Prospecting & Pipeline Management: My Journey :-)
Hi, my name is Alex
I love miniature dachshunds and have six of them, and here is my story about prospecting & pipeline management.
Hi there, my name is Alex Abbott a sales practitioner of 30 years. I started my career in sales knocking doors as a Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesman, singing songs in the morning to get my blood flowing and build resilience for a tough day of rejection ahead.
After 7 years I broke into a professional B2B sales environment, that was the year 2000 and since then I have been committed to being the best I can be in sales, with five president club wins across three different companies, I built a new division within Oracle from 0-$22M ARR within 4 years and transformed the sales approach from product led to value based with a team of 40+, quadrupling the AOV within just 12 months.
Today, I am a fellow of the ISP (Institute of Sales Professionals), I chair a Women’s group called She Loves Social, I mentor x3 women to help them develop sustainable sales skills. I run a small sales consulting business called Supero and I provide training and coaching that empowers salespeople to develop a regular flow of business conversations that support positive mental health in sales.
I’m married to my beautiful Wife, Jackie and have three Sons a Granddaughter and six Miniature Dachshunds which keep me busy when I’m not working. In the last three years I trained my two eldest Sons how to prospect effectively and they have both secured roles as BDR’s within tech companies, and my youngest Son recently joined my business as an Apprentice Content Creator, helping me creatively as I develop my personal brand and support the promotion of SalesTV.live, a business I co-founded with some friends so that we could help others in sales debate tough topics, network with peers and support their life long learning goals within sales.
So, I’d say prospecting and pipeline management is in my blood!
The reason this topic is so important to me is twofold.
Firstly, I realised quite early on that prospecting was ‘the’ most important activity that influenced the level of success I could reach as a sales rep. I learnt how to forecast opportunity creation based on the level of effort I was putting in. And I can tell you, when I was busy managing deals or caught up in the whirlwind of work stuff, prospecting could easily be the first activity to fall off the radar. I developed a system to prevent that from happening which I will share with you today.
Secondly, I care a great deal about mental health, for mine and those closest to me, including teams I’ve led. My Mum suffered with her mental health over the years and I witnessed things I wish I hadn’t. My Mum was a self taught therapist and would often practise on me, much to my frustration! In my career I have suffered burnout twice that I know of, and depression which affected me quite badly, my body shut down physically, and there was nothing I could do to control it.
The painful truth
When I see sales leaders forcing their reps to make more cold calls or send more tailored emails, it really bothers me. The businesses we work for try so hard to be ‘buyer centric’, yet they will happily disrupt a buyer with a cold call or incessant emails and push reps to do things they don’t believe work, and then pile on more pressure after it hasn't worked. This behaviour of forcing salespeople to do things they know doesn't work has caused a mental health endemic in sales. According to the Sales Health Alliance , 79% of salespeople are highly stressed. 63% are suffering with poor mental health and 60% of sales leaders, the people there to protect and lead their salespeople, are suffering too, up 50% from the year before.
When pipelines are healthy, we’re talking to our prospects, building rapport, deepening our relationships, we feel happier as salespeople. Why? Because when trust forms, you can have an authentic conversation about challenges and pains you can solve, and your prospect, your friend, now trusts you and is willing to open up - conversations become meaningful!
Breaking it Down:
In this article I will share how to do this at scale using social media, so that you can multiply the number of meetings you’re getting exponentially just like me, my team and our clients. We measure the performance of ourselves and our clients when following the approach and the average 'conversation rate' is 9.9% this year.
Conversation rate is the percentage of people we sit a meeting from those we ask.
Imagine how much pipeline you could generate from having that many meetings with your target audience.
Before we get into the details, I’d like you to think about the impact of outdated cold outreach techniques like cold calling and emailing and how these sales led approaches no longer work. I want to take you back to the late 1800’s when the horse and carriage was the lifeblood of every major city in the UK and America. The Hansom Cab as it was known, ferried commuters into cities, allowed tourists to travel easily from place to place. The Hansom Cab was a significant driver of the economy. However there was one huge downside. Horse manure, and lots of it!
