Pipeline Generation 101: Effective Strategies for Success

Not all leads become paying customers. Many enter the sales funnel but never make it to the finish line. In most cases, this is because of gaps in information and touchpoints during the buying process. In other words, lack of pipeline generation—a comprehensive strategy that nurtures, qualifies and advances leads through every stage of the sales process.

With pipeline generation, companies define the buyer journey and guide qualified leads towards a purchase. A strong pipeline helps grow a business by closing deals more efficiently, ensuring each lead receives a personalized approach.

This article will help you develop an effective pipeline generation strategy and explain which metrics to track.

Pipeline generation vs lead generation: what is the difference?

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Sales and marketing teams might talk about their winning pipeline generation strategy, but it’s often confused with lead generation. While both are important for the buyer’s journey, they serve different purposes.

Lead generation only focuses on the initial stage of the sales process—attracting potential customers, spreading awareness and increasing lead interest in your business. Your marketing team usually collects lead data through paid ads and other marketing efforts, also known as demand generation. After that, leads become part of your sales funnel.

However, capturing interest isn’t enough. Think of the lead generation process as just the tip of the iceberg. Much more work is needed beneath the surface, and that’s where a pipeline generation strategy comes into play.

Pipeline generation involves managing and nurturing leads at every step of the buying process. It’s a comprehensive strategy that includes:

• Defining the criteria to determine when potential customers move from one stage to another;
• Developing tactics to move prospects through the sales pipeline;
• Analyzing data about prospects to project future revenue based on the volume, quality, and stage of leads in the pipeline;

Lead nurturing, an essential part of pipeline generation, offers many benefits. According to the 2023 lead nurturing and acceleration benchmark survey, 71% of practitioners report generating sales-ready leads through nurturing.

Here’s an overview to explain the difference between lead and pipeline generation.

Effective pipeline generation: where to start?

Companies that manage strong sales pipelines have a 28% revenue growth rate. To jump on the bandwagon, you need a successful pipeline generation strategy. Let’s see where you should start.

Target audience definition

Sales and marketing teams need tailored efforts to attract potential buyers. That’s why they need to define a target audience, which helps them understand what to cater to each individual.

Essentially, your company should identify and define:

1. The ideal customer profile (ICP)
2. Buyer personas

The ideal customer profile provides a detailed description of your company's ideal customer. It explains the characteristics that would encourage them to purchase from your business. This description includes:

• Pain points
• Demographics, including age, location and company size
• Purchasing behavior

Then, you can build buyer personas after identifying the ideal ICP. These are fictional characters that you create based on audience and market research. All personas have essential information that you collect from your customers, such as:

• Age
• Pain points
• Interests

But how do you identify ICPs and buyer personas?

For ICPs, you can:

• Analyze your current customer base: Find the customers who spend the most on your services or products.
• Identify common characteristics: Look at their information to identify common characteristics like company size, industry, location, etc.
• Conduct surveys and interviews: Send surveys to gather insights into customer and prospect challenges and needs.
• Create a profile: Based on your findings, build the ideal customer profile to outline the common characteristics.

For buyer personas, you can:

• Segment audiences: Divide customers into groups based on similar characteristics. 
• Build detailed personas: Each persona should include purchasing behavior, main challenges, and what they need to achieve with your product or service.
• Utilize the findings: Tailor your marketing efforts for each buyer persona. Then, target paid ads or content for every group.

Your marketing team will benefit the most from an ICP profile and buyer personas. They can use them to create personalized content that catches attention and drives people to your website.

Sales and marketing alignment

A successful pipeline generation strategy depends on the collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Aligning sales and marketing means you won’t miss out on potential opportunities and abandon warm leads in the pipeline.

Sales and marketing alignment improves the effectiveness of the pipeline generation efforts. The teams share a goal, so it’s easier to define marketing efforts that might generate the necessary results, including higher conversion rates and increased revenue.

Their collaboration creates a seamless pipeline. For instance, marketing produces content that educates leads. Sales then contacts the prospects who viewed that content with personalized messages.

Content strategy

You must nurture leads at every stage of the buying process. At times, prospects will forget about your business, and you need to employ engagement tactics to remind them what your products can do.

This is where a good content strategy comes into play.

You can establish credibility by providing valuable educational content to your target buyer. That content can be tailored for each stage:

• Awareness stage: Create content like eBooks that educate prospects about their challenges.
• Consideration stage: This is where you need to show people how your product solves their particular problem. You can use interactive demos here to showcase a specific pain point and how to solve it.

Decision stage: When prospects are ready to decide, it’s time you reiterate your value proposition to them. Use case studies that showcase success stories from existing customers.

Interactive product demos are a great and engaging pipeline generation tool. People learn by doing, so giving them hands-on experience with your product will reveal its true value.

HowdyGo is a demo creation tool for marketing and sales teams. It lets you record and edit pixel-perfect copies of your product, which you can later embed on your website or share in emails. The marketing team can use interactive demos for their demand generation campaigns, while the sales team can use them to nurture prospects further down the pipeline.

