It’s no secret that marketing and sales teams are under immense pressure to deliver high-quality leads, but lead volume isn’t everything. If your leads aren’t becoming customers, your pipeline generation efforts may need improvement.

Effective pipeline generation is the cornerstone of a growing business, enhancing lead quality and conversion rates. With the right strategies and data, you can nurture your sales pipeline, predict sales outcomes, and align marketing with sales for peak efficiency — driving your business to rapid growth.

Why Pipeline Generation is Essential

Pipeline generation is the set of practices organizations use to consistently identify and nurture potential sales opportunities. A robust pipeline generation strategy focuses on maintaining a steady flow of deals in your pipeline rather than solely capturing lead information.

Lead Generation vs. Pipeline Generation

When it comes to driving sales, many businesses focus on lead generation, a short-term approach aimed at immediate conversions. While lead generation strategies are crucial to any sales plan, you should also consider how leads are nurtured once you capture their information. That’s where pipeline generation comes into play.

Pipeline generation takes lead generation efforts to the next level by focusing on managing and advancing prospects throughout the sales funnel beyond initial capture. Unlike lead generation, pipeline generation is a marathon, not a sprint. Pipeline generation efforts can support lead generation efforts, moving prospects through the sales funnel until they eventually make a purchase.

Benefits of Pipeline Generation

Pipeline generation can propel your organization toward exponential growth if done right. It sets the stage for more qualified leads and shorter sales cycles by:

  • Ensuring worked leads align with target personas
  • Establishing criteria for prospect movement through the sales stages
  • Improving lead scoring to better understand a prospect’s status
  • Deploying effective tactics to advance leads
  • Enabling the development of highly personalized marketing campaigns
  • Aligning sales and marketing efforts

Overcoming Common Pipeline Generation Challenges

Despite its numerous benefits, implementing effective pipeline generation isn’t always easy. Common obstacles faced by B2B teams include ever-changing buyer behaviors, siloed sales and marketing departments, and lack of the right technology.

However, these hurdles aren’t insurmountable. Here are some practical solutions to consider.

Align Your Sales and Marketing Efforts

Sales and marketing are often seen as separate entities with different goals. But in the world of pipeline generation, they are two sides of the same coin. Proper collaboration between your sales team and marketing departments is vital for a smooth sales pipeline. This alignment equips marketing teams with the information they need to capture quality leads and paves the way for sales reps to have more meaningful conversations with prospects. Creating nurture sequences that incorporate multiple touchpoints across various sales and marketing channels can boost engagement and lead generation.

While not all of these efforts are feasible for every organization, there are steps you can take to promote cross-departmental alignment:

  • Mutually develop your lead scoring system across marketing and sales
  • Share definitions, goals, and success metrics across teams
  • Develop a shared technology stack and sales process that serves both marketing and sales roles
  • Agree on ideal customer personas and buyer journeys
  • Create and maintain open lines of communication between departments through frequent meetings and standups

When sales and marketing teams collaborate, each party better understands buyer intent for improved messaging and strategic outreach.

Adapt to Your Buyers’ Behaviors

Your buyers are people, and people are complex and ever-changing with unique goals and pain points. To truly understand your buyers, you must adapt and meet them where they are.

If you sense you may be misunderstanding your ideal buyers, that’s okay — it’s never too late to adjust. Conducting market research, gathering feedback from sales interactions, and analyzing trends in your contact database are solid first steps to validate or disprove assumptions you have about your target personas. Then, when you routinely analyze your personas’ actual buying behaviors, you can more effectively engage your prospects so they become customers.

Choose the Right Technology

A tailored tech stack can empower your pipeline generation efforts. Chances are, you already have:

  • Marketing automation software
  • A robust CRM
  • Website analytics platforms, like Google Analytics
  • A content management system

Marketing automation platforms should help you nurture and score leads, push them through the sales funnel, and analyze their behavior. Similarly, the right customer relationship management software will aid you in organizing leads, monitoring the buyer journey, and automating communication with prospects. Meanwhile, your analytics platforms and CMS allow you to evaluate what content is supporting your goals. With 77% of companies believing marketing software impacts their business, if these tools aren’t easy for your teams to use, or they lack functionality, it may be time to consider making a change.

Strategies for High-Converting Pipeline Generation

Harnessing customer data allows you to make informed decisions as you enhance your pipeline generation efforts. When you minimize the guesswork, you’ll see a stronger return on investment in your marketing and sales efforts by providing a steady stream of closed deals in your pipeline.

Personalize the Sales Experience

Using customer data and intent insights to create personalized campaigns aligns marketing and sales efforts and helps you resonate with your target audience. This approach enhances the sales experience while fostering a more personal relationship with your prospects, increasing the likelihood of closing.

Tailoring your message to meet the specific needs and interests of your prospects shows you understand and empathize with their pain points and challenges. This personalized approach can significantly increase engagement, leading to a higher volume of qualified leads and an improved sales process. After all, who wouldn’t prefer a customized experience over a one-size-fits-all approach?

Stay in Front of Your Prospects with Account-Based Marketing

Being constantly visible to your prospects by creating helpful content and engaging leads through multiple touchpoints keeps you at the front of their minds. The right content at the right time can be the difference between a prospect forgetting you and selecting a competitor or scheduling a follow-up meeting. Since B2B sales cycles are long, keeping your prospects’ attention is vital, and account-based marketing is a great way to do that.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a targeted approach to B2B marketing, where marketing and sales teams join forces to target high-value accounts with personalized interactions. By focusing on the right target accounts and personalizing the sales strategy to their specific needs, ABM can lead to shorter sales cycles and increased conversion rates.

Track Customer Journeys

Monitoring customer journey and engagement data is essential for understanding buyer intent. By understanding each step your customer takes on their journey, you can develop intentional marketing and sales strategies. By identifying common pain points, preferences, and critical buying impulses, you can tailor your content creation, campaign planning, and lead nurturing strategies. With this level of insight, you can guide your prospects smoothly through the sales process on their ideal buying journey instead of forcing them to walk a path that doesn’t meet their needs.

Leverage Buyer Intent Data

Buyer intent data, including first-party intent data and third-party intent data, provides invaluable insights into potential customers’ interaction behaviors and purchase intentions. By leveraging intent data, sales teams can accurately identify prospects demonstrating high purchase intent and engage them with customized nurturing tactics, leading to improved conversion rates.

Learn more about how you can leverage intent data here.

Level Up Your Pipeline Generation Efforts with Predictiv Data.

If you’re looking to take your pipeline generation to new heights, you need a reliable source of customer data. We’re here to support your efforts with high-quality intent data accessible within our easy-to-navigate platform. With Predictiv, you can:

  • Pinpoint high-value accounts with strong buying intent
  • Identify contacts based on firmographics, technographics, and thousands of other data points
  • Better understand your target personas
  • Isolate critical buying impulses so you can deliver the right messages at the right time

Ready to get started? Let’s go!