Ever heard yourself uttering: “Marketing just doesn’t work for us”?
Or, feeling like marketing spends loads of money and doesn’t generate anything?
Sometimes it’s even worse than that, and you’ve seen it first-hand – you pour money into tactics, ads, roundtables, the lot… but with no real results.
So it seems obvious: marketing just doesn’t work… but we both know that story isn’t true. It’s been fabricated in your mind from a tonne of false beliefs and bad experiences.
Because marketing and sales as a department isn’t built on “fluffy stuff” – it’s driven by metrics, and your ability to hold people accountable to meeting them and hitting them.
Thing is, the reason why most founder-led agencies can’t create predictable revenue isn’t because they need one magic tactic (we’ll get to what they do need, don’t worry).
Yet they’re always looking for that silver bullet. That ONE thing that’s going to change EVERYTHING.
I hate to tell you, there’s no one thing – but there is one system, which is what we’ll cover in this article.
The annoying part about sales pipelines
Marketing is one big experiment – which means some times it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and the aim of the game is to slowly filter out the latter and double-down on the wins.
The problem is, if you haven’t done any experimenting, tracking and refining as you go, you’re going in cold.
Of course it feels like nothing works; you’ve been trying random, ad hoc tactics, without knowing what “good” looks like, and without being able to tell the difference between “this is working but it needs time” and “this is completely wrong”.
And if you don’t know what good looks like, how are you ever going to know how to hold people accountable? Whether it’s your team, an agency you’ve outsourced it to, or an external consultant.
If you never work out the target, you’ll never hit it.
If you want a predictable pipeline, you have to stop talking about “marketing” like it’s one blob of activity here, one flurry of social posts there, and break down what actually builds a pipeline.
Because the facts are:
- there are three parts to a successful pipeline
- there’s a system that underpins those three parts
- most businesses who aren’t seeing results have an issue with one or more of those parts
Let’s take it from the top and break down these three parts so you understand what actually builds a predictable sales pipeline…
Part 1: The top of the funnel
“Top of funnel” is simple to understand, but can be genuinely difficult to execute properly.
Top of funnel = are you picking the right tactics, for the right buyers?
And the second you ask that, it opens up a can of worms…
- Do you know who your buyers are?
- Do you know what pain they’re in?
- Do you know the outcome that they want?
- Do you know how they think?
- Do you know where they are?
- Do you know where they indulge in escapism?
- Do you know where they build their network?
… be honest, do you know your buyers to that degree?
Because that is what determines the success of the top of your funnel.
Unless you have this level of depth and this richness of detail, you have no hope of picking the right tactics to bring them towards you, or go towards them.
This is where founders often kid themselves; practically every conversation I have with a prospect starts with asking if they know their buyers, and usually they say: “Yeah, we know our ICP, we’ve done loads of work on that.”
But knowing headcount, turnover, industry and a contact with a certain job title and some rough pain points is not buyer persona definition.
It isn’t enough to know your buyers have a turnover of £10mil – it means nothing on its own!
What matters is knowing them on a personal level – you need to understand how they think. Only if you know that can you select the right tactics.
Why? Because thoughts create feelings, which drive behaviour – that’s how the brain works! So if we know how they think, we can understand their likely behaviour in real world scenarios and connect with them on a far deeper level when they’re in front of us.
That’s the beauty of the top of the funnel, and you have three broad routes for bringing people in:
- Inbound (prospects come directly to you – eg your website)
- Outbound (you go directly to them – DMs, networking and so on)
- Nearbound (you’re introduced by an external – referrals, partners, etc)
Each of these three areas have their own sets of tactics baked within them – tonnes of tools at your disposal – but you’ll never work out the right ones to experiment with if you don’t work out the buyers you want to convert to begin with.
Which brings us to the final point about this stage: the outcome you want.
How many of that particular buyer do you want?
What revenue gap are you trying to close?
What does “good” look like?
You’ll never be happy with the results you put into the top of the funnel if you don’t work out what good looks like to begin with and what you want closing as a deal at the other end.
This is where your marketing strategy stops being vague and becomes a formula that powers your sales efforts.
Part 2: The middle of the funnel
“Middle of funnel” is where most founder-led agencies lose the plot, because we reach a crossroads.
When people come into the funnel and you meet them for the first time, they’re either in pain or they’re not.
If they’re the ideal customer and they’re in pain, they progress down to the rest of the funnel immediately and you know exactly what to do with them.
But if you meet someone who you think could be the ideal customer very soon, but aren’t quite ready yet, that’s what the middle of the funnel is for.
Nurturing.
