How to generate pipeline for B2B sales

Since 2017, we’ve consistently refined our B2B sales pipeline and worked with over 1,000 companies. Achieving this feat wasn’t easy because we had to deal with:

1. Low lead volume, which reduced the odds of finding many ideal customers
2. Poor lead quality, which caused us to waste resources chasing poor-fit prospects 
3. Lengthy sales cycles that limit the smooth flow of leads through the pipeline
4. Insufficient close rates that directly impacted revenue and operations

These challenges aren’t peculiar to us.

Our chat with company leaders shows they face similar roadblocks that prevent them from building a robust pipeline. But most executives won’t vibe with these challenges because they impact revenue.

Executives want results irrespective of bottlenecks, like a few website inquiries or a lengthy sales cycle. To align with the goals of your higher-ups, the focus needs to be on scalable methods to attract, nurture, and convert leads quickly.

So, to help you create a pipeline strategy, I spoke with Yuriy Boyko, the head of account management at Belkins. Yuriy has been working in B2B sales for over a decade, and I’ve featured his expert insights throughout this piece.

What is pipeline generation in sales?

Pipeline generation in sales is the identifying, moving, and converting of leads through different stages of the sales process. These stages provide a visual snapshot of the deals salespeople must close to hit their sales quota.

Why you need a sales pipeline strategy

A sales pipeline strategy allows sales teams to:

1. Predict deal closures over time and plan for targeted growth 
2. Know how many deals they need to close each month or year to hit specific goals
3. Identify bottlenecks in the sales process
4. Manage the team workload

On the flip side, the absence of a pipeline strategy can break your sales process and portend risk to your goals and revenue target.

As Yuriy told me, sales teams need efficient pipelines for generating new revenue, closing deals consistently, and maintaining a steady flow of opportunities. Referrals and repeat business from past customers help. However, real growth happens when there’s a constant pipeline of potential deals.

The process for sourcing potential deals for your pipeline is not the job of sales alone (unless your company runs only on outbound), but marketing too. As such, both teams need to align on what they must do to drive revenue. For instance, with a strategy, both teams can agree on what’s a good versus bad lead.

There’s no universal pipeline strategy that works across all businesses. A basic pipeline strategy for a small business or startup can include:

Conversely, a detailed pipeline generation framework for a midsize to enterprise company might include:

How to create a viable sales pipeline generation program

A sales pipeline generation program that drives revenue doesn’t happen by chance — it requires structure and clear objectives. 

Here are the basics for setting up a pipeline program that fuels growth:

Establish a revenue goal with your team 

Once you’ve defined your revenue target, break it into smaller and manageable milestones. 

For example, if your company aims for $500,000 in quarterly revenue, it will be easy to calculate the number of deals you need monthly. This gives focus to your team and helps you gauge whether you’re on track as leads move through the pipeline.

Create your prospect list

A viable list starts with a defined ideal customer profile.

Let’s say you’re selling a B2B software solution for manufacturers. For this, you won’t need a list of general business leaders. Your list will comprise decision-makers in departments like operations, production, etc. 

If you’ve sold to a similar customer, digging into your CRM will help. You’d want to find info about your previous client, such as company size, industry, title, company revenue, growth rate, etc. With this targeted list, you will keep your outreach focused and effective.

Develop a clear sales process

A clear sales process provides your team with a step-by-step approach for prospecting through to closing. You want your reps to know exactly what to do when a lead turns into an SQL, like schedule a demo, follow up in 48 hours, and deliver a custom proposal. This keeps everyone on the same page and ensures no lead falls through the cracks.

Without this process, your reps might adopt different sales techniques to move leads through the pipeline. On the surface, this doesn’t look like a problem, especially for a few leads. But when you have hundreds of leads, a haphazard process becomes problematic and can extend your sales cycle.

The beauty of unifying your sales process is that your prospects share common attributes. As such, you can standardize your process, use the same workflow, save time, and grow revenue quickly.

