How to Build a Qualified Sales Pipeline

Most marketing teams are focused on generating pipeline rather than creating qualified opportunities. Even though B2B marketing teams contribute close to 80% of the pipeline on average, its contribution to revenue is merely around 20%. Lost deals aren’t the biggest issue here for B2B companies. The alarming increase in deal dormancy rate across industries in the last decade is the bigger issue that needs to be addressed.?

This is why revenue teams need to start calling it a QUALIFIED pipeline. Not just to remind everyone in the team what it was meant to be in the first place. But also to bring about more structure in the process of qualifying opportunities.

What is a qualified sales pipeline?

A qualified sales pipeline or a healthy pipeline of opportunities means a list of accounts with a high probability of facing the problem that you are solving for.

Most sales teams work on accounts without an idea of whether these prospects have an understanding of the problem, leave alone realizing the need to solve the problem. Or if there is a buyer group or a buying committee which is ready to buy.?

Revenue teams need to work on designing a data-driven account qualification model. One that can collate current data from your MAP, sales intelligence, CRM and any other customer touchpoint to validate TOFU engagements with accounts. This model should help you predict the accounts you can start engaging with as well as how to do it.

How to build a qualified sales pipeline

Here’s our step-by-step explanation of the process we recommend for building a qualified sales pipeline.

a. Define your ICP

Building a qualified sales pipeline begins when you understand attributes of accounts which benefit from your solution or product. Relying on your (intuitive) understanding of the best-fit accounts is a good start. But over time you need data to validate the intuition.?

b. Identify the buyer group

Identifying the buyer group ensures you engage with only the best-fit contacts. Having a grip on the buyer group also deepens your understanding of the buying journeys.?

c. Monitor buying-intent from all sources

Monitoring the buying-intent at all times helps you track the buyer journey and take appropriate actions to further the journey. You need to interpret the buying-intent from all of your first-party and third-party sources.

d. Account prioritization

Based on your current and recent historical data, you can identify the accounts in the appropriate stage of the buying journey. You need to start engaging with these accounts at a deeper level.

e. Orchestrate the engagement

You need to drive engagement across the buying group not only to ascertain the buying-intent but also to constantly move the funnel. Every communication should? be timed appropriately for a seamless customer experience. Appropriate channel and seller-side stakeholders need to be identified for every interaction.

To build a qualified pipeline predictably, there has to be a conscious shift from lead-based to an account-based approach across the funnel. And to do this at scale, you need to have a robust data strategy. With B2B sales cycles increasingly becoming digital, a data-driven marketing motion is your recipe for success.

This article was first published on the BambooBox blog. You can read the full article here.