It only takes five clicks for Flagsmith to explain to its customers what they can do with their product. Imagine how much time this saves! Rather than spending time on demo calls with unqualified prospects, your sales team can send an interactive demo instead.

Ready to try interactive demos out? Get started for free!

Multi-channel approach

A multi-channel approach helps you reach customers effectively. It gives you a higher chance of reaching customers on the device or platform they use the most. That’s why an effective pipeline strategy should target qualified leads through:

• Email marketing: Send targeted messages to various audience segments. These emails can include educational content like whitepapers or interactive walkthroughs.
• SEO: Make sure to optimize your website and content to rank higher in online searches. Potential customers are more likely to discover your company when they search online.
• Paid marketing: Utilize paid ads to reach a broader audience. You can run targeted ad campaigns on social media and Google based on audience demographics and online behavior.
• Social media: Engage with your audience by posting content and building a community. For instance, you can share interactive product tours on LinkedIn and Twitter (X) that show your product in action.

Customer relationship management (CRM) & data utilization

CRM tools are another way to align sales, customer service and marketing teams. They are centralized locations that store all customer-related data. Having access to the information ensures everyone sees and makes decisions off of the same, accurate data.

Teams can use that data to streamline pipeline generation and build ICPs. Your business can also monitor sales performance and understand which areas need improvement. For instance, you can track the sales cycle length and identify gaps in the pipeline generation strategy.

By leveraging CRM tools and data, you can adjust sales strategies and target customers more effectively.

Pipeline generation tracking: metrics and KPIs

You won’t know if you have a winning pipeline generation strategy if you don’t track metrics and KPIs. They give you an in-depth understanding of whether or not your sales strategy is driving revenue growth and converting qualified leads.

Here are the pipeline metrics and KPIs you should track.

Lead to marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) ratios

Let’s first establish the difference between marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads.

An MQL is a lead who has engaged with a company’s marketing efforts. The marketing team analyzes the lead’s online behavior to see if they qualify as MQL. For instance, they look at what CTAs the lead clicked on and which pages they visited.

On the other hand, an SQL is a lead who has interacted with the sales team and has shown immediate interest in buying. They are now part of the sales pipeline and the team uses different tactics to move them down and motivate them to finish the purchase.

Therefore, the MQL to SQL ratio is the percentage of marketing-qualified leads that become sales-qualified leads. You can track this metric by dividing the total number of MQLs by the total number of SQLs.

Opportunity creation rates, win/loss rates, conversion rates

You can also determine if you have an effective pipeline generation strategy by monitoring:

• Opportunity creation rates: This metric measures the percentage of prospects who become high-quality leads and, thus, business opportunities. A lead becomes a sales opportunity after they have expressed a lot of interest in what you offer and will likely purchase from your business.
• Win/loss rates: A strong pipeline generation strategy examines both the wins and losses. With this metric, you track the number of closed deals versus the number of lost deals. It also gives you an idea of how each sales representative is performing.
• Conversion rates: Want to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing or sales tactics? This metric is perfect for that. Conversion rates indicate how many users take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or booking a demo. Check out how you can increase SaaS landing page conversion rates.

The above metrics give you the best idea of how well your teams perform. But there are other metrics you can track as well.

Other relevant metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and sales cycle length

You can gain valuable insights by monitoring customer acquisition cost and sales cycle length.

CAC is the best metric to track if you want to know how much your business spends on marketing and sales. It tells you how much money you invested to acquire a new customer. You can rely on this metric for your future budget planning.

Sales cycle length examines the time it takes for sales leads to become paying customers. It is calculated by dividing the total duration of the cycle by the total number of closed deals.

Conclusion

A successful pipeline generation strategy will drive revenue growth and ensure your teams are on the same page. Your task is to shape every stage of the sales process, from start to finish. So, identify your target audience, build a content strategy for multiple channels and use CRM tools to align sales and marketing.

Don’t forget to add interactive demos to your strategy. They can help you improve your signup page conversions and educate your leads on all aspects of your product. You can achieve that with HowdyGo, a tool that captures your product in action in just a few clicks.

Ready to improve your pipeline generation strategy? Try HowdyGo for free!

FAQs

What is the difference between lead generation and pipeline generation?

Lead generation looks to capture a wide target audience and attract them to your business. Pipeline generation, however, defines and shapes every stage of the buyer’s journey and outlines ways to drive people toward the purchase.

How to calculate pipeline generation?

You can track the effectiveness of your pipeline generation strategy with metrics like:

• MQL to SQL ratios
• Opportunity creation rates
• Win/loss rates
• Conversion rates

These metrics look at different data to determine how successful your strategy is.

How to measure pipeline generation?

Measure pipeline generation by examining the performance of your paid marketing, customer acquisition costs, win/loss rates and MQL to SQL ratios.

What does pipeline mean in business?

A pipeline is a visual way of tracking potential buyers as they progress through the purchasing journey.