Is Pipeline Generation Predictable?

The short answer is, yes it is.?

If you want to know how then read on.?

For many years B2B buyer behaviour has been changing, the first time we realised this was when Brent Adamson and Matt Dixon completed their B2B buyer research as part of creating the Challenger Sale. 15 years ago they found that almost 60% of the purchase decision was concluded by the time a buyer engaged a seller.?

Forrester found this to be between 70-90% a few years later and today, I would argue it’s 100% unless the buyer has a relationship with the seller or someone at the vendor company.?According to TrustRadius’ B2B buyer research in 2022 buyers no longer trust vendor websites or blogs like they once did and they would rather reach out to a new community for advice on solutions to solving a problem than speak with a sales person or vendor directly. ?

Gartner found that 72% of B2B buyers want a rep free experience and Winning By Design found that in Q1 2023 pipeline generation rates had plummeted and close rates fallen by almost 50% in the last 2 years across the full spectrum of deal sizes, from SMB at $20k to $350k ARR with enterprise suffering the most from 29% to 17%.

The picture is bleak and is due to one thing, changing buyer behaviour.?Something we as sales people, sales focused organisations have caused as a result of selling when no-one is buying.?

As a result, broken...

Think about that for a moment, is it really possible that the exact thing sales people are hired to do every day is the one thing that is making it harder for them to do - pushing buyers deeper into the zone of resistance and forcing them to leave it right until the last minute to bring you in, by which time it’s impossible to build a meaningful relationship or influence the purchase decision criteria.

We can blame the economic headwinds, or the fact that ‘LinkedIn has become Facebook’ or the SalesTech we’ve invested so much in isn’t doing what we expected.?But at the end of the day, business is about people, it’s about relationships and it’s about providing unconditional value to create a value exchange with the person you are trying to build a relationship with.?Some people will like you and therefore buy from you and others won’t but that’s okay.??

As good as your company, product or solution is, there are several more that can do exactly the same. ?

YOU and your people are the only thing your company has, so leverage that. Empower them to develop their professional digital twin, activate their networks, grow them with purpose and teach them how to create content that makes them stand out and look different, and by the very nature will make your company look different too.?You’ll be amazed at how the tide of prospecting will turn, and your target audience will begin walking towards you and not running for the hills. ?

And when you do you too will experience the kind of results I’m about to share with you here. These results are now benchmarks having tried traditional prospecting approaches for two decades have found in the last 3 years it doesn’t matter how sophisticated you are, how many strategies you deploy in the funnel, they no longer work like they once did.?Resulting in re-orgs, redundancies, and for many companies too slow to adapt, going bust.?

Our Social & Value Selling combined is a new methodology.

Our story at Supero begins with…

Digital Twin

A passive digital brand or digital twin if you will. We have each invested time creating buyer centric profiles on our digital platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Guild, and YouTube.?We take care in writing our profile to help our target audience come to the conclusion we want them to, which is we are experts at what we do and we are genuine human beings worth having a chat with.?Wherever possible we complete as much information as possible to increase the level of credibility felt by our target audience visiting us.

Network

Next is network growth.? Most of us have digital networks, people we’ve connected with at some point but never actually done anything to maintain visibility with that person.?Take a few minutes to research your team and see how many connections they have on LinkedIn or any other digital platform they use and see how active they are.?

• Our profiles are 100% complete and buyer centric.

Why do most folks, even when in a sales position not maintain some degree of visibility with their target audience on Social media? [missed opportunity]

Don’t think about social media as Facebook, think of it as a real life networking situation.?How would you use it differently then?

Activating your existing network and growing it with your target audience increases your visibility with the right people, the people that matter the most to achieving your commercial objectives. ?

• Our combined network growth as a team is 7.6% in 2023 (the last 14 weeks).?Our top performer has grown his network by 30.2% in just 14 short weeks.?We track and calculate the commercial value of this.

Content?

Are you a writer, video creator or creative? ?

Most of us aren’t and feel like we never will be.?But did you know we all have the ability to be creative we just don’t try because we think of all the reasons why not and it won’t be good enough for your audience.?Like any muscle the more you train, the more you practice (just do) the stronger and better you become - content creation is no different.

We were in exactly the same boat over a year ago and now we create all kinds of content formats and share them across multiple digital platforms.?Something we thought we’d never have the time for.?They KEY is the content is YOURS created by you and is part of what you want to be known for with your target audience, which is usually an expert at what you do, who is a genuine human being worth having a chat with.?

Having a content plan can help, though really it’s about making time to think about what you want to write and share and make a start, one piece at a time until you build momentum.?Having a coach will help!

