How To Create A B2B Sales Pipeline: Everything You Need To Know

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2. Define your ideal customer, buyer persona, and market for each source

As part of your sales pipeline, you’ll have different types of clients, some of who will pay you more than others.

So, you’ll need instructions for your SDRs on how to work with different kinds of leads in order to convert them into paying clients.

What’s the difference?

• Ideal customer profile: Used to describe a type of a company that would be your ideal customer.
• Buyer persona: Semi-fictional representation of your customers. Helps you identify individuals with different job roles and decision-makers behind every purchase.

Then, you should:

1. Clearly define your ICP-associated channels for each lead source, to ensure a consistent value proposition across all functions, for easier internal and external communication.
2. Form your ICP across the levels of location, industry, target company size, and more.
3. Define your buyer persona based on functions and titles.
4. Define your TAM/SAM/SOM to generate a list of companies that fit your criteria, based on market research and customer analysis).
5. Finally, to access your TAM/SAM/SOM bases, leverage resources like Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Dealroom, or other platforms for startups and scale-ups

3. Start prospecting and lead generation for outbound, inbound, and partner-sourced leads

Naturally, this will depend on the specific strategy or lead source.

So, here’s a general overview:

First, when creating an outbound strategy, build a prospect list aligned with SOM, and prioritize based on internal fit criteria.

Then, you need to enrich your data and filter down your list.

Tailor an approach based on top-priority companies first. Utilizing AMB (account-based marketing) or personalization methods. 

For second and third priorities, explore opportunities for increased automation. Develop a specific value proposition for each ICP, guiding a subsequent sequence creation.

The demand generation team should focus on attracting and nurturing your TAM/SOM/SAM bases, aiming to bring them to your website to book demo calls or sign-ups. Be sure to also employ SEO and nurturing techniques to make demos, sign-ups, webinars, and events the primary sources of your inbound pipeline.

Finally, with partner-sourced leads, formulate strategies to create opportunities through collaborations. Armed with the knowledge of your ICP, this should become easier over time.

Let’s generate an easy example.

If your goal is to get to a million dollars in ARR and your solution is for UK-based fintech companies, your best option would be to start with Crunchbase.

Select industry, location, and company size parameters to form an initial list. Do not forget to filter out companies via Company Operating Status field and Company Type (For Profit).

Keep in mind, this won’t be perfect yet but that’s fine, as you can refine it over time.

This list becomes a foundational asset for both marketing and outbound strategies.

Marketing here involves crafting a semantic core, creating lookalikes, and implementing various optimization techniques. Once you apply relevant ICP filters to Crunchbase, you should go through some of them manually to learn about them in more detail.

From there, your outbound team should select 500 companies for each SDR from the overall fit criteria companies list, and prioritize based on historical data and market insights. Then, they create an outbound sequence tailored for that market (in this case, UK fintech companies).

On average, one SDR should handle 20-30 prospects per day with a tailored and mindful approach.

Those companies SDRs engage with should also be nurtured by the marketing team for the much qualitative result that this synergy brings. I call it – healthy prospecting. Some others use the term – programmatic ABM.

To achieve accurate data, determine your average deal size. For example, based on how much your product costs, you’ll know how many clients you need to bring in to close that amount.

Then, how many leads are needed for that number of clients, based on the conversion rate you have through all stages of the funnel.

4. Lead qualification

At this stage, SDRs and BSDRs (business development representatives) qualify leads brought in by partners and marketing, before passing it to the sales team.

Done well, sales qualification reduces time required to decide of you’re talking to the right person.

Without having this step defined, you could be talking to hundreds of leads a day – only to end up with one or two closed deals to show for your effort.

You don’t want to work with clients who aren’t a good fit, right?

This could be because of budgetary issues, organizational challenges, or simply put, your solution might not be relevant to where they’re at right now.

Inset, you’ll want to pursue sales leads who are most likely to purchase your solution and properly get the most out of it.

Similarly, your target audience isn’t “everyone”. You have a well-defined, specific ICP for a reason.

To qualify leads, you can use BANT or SPICED qualification frameworks. You can choose from the variety of methodologies, the only thing tha matters – is why you are doing that and if the chosen methodology helps aligning teams.

Here’s what these two frameworks stand for.