The Times wrote an article in 1894 detailing that if something wasn’t done about it, that every street in London would be buried under 9 feet of horse manure within 50 years. Even knowing that horse manure was attracting flies and spreading disease on the streets creating a risk of death, nothing was done for more than 10 years. No-one could think about not using the one thing that created their livelihood, it wasn’t just the convenience for commuters and tourists, it was those families and businesses that made money from ferrying people around, looking after the horses at night and cleaning up the crap, which was literally putting food on the table and the clothes on their back, keeping them warm in the winter. How could one survive without the horse and carriage?
Henry Ford had been working on a solution for this problem. There were cars on the road already but they were expensive, way more than a horse and carriage. And no-one could afford to travel at 5 times the cost. How was Henry going to save people from this crisis. Henry Ford famously said, “if I’d asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.
In 1907, 13 years after the crisis had been highlighted by The Times, Henry created the Model T. An affordable production Motor vehicle, designed to replace the horse and carriage. The solution to the problem! But it took a further 13 years years, until 1920, before half of the carriages were replaced with the car, 26 years after the crisis was first brought to everyone's attention.
I’m not saying we should stop using the phone and email as forms of communication. But what I am saying is that we need to think about the traditional sales funnel differently. No longer can we treat every prospect as a buyer, pushing them closer to conversion. We must think about the prospect as a human being, someone you genuinely want to get to know. Instead of thinking about the 5% of your target audience in market for your solution. Think about the 100% of your territory that or human beings, with values and beliefs, many just like yours.
We must flip the traditional sales funnel on its head.
There are two steps to this.
Step 1:
Develop your professional brand, show yourself as the trusted advisor you are and at the same time that your a genuine, authentic person worth having a chat with. Activate your network and grow it with a sense of purpose. Create content that makes you stand out, look different and be remembered for when your prospect is ready to have a commercial conversation with you, once they feel like they know you, even if they haven't met you yet, you're half way there to securing your next deal.
Step 2:
Once you have created a steady flow of new conversations with your target audience you get to choose who you want to speak with. It’s much easier to optimise your pipeline generation flow when you have more conversations than you have the time for. This is when you create your opportunity forecast. A list, in excel or your CRM, of the conversations you’re having and projecting 12 months into the future, when you believe that conversation will develop into a qualified opportunity. This view is the 'magic view' that will tell you exactly how much more effort (or not) you need to put into prospecting to develop the number of opportunities needed to hit and exceed your revenue goal.
This is how to create a systematic approach to predictable revenue growth.
With step 1 there are five building blocks for you to work on, I’m going to walk you through each one of them now, so you get a sense of what’s required to get you to a point where 10% of the target audience you ask to have a call with, accept and you have a call with them.
The first one is Personal Brand. It’s important to think of this in two ways. The first is your passive social presence. So when your target audience see you, they see you as the trusted advisor you are, that you’re genuine and worth having a chat with. You want them, when they read your profiles to reach the conclusion you want them to, as opposed to what they might come to otherwise. Next is your active presence, what you write, what you do and say on social media. Again, ensuring that the way you behave is supporting the personal brand you are creating, being known for the things you want to be famous for, the things that are highly relevant to you and your target audience.
Next is Network Growth. Most of us have developed networks over time based on the company or territory we were working with. There’s no network growth strategy or sense of purpose with our connections, it was just who we ended up connecting to. Your network has a value. It is a list of your contacts who know you or know of you and it’s important you look after it, and work it with care. Each social platform organises one’s network slightly differently. LinkedIn is particularly important as that is typically the most important to us working in the B2B space. LinkedIn will move your contacts closer to the centre of your network the more engagement there is between you. And the closer one is to the centre of your network the more likely they are to see you and your content. Growing your network with purpose is vital to increasing your visibility and influence across your target audience.
The third is Being Found. It’s important that there’s consistency across all of your social platforms so that when your prospect see’s you somewhere different, they instantly recognise you. Ensuring consistency of message and the things you want to be famous for are also important. For most, they use each social platform differently, consuming what they need and when they need it. If you’re using more than one from a business perspective, think about how you look on each and explore new ways of engaging your audience. It’s surprising how many more business folks are turning to Tik Tok to consume new and interesting content about previously quite dry topics. Standing out and being remembered is an important element to prospecting in the modern world - and remember it must be human and from the individual and not the brand.