In 2023 between three of us we’ve created 206 pieces of content, 95 of which had a human element, the human element is important as it helps your audience feel like they get to know you before they’ve even spoken with you.?People buy from people so it’s rewarding to experience others mentioning your content when the time comes to speak with you. ?

• This effort has resulted in 211,587 impressions on our content.?Impressions are views when it comes to LinkedIn and it’s our target audience, those we are connected to and connect with on a weekly basis that is seeing our content, as well as our 2nd degree connections, those hard to reach contacts that are connected to our 1st degree connections.?And it’s no fluke, our average number of content impressions each week is 16,276. How much would that cost you in media budget if 16k of our target audience was seeing your content.?Not corporate content but often human and authentic content about YOU.? It is this approach that leads to inbound leads and we’ve reached a stage where we receive 1 new inbound lead per week. From someone that has been following our story. ?What percentage of those inbound leads do you think we close, when someone has been following you and your content for a while??

Corporate content is invisible to your audience as is corporate content shared by your teams (aka advocacy programs), it looks salesy and as hard as you try to make it not, it is still ignored as it adds to the noise of uninteresting content - it is this noise your own content is seeking to cut through, content that is relevant and connects with others.

• Our content in all its formats has received 4,028 pieces of engagement in 14 weeks.? Our target audience is dropping likes and comments and all of this buyer activity provides us with an opportunity to engage.?Say thank you and begin a dialogue. ?

Networking?

In person networking is reported to be the number 1 activity when it comes to building relationships that are more likely to turn into a commercial discussion and potential business and like most sales professionals I agree.?That was until we found social and value selling and use it as a methodology.?In-person networking is expensive and not scalable.?A year ago we attended every conference we could and would pay to attend in some cases.?Now, we don’t need to as we have more than enough conversations each week and have very little time to waste attending an exhibition, unless it’s part of our approach.?We no longer attend a conference or exhibition thinking we must get ‘x’ number of leads or pipeline from this investment. ?

Now we spend time each week entering new conversations with our target audience about topics relevant to us both.?We wave to our audience, we ask intelligent questions and make comments to encourage discussion - this activity is where social selling gets serious.?This activity improves our engagement rates, our connection rates, the number of conversations we have with relevant people.?The combination of each activity we perform has a multiplicative effect like a halo, and it’s vital to be consistent with the execution to reward you with your target audience walking toward you. ?

• We’ve joined 2,769 new conversations in 14 weeks and we haven’t left our home offices. ?

Value Alignment?

Getting conversations with our target audience isn’t the difficult bit, steering the conversation towards a commercial one without ‘selling’ is what the less experienced on the team find most challenging.?We’ve designed a step within the value selling framework called value alignment, this is where we combine several pieces of insight into a story that aids and helps steer the conversation.?It includes our value story, success anecdotes, directional questioning and commercial insight that empowers our team to maintain a flow to the discussion that in many occasions leads to a commercial one.?

Together with social selling, essentially doing a lot of the heavy lifting ahead of the first conversation we see the following results.

• We have an average 9% conversation rate.?For every 100 people we ask 9 of them sit a call with us.?22.5% for senior leadership.?As a team of 3 we’ve had 104 calls in 14 weeks.
• 33.6% of our conversations progress with a meaningful next step agreed. 41.3% for senior leadership.?
• 32.1% of our calls qualify as an opportunity, which we call value alignment.?66.7% for senior leadership.?

What would this mean to your territory?

Now think about this approach progressively getting better over time as your cold outreach is warming and?valuable as opposed to disruptive like most traditional cold outreach approaches.?

We see nuances between focus account and volume account approaches depending on the level of focus?put on a particular account.?The benchmarks we have created are based on cold outreach to a combination of volume accounts where an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is defined and a focus account list created.?The warmer the account the greater the results, it’s quite logical really. ?We find most clients that think they are well connected in an account are really not when we dig into the depth and breadth of connection and strength of relationship. ?

How is this predictable?

Now the methodology has been followed religiously for more than 3 months (9 months in learning and optimising mode) we are seeing consistent numbers and now understand the relationship between daily behaviours and how this translates to revenue.?We simply continue the activity levels (defined behaviours) and optimise each as we become better at performing each activity.?As an example; our conversation rate was initially 6.7% after 6 weeks and now 8 weeks later has increased to 9%. ?

And it doesn’t cost a dime. No annual media costs, no event costs or T&E to budget for unless we decide to meet in person of course.?Imagine what this would do to your bottom line and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).?Traffic to your website??..this becomes less important as people buy from people, your website and company LinkedIn page becomes pages of content to validate the company who YOU work for.?

Learn about our approach, explore if this could work for you and your business, drop me a DM…

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