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Do you want more leads?

Pipeline & Deal Velocity

Who is it for?

For sales leaders and founders hiring or developing revenue talent.

When to use?

Use when interviews produce false positives and you need a repeatable way to assess real capability.

27 Jan 2025

More leads rarely fix structural flaws. This piece questions the reflex to increase volume at the top.

Don’t worry, I know the answer is yes! I can’t solve the problem for you in one blog post, but I do have a couple of key ideas below.

Successful new-logo revenue generation requires two things

1. Pipeline Generation

2. Closing Deals

In nearly every company I’ve worked with, pipeline generation is the more challenging aspect. If you have a solid sales process, decent leads, and good product-market fit, closing deals becomes significantly easier.

However, generating opportunities is a different story. Massive spending on digital campaigns. Broad BDR/SDR teams. Thought leadership content. Product led engagement. And many other channels. If you listen to chattering GTM leaders today, many will tell you that the day of the BDR is over – nobody is responding to emails, acknowledging you on LinkedIn or taking your calls. Others will tell you that there are amazing AI tools which can take the place of your BDRs and deliver more effective leads faster. If you look at each of the different channels, you can find as many people arguing for them as against.

So how do you decide where to invest?

It’s actually simple: test. What works, do it more. What doesn’t, stop. Of course nothing is that simple. In order to formulate a meaningful test and get significant results, you need to think carefully.

1. Form a hypothesis of what you will test

2. Decide exactly how you will test it

3. Most importantly find leading indicators that will tell you within a few weeks whether you are on the right path.

(Let me know if you’d like more content on this.)

I can suggest you try a couple of specific things.

* Face-to-face engagement. This typically means conferences/tradeshows. Particularly when selling enterprise technology, this is one of the easiest ways to get face time with your prospective customers. You must still do a great job when you speak to them – find a real pain and give them a reason to remember you next week. If you do that, it is one of the fastest ways of creating engagement. It is also an important way of maintaining previous engagements and moving deals forwards with key meetings.

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