric Renewables, a Canada-based solar energy company that installs solar panels for businesses. They wanted to expand their footprint in the competitive Ontario market but experienced 2 challenges:

• Market penetration. The company needed a marketing channel to establish its presence in Ontario’s competitive market quickly.
• Opportunity identification. This wasn’t just about brand awareness. Alectric Renewables also wanted to win new opportunities in this competitive market.

To help Alectric, we continually refined their ICP to reach the right audience. Here’s what we did:

• Initial targeting. We prioritized large commercial buildings ideal for solar installations. We also targeted high-level decision-makers like VPs, presidents, CEOs, and managing directors. This strategy helped us engage leadership directly to discuss the potential impact of solar energy on their businesses.
• Target expansion. Initially, our focus was Ontario-based prospects. However, the campaign took an unexpected turn when a prospect forwarded one of our emails to their U.S. branch. It turns out Alectric’s offer was competitive in the U.S. Recognizing this new opportunity, we expanded our efforts to the U.S. market.
• Venue-specific outreach. We initially tailored our campaign to Ontario manufacturing companies classified as Class B electricity consumers, i.e., businesses operating large factories and warehouses with significant energy-saving potential. While the campaign performed moderately well, feedback and response analysis revealed the need for a sharper, more tailored approach.
• Hyper-personalization. Collaborating closely with Alectric’s team, we developed a more personalized method. Leveraging Google Maps and the client’s lead database, we assessed building roof sizes to determine suitability for solar panel installations. This helped us identify the most promising prospects and provide tailored data, including precise energy outputs and projected savings. To show the extent of our research, we also included prospects’ business addresses in our emails.

The result was an astounding 10,000 leads, 150 appointments, 14 pending deals, and 4 closed-won deals. If you need help increasing your B2B sales pipeline, take a gander at our customer stories or contact us.