Building Your Influence. Creating your view of the world is important when it comes to social media. I find that creating lists helps me focus my time when it comes to engaging with the people that matter to me. Typically, that would be your territory, a target list of primary, secondary and tertiary contacts you want to build visibility and influence with. Primary Influencers; experts in your field that you know your target audience is likely to see or engage with. Secondary or micro influencers; folks that post about topics relevant to you and your target audience or mutual connections so that when you engage with their content you increase the chances of being seen and engaging in conversation with on social media. Think of it like a real life networking environment where you walk into a room and scan the room for who you might want to chat to. Perhaps there is no-one of interest in this rom so you go to the next, and the next, until you find the people you’re looking for and want to speak with. Walk up to them as you would in real life, have a listen to the conversation and wait for your moment to drop a smart comment, make yourself look good. Or perhaps ask an intelligent question as a way of inserting yourself into the conversation. Do this a hundred times per week and you will be amazed with the results. Remember, you don’t get a six pack by doing a hundred sit ups. You need to do so every day, every week, and support this new behaviour with the other four points (eating healthily ;)).
Now onto the thing that people find most difficult. Content Creation. If you’re new to content creation the best way to get started is by curating other peoples content and putting your point of view to it and share it as your post whilst crediting the author. Then try writing a short blog of your own about a topic you know really well, it doesn’t have to be work related, all you’re doing is exercising the creative muscle in your mind. Write about things you love and practice until you feel more confident and then move onto commercial topics, though remember to keep it human and authentic, lose all the jargon and sales language, no-one likes that. Now your content is more human and authentic, now is the time to write about yourself. The more humanised it is the more engagement and impressions you will receive. And when you start to help your network get to know you at scale, your influence grows. And soon, your target audience will be walking towards you and inbound leads begin to flow. Especially as it’s crystal clear who you are and what you do through your content. And when or if you’re ready, turn to video, there’s nothing more engaging than a video of yourself being authentic!
With step 2, the opportunity forecast, this now becomes a very easy thing to create as you’re already generating a steady flow of conversations by now. So simply create a spreadsheet with a list of the four future quarters, so you effectively have a 12 month rolling view into the future, and plot when you believe a conversation you’re currently having will become a qualified opportunity. Now, for me, based on my close rate and average order value I like to target myself to have twelve future opportunities loading each quarter a little like baseball runners loading the bases. And here’s the important bit. If you don’t have the 'x' number of conversations converting to an opportunity in each of your four quarters, then you need to prioritise doing more of the activities in step 1.
So no matter how busy you become with deal management or the whirlwind of a busy day, you know in an instant by looking at this spreadsheet whether you have enough pipeline to achieve your commercial objective, it then becomes a simple maths equation - from territory to revenue!
So it’s really quite simple.
Summary:
If you want to have positive mental health by doing things you and your buyer enjoy and create a predictable flow of conversations that convert to pipeline and revenue, then follow these simple steps.
Develop your personal brand
Activate and grow your network
Create content that makes you look like the trusted advisor you are and a genuine authentic human being worth having a chat with
Enter as many new social networking conversations as you can each and every week, and approach people as human beings, and not with a sales message
Do that and you will earn good money, secure a promotion and have a much greater sense of purpose controlling your own destiny.
So to get started… I want you to take the first step with developing your personal brand, your profile. Look at your profile picture, what does it say, is it warming, inviting, does it say I’m an interesting person?
Then, look at your tag line. Change it. Make it as quirky and different as possible. Mine is: “Life is full of experiences, have stories to tell, not stuff to show…” this along with your profile pic are the first things people see when you pop up in their timeline. It must say, ooh, I’m intrigued, let me have a closer look.
You’ve got this! And if you have any questions you know where to find me. Yes, on LinkedIn!
Or
You can also find me (a.k.a. Bearded Sales Guy), on:
On SalesTV: https://www.youtube.com/@SalesTVlive/videos
TikTok: @BeardedSalesGuy
Instagram: @BeardedSales.Guy
Twitter: @BeardedSalesGuy