BANT

• Budget: How much is the prospect willing to spend on your solution?
• Authority: Who is the authority in this sales that will make the ultimate decision?
• Need: Does the prospect have a true need for the solution?
• Timeline: How much time will the prospect need to make a decision?

SPICED (Winning by Design)

• Situation: Facts, circumstances, background details about your prospect.
• Pain: Challenges that brought the prospect your way.
• Impact: How you impact your prospect’s business.
• Critical Event: Deadline to achieve that impact.
• Decision: Process, committee, and criteria involved in purchasing the solution.

You need to ask the above questions based on the framework to qualify leads before getting on a call with them.

If they don’t fit your criteria, then you simply disqualify them and move on to other leads in your sales pipeline.

For example, if a lead doesn’t have big enough budget to afford your services, it doesn’t make sense for you to work with them.

Alternatively, your solution might be the best fit for UK FinTech companies making at least 6-figures. As a result, you wouldn’t work with startups selling a health product, for example.

You don’t need to get on a call with someone to figure this out.

As you can simply go through their website, read the founder’s story, analyze what their solution is – and then make a well-informed decision.

5. Offer and negotiation

Based on 1 or 2 calls, the sales team should craft a proposal for the prospect, outlining the exact plan to achieve your solution.

Based on the prospect’s reaction, you’ll want to move them in your CRM from negotiation, procurement, and contract phases, leading to “close won”.

Depending on your sales cycle, you’ll have different stages where the offer and negotiations phase.

Typically, you’ll want to create a proposal based on what you discussed in the call. That might include things like:

• What service you’ll be providing.
• What are your deliverables.
• Timeline.
• Pricing breakdown.
• Who is responsible for what.
• And other expectations

But it’s not like you can just send the proposal and call it a day.

With tools like Proposify, you can track when exactly leads take a look at your proposal and for how long.

For example, once you gain a notification that they’ve opened your proposal (which you gain access to through sales tools like Proposify), you can send a follow-up message accordingly.

From there, you can expect 3 possible outcomes:

• They say yes – Naturally, this is the ideal outcome. If this happens, you move forward with your plan and complete the sale. Update your pipeline, mark as closed, and get ready to deliver on your offer.
• They say no – Rejections are common in sales. The key to handling a ‘no’ is how you decide to move forward. Ideally, you’ll want to find out why they’re refusing. Then, see if you can persuade or handle any possible objections they might have to working with you. Keep in mind though, you don’t always have to persuade them to buy. If they can’t afford your pricing, for example, you can either down-sell or they just might not be your ideal client. Make sure you keep track of objections or other reasons leads might say no.
• They don’t reply – If this happens and they disappear, make sure to send follow-ups. If they still don’t reply, it’s likely your pricing doesn’t work with them or they went with a competitor. Consider following up again in a few months.

6. Review and analysis

Last but not least, Sales and Marketing teams should systematically review past closed lost deals/opportunities, where the loss reasons were related to time, budget, or need constraints.

To improve your overall sales process, you should be looking at the average close rate, average revenue per account, overall pipeline value per stage, and conversion oneach stage of your pipeline.

Here, you should leverage your CRM and other tools you use for your sales processes to gain a data-driven approach to sales for best insights.

Look at metrics such as:

• Number of deals/opportunities in your sales pipeline at a given time.
• Average length of sales cycle (average time between deal’s entry and when it closes).
• Average deal size (average amount of revenue generated from a single closed deal).
• Leads to opportunities conversion rates that leads to true sales opportunities.
• Win rate (sales opportunities converted to closed sales).
• Pipeline value by stage (total value of deals in each separate stage of pipeline).

Occasionally, you can also launch outreach campaigns targeting companies that work with your competitors, and test new campaigns. 

Final Words

So, to recap, creating a B2B sales pipeline can be a time-consuming, lengthy process.

But if you want to scale up as a business, it’s an essential step you can’t miss.

Done right, you’ll have a well-defined sales system getting you paying customers like clockwork. 

With both your sales and marketing teams being on the same page on how to generate and close more meetings.

As you might have noticed, one important part of this process has to do with prospecting and outreach.

Expandi helps sales teams fully automate their outreach and nurture sequences.

You can automatically import LinkedIn searches, scrape groups or Sales Navigator filters, create a campaign in under 20 minutes, and start seeing real results in under 24 hours…

Claim your free, 7-day Expandi trial now!