How to generate pipeline effectively

Increased competition in B2B has led to the saturation of outbound and inbound channels. To stay ahead with your pipeline, you need to pursue your goals and implement your client acquisition tactics with all you’ve got. Here’s how:

1. Calculate the number of leads needed

If you have an army of sales reps and a marketing team, your best bet is to ensure they shoot for the stars. For instance, if your average contract value is $50,000 per year and you need a revenue growth of $1,000,000, you’ll need 20 customers. Having a buffer of 5 more customers guarantees your team will work harder to reach and even surpass the goal of 20 customers.

Every ambitious goal must also be SMART. To ensure your goal is achievable, you also need to consider your conversion rate throughout the entire pipeline to know how many leads you need. Here are some quick assumptions:

• Lead to MQL ratio: 30%
• MQL to SQL ratio: 13%
• SQL to appointment ratio: 30%
• Appointment to closed deal conversion rate: 20%

Upon calculating, you need 8,547 leads to close 20 new customers.

Number of leads = 20/(0.30×0.13×0.30×0.20)​ = 8,547

Marketing could source some of these leads via inbound, while sales do outbound like cold emailing.

2. Have the right team size

The size of your sales and marketing team impacts your ability to generate a pipeline. Too small a team and you risk overwhelming everyone, leading to less effective content from marketing and lost opportunities by sales. Conversely, the overhead of running a large team can get expensive quickly.

You must align your team size with your pipeline’s needs to strike a balance. For instance, marketing and sales could have lead quotas in the above example of generating a pipeline of 8,547 leads. From there, the marketing and sales heads can decide on the team size that can deliver on the goal based on their strategy. Another crucial factor to consider is time, especially with inbound marketing channels.

In an ideal scenario where marketing and sales have generated, say, 8,547 leads, we can get a rough idea of the team members required.

• Lead to MQL: 8,547 leads × 10 minutes = 85,470 minutes = 1,424.5 hours
• MQL to SQL: 2,569 MQLs × 15 minutes = 38,535 minutes = 642.25 hours
• SQL to appointment: 334 SQLs × 20 minutes = 6,680 minutes = 111.33 hours
• Appointment to closed deal: 100 appointments × 1 hour = 100 hours
• Total time: 2,278.08 hours or ≈285 days

This rough calculation implies you’ll need at least 3 reps to reduce the length of the sales cycle. However, you’ll also need to account for team members in marketing, and this will vary depending on your product, service, and industry.

3. Use omnichannel to generate more high-converting leads

A huge revenue goal without the best leads is dead in the water.

When I asked Yuriy about the best approach for finding leads that can drive pipeline growth, his answer was succinct: an omnichannel strategy.

According to Yuriy, relying on a single channel — whether SEO, cold emails, or paid ads — won’t significantly boost your pipeline in the long term. One channel alone may yield some results, but over time it might lose momentum. Our firsthand experience of this at Belkins caused us to extend our client acquisition tentacles. We do paid ads, SEO, cold emails, video marketing, run an industry community, create industry reports, run webinars, create courses to show our expertise, stay active on LinkedIn, and the list goes on and on.

Partaking in conferences, doing influencer marketing, or exploring co-marketing opportunities is also omnichannel.

The best part about omnichannel is its scalability for attracting leads. With omnichannel, you can analyze, figure out the best channels, and put more money into those channels. Omnichannel also lets you nurture leads who may follow you and your brand on social media or join your email list. The outcome: increased revenue when leads convert.

The bottom line is that the best leads are everywhere and sticking to one channel limits your odds of generating a significant pipeline.

4. Set robust lead qualification criteria

All leads aren’t equal, so defining your lead qualification criteria is crucial. Doing this ensures your team doesn’t waste resources on dead ends.

There are several lead qualification frameworks. However, there are 2 we like to use for clients and ourselves. The first is BANT. 

• Budget: Can the prospects afford to purchase your product or service?
• Authority: Is the prospect responsible for making the final purchase decision?
• Need: Does your solution meet the prospect’s needs?
• Timeline: What is the prospect’s timeline for buying?

The second is MEDDIC.