This stage of the system is critical – it ensures that people who aren’t in immediate pain have us front-of-mind enough so that they eventually turn into opportunities.
A few questions to consider for this stage:
- Do you have nurturing touchpoints in place?
- Are they mapped against the ideal buyer journey?
- Do they factor in a team effort between sales and marketing?
- Are you regularly showing up for those people in your funnel?
- What are you saying to them?
- Are you talking about what matters to them?
… that last point is a BIG one, because there’s another flaw inside this stage that often lies in what’s being said to people…
Truth is, a lot of businesses talk to prospects as though they already trust them.
They start talking about blockers to moving forward when that person doesn’t even realise there’s a problem yet – that’s only going to put them off, because they think you’re wrong.
So you’ve got two sides to the middle of the funnel:
- Are you nurturing consistently?
- Are you talking about the right things for their stage?
That could be solving false beliefs, challenging them on their assumptions – but whatever you say, you’ve got to meet them where they’re at.
This is one of the core sales pipeline stages that makes or breaks predictability – it can also end up being the most fulfilling, because it’s the difference between “we had a nice chat” and “we built an opportunity over time”.
Part 3: The bottom of the funnel
Speaking of “nice chats”, “bottom of funnel” activity is where you stop pretending a “nice chat” is a commercial opportunity.
This stage of the funnel is all about conversion – all our hard work further up the funnel, driving the ideal leads towards us comes down to this point… but it terrifies a large number of people.
This is where we have to get really honest – do you know how to create opportunities from conversations?
Do you know how to turn someone you met while networking into a proposal?
Do you know how to turn a coffee meeting into a discovery call?
Do you know how to challenge someone properly, so they realise this is a bigger priority than they thought?
In other words: do you know how to convert them? Because if you don’t, all your earlier effort is wasted. What we need to focus on here is:
- Making sure you structure your conversations with conversion in mind – ie, they’re based on buyer persona pain
- Making sure we always lock in the next logical step – so we don’t leave huge lapses in communication
- Ensure all of your conversion collateral (like creds decks, proposals, pitch presentations and so on) focus on the customer’s pain, the outcome they want and the value you bring (ie not your service as a list of features)
Think of the last time you lost a pitch…
- Was your proposal centred on them, or you?
- Was it designed with storytelling in mind that showcases the outcome you deliver?
- Was your USP clearly defined so there’s a reason to work with you and not somebody else?
If not, your bottom of funnel section is broken – and if this one part is broken, the whole pipeline collapses.
This is why knowing how to build a sales pipeline is not about adding more activity; it’s about fixing the stage that’s flawed.
The system underneath it
So – time for a quick recap…
You’ve got top of funnel tactics for classic lead generation. Tick.
You’ve got middle of funnel activity for nurturing earlier-stage prospects along the journey. Tick.
And you’ve got bottom of funnel systems in place for conversion. Tick.
Sounds simple enough – but here’s the final piece to the puzzle, and funnily enough, if there WAS a silver bullet, this would probably be it:
None of this holds together without ownership.
Do you know how to hold either yourself or the team accountable to showing up across the funnel and taking the right actions?
Are you confident that all those parts connect seamlessly as a unit?
Or are things fragmented, siloed, in need of work?
Whatever your answer, that’s ok – we all start from where we start from – but all of these things determine the success of that pipeline.
Why? Because success is about showing up and taking the right action to get the result that you want.
That right action doesn’t happen if you don’t know the three parts of the pipeline exist, what they’re for, and how to make them work.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
If you can’t improve it, you can’t get to predictable revenue.
The one step that makes this real
If you want one practical move from this blog, it’s this:
Define the revenue gap, and reverse-engineer the required conversations.
Not just “more leads” – the required conversations and touchpoints across the entire pipeline!
If you don’t build it deliberately, you’ll keep living inside revenue gaps and that “feast or famine” mentality that goes with it.
And that’s not a marketing problem – that’s a clarity problem.
But look – if you’re reading this and thinking, “Fine… but I still don’t know which part is broken,” that’s completely normal.
Most founder-led agencies don’t even realise there are three parts to the pipeline, let alone which one is leaking.
And even if you did, all of the above requires taking new and different action, and that’s overwhelming (even just plain scary) to a lot of stakeholders spinning many plates, so it’s critical that there’s someone there asking the hard questions.
That’s exactly why this doesn’t fix itself – but if you want to stop guessing, stop experimenting blindly, and actually understand what’s missing inside your growth pipeline, this is your chance.
Drop me a note right now with your major pipeline struggle right now, and I’ll help you work out a way forward.