• Metrics: What is the measurable impact of your solution?
• Economic buyer: Who is the financial decision-maker?
• Decision criteria: What criteria will the buyer use for making a purchasing decision?
• Decision process: What is the buyer’s process for deciding?
• Identify pain: What is the buyer’s core pain point and the buyer’s cost of leaving it unaddressed?
• Champion: Who is a key player who can influence the decision process?

5. Follow up hot leads

B2B buyers have several product and service choices.

For instance, only hundreds of martech tools existed a few years ago. Today, there are over 10 thousand. This steep rise means only persistent teams that follow up while sticking to best practices will win.

In our article about closing sales deals, Brian Hicks, VP of sales at Belkins, said his persistence helped him close a deal after 19 long months.

Following up doesn’t have to be only via email. When you’re doing omnichannel outreach, you want to personalize your follow-ups to create a better experience. For instance, leads who begin a conversation on LinkedIn could get follow-ups on LinkedIn before you get their email and put them in your CRM.

You can also follow up through calls or voicemails. Here’s a simplified version of how our follow-up operation looks:

Irrespective of the follow-up channel, having outreach templates helps. 

Templates keep reps in check and prevent them from sending or saying whatever comes to mind that could burn your pipeline completely. A vivid example is this poor follow-up email received by Josh Braun, founder of Braun Training.

As Josh rightly said, this email lacks empathy and doesn’t focus on the problem. A better alternative from Josh is:

6. Nurture warm leads

Leads often have objections or put off the purchase because they lack the funds to proceed. 

Either way, you want the leads you worked hard to generate for your pipeline to stay top of mind. You do this by sharing relevant content.

For example, you can send a detailed case study that mirrors their industry challenges. If a similar ICP had a specific concern with the product or service, the lead might be in the same boat. Anticipate such objections and nurture with a product demo video, feature breakdown article, etc. It gets better when the sales team is aligned with the marketing team, ensuring the right content gets produced.

Overall, the goal is to align content to where the lead is in the pipeline: Early-stage leads may benefit from e-books or blog posts, while mid-funnel prospects might prefer webinars or white papers. With this content, you can reinforce your message and move leads to the next stage of the pipeline. 

7. Ditch uninterested leads

You may have set up robust lead qualification criteria and followed up, but the prospect won’t bite.

This might happen because of situations your reps can’t control. Think of lack of time, cost concerns, budget constraints, or pressing personal matters.

Rather than clog your pipeline with these leads, it might be best to ditch them. 

But before that, Yuriy recommends you identify what’s broken. Examine the entire funnel from marketing to sales, and see the stage where things go wrong. Pay attention to how long challenges surface as well. 

Often, if leads aren’t converting, it’s not just a sales issue — likely, your marketing efforts are not targeting the right audience. Look at your targeting, messaging, and qualification processes to see how low-quality leads are slipping into the pipeline, then adjust accordingly. It’s essential to analyze and refine both marketing and sales processes together.

8. Monitor your sales pipeline metrics

There are several sales pipeline metrics worth monitoring. A consistent review of these metrics shows if your generated pipeline is healthy and what you must improve. When analyzing your pipeline metrics, try quantifying everything. The more you link to key financial metrics, such as customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, and revenue, the better.

Here are some metrics to monitor: 

Executing your pipeline generation plan

Your sales pipeline is core to your company’s revenue growth. And to make it work, you simply need to implement what we’ve shared. However, the most draining aspect of implementation is everything except deal closure. Closing is always exciting!

It’s great if you have the resources for generating the pipeline. But if otherwise, outsourcing some aspects while focusing on closing is your best play. This is where Belkins shines!

Within 1 year of working with us, the pipeline of our clients looks like this:

Belkins provides clients with omnichannel engagement through a suite of services such as LinkedIn lead generation, deliverability consulting, account-based marketing, sales development, lead research, sales enablement, lead nurturing, demand generation, and more.

If you’re looking to grow your pipeline while committing fewer resources, contact us and we’ll be happy to help. 

To explore other free resources, read our customer success stories of generating millions for businesses. You can also listen to the Belkins Growth Podcast and subscribe to unlock exclusive access to our webinars.