Nothing feels better than smashing those sales targets with a sensational month of sales. While every good sales agent understands the value of having access to a good stream of quality leads, finding new leads is only one part of the battle—turning them into paying customers is the real challenge.
A successful pipeline generation strategy is crucial if you want to capitalise on your lead generation efforts and develop a sustainable stream of sales for your business.
In this useful guide, we’ll shed light on exactly what pipeline generation is, how it works and how you can grow your business’s sales pipeline.
- Pipeline generation encompasses the entire process of converting leads into customers, focusing on nurturing and managing potential sales opportunities at every stage, unlike lead generation, which primarily aims to attract leads.
- Effective pipeline generation involves a combination of identifying, qualifying, nurturing and converting leads. A winning strategy requires setting clear goals, understanding the target market, aligning sales and marketing efforts and using data analytics for continuous improvement.
- As experts in lead generation, Who Needs Leads offers tailored services ranging from targeted lead generation campaigns, helping businesses in Melbourne build robust sales pipelines for sustained growth and profitability.
Difference Between Pipeline Generation and Lead Generation
It’s a common misconception that lead and pipeline generation are one and the same, but they’re distinctly different, yet interconnected components of any sustainable sales strategy.
While you can always get the full run-down on lead generation and how it works in our detailed lead generation guide, for the purpose of this article, we’ll fill you in on the basics.
Lead generation is the process of attracting and capturing a potential customer's interest in a company's products or services. Leads can come from a wide range of sources including your website, search engines, social media, content marketing, online directories and listings, chatbots and live chats, online events and webinars or affiliate marketing.
Lead generation is one of the first steps in the sales process. Leads aren’t all made equal. While some leads might be considered ‘hot’ leads that are teetering on the brink of purchasing a product or service, others will require a lot more attention and nurturing before they’ll be ready to complete a purchase.
That’s where pipeline generation is so helpful. Pipeline generation is the process of creating and encouraging a consistent flow of potential leads or prospects through the various stages of the sales cycle, ultimately leading to conversions and revenue generation.
This involves identifying and engaging with potential customers, nurturing those relationships and guiding them through each step of the sales funnel until they become paying customers.
How Does Pipeline Generation Work?
Pipeline generation involves identifying potential customers (leads), nurturing them through the various stages of the sales process, and ultimately, converting them into paying customers.
Understanding the sales funnel
Before you can understand how pipeline generation works, it’s important to understand the sales funnel.
The sales funnel is the steps a potential customer goes through from initially becoming aware of your product or service, to making a purchase. These stages include awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation and purchase.
Here’s a quick run-down of what’s involved at each stage of the sales funnel:
- Awareness: A potential customer becomes aware of your product or service, often through marketing efforts, word-of-mouth or online searches.
- Interest: That potential customer becomes a lead by expressing interest in your offering by doing things like engaging with your content, visiting your website, following your social media profiles or interacting with your business in some way.
- Consideration: Leads actively consider your product or service as a solution to their needs, also comparing it with other options offered by your competitors.
- Evaluation: Leads thoroughly evaluate your offering, weighing up its features and benefits possibly through demos, trials or consultations to determine whether it will suitably meet their specific requirements.
- Purchase: The lead makes the transition to a customer by making a purchase, completing the transaction process and committing to your product or service.
A lot happens throughout the journey from awareness to purchase. Each new customer starts out as a complete stranger. It’s up to you to nurture them through the process of discovering your business, understanding what you offer, learning to trust your business, seeing value in what you offer, and eventually, becoming a paying customer.
As you can see from the above infographic, the sales funnel gradually narrows at each stage of the process. The narrowing represents leads that are lost throughout the sales process if they are not adequately engaged and nurtured.
While it’s inevitable that you’ll lose a percentage of the potential customers that enter your sales funnel, there’s a lot you can do to retain and guide as many leads as possible through the process to becoming a paying customer.
The pipeline generation process
As we mentioned before, pipeline generation is about creating and managing a consistent flow of potential leads or prospects through the various stages of the sales cycle, ultimately leading to conversions and revenue generation.
So how does it work? Effective pipeline generation requires a combination of strategies, tools and processes to attract, qualify and convert leads into customers and create a consistent stream of sales for your business.
Here’s how the process typically works:
- Lead Generation
The process starts by identifying and generating leads, which are potential customers who have shown interest in the product or service offered by the company.
- Qualification
Once leads are obtained, they need to be qualified to determine if they are a good fit for the company's product or service. This might involve assessing factors such as their needs, budget, authority to make purchasing decisions and timeline. This is a crucial step to ensure you don’t invest time trying to engage a lead that is either ineligible or highly unlikely to become a customer.
- Engagement and Nurturing
Once qualified, your sales and marketing teams engage with leads to build relationships and provide them with relevant information about the product or service they’ve shown interest in. This might involve personalised communication, a video demonstration or showing them other relevant content to further emphasise the features and benefits of your product or service and address any pain points they might be experiencing.
- Progression through the Sales Funnel
Once you successfully engage and nurture a lead, they’ll move through to the next stage of your sales funnel. With each progression to a new stage, your leads are likely to face new pain points or find new objections which might require you to do some extra nurturing to keep them interested and engaged. To do this, you may need to adjust your content, messaging or approach to reflect the new set of questions or objections they may be facing.
- Conversion
Once confident that your product or service will meet their needs, a lead may decide to complete a purchase.
If you manage to successfully guide a large proportion of leads through the consideration and evaluation stages of your sales funnel to become paying customers, congratulations! You’ve built a winning sales pipeline that can provide your business with a steady stream of sales, revenue and profit.
- Post-Sale Relationship Management
Even after a sale is completed, a successful pipeline generation strategy should include ongoing communication and relationship management with your customers to ensure they’re satisfied, encourage repeat business and possibly generate referrals.
Why Pipeline Generation Is Important
Pipeline generation is crucial for a business's success as it ensures a steady flow of potential customers through the various stages of the sales process, ultimately leading to conversions and revenue generation.
By continuously filling your pipeline with qualified leads and carefully nurturing them through your pipeline, your business will have a far greater chance of being able to maintain consistent sales activity, mitigate revenue fluctuations and sustain growth.
A robust sales pipeline provides visibility into the sales funnel, enabling sales teams to prioritise efforts, identify bottlenecks and allocate resources effectively. Moreover, it facilitates forecasting and decision-making, allowing businesses to set realistic targets, allocate budgets strategically and adapt strategies based on performance metrics.
Ultimately, a well-managed sales pipeline doesn’t just have the potential to drive revenue, but also enhance customer relationships, foster brand loyalty and position the business for long-term success in a competitive market landscape.
How To Build a Winning Pipeline Generation Strategy
Each business is different and requires a pipeline generation strategy that is tailored to their industry, sales model and target audience.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that will guarantee a steady stream of sales over the long term, here are some of our winning tips to build a successful pipeline generation strategy for your business:
- Know which leads are worth investing in: A good pipeline generation strategy ensures you invest your time and effort to carefully nurture the leads that are most likely to convert. To do that, it’s crucial to understand who your ideal customer is, their needs and wants, what they value and any challenges they might face along the way to becoming a customer.
- Consider each touchpoint along the customer journey: Carefully assess what experience you are providing prospective customers each time they have some form of contact with you, whether it’s seeing an ad, visiting your website or social media pages, submitting an enquiry or purchasing and using your product or service.
- Develop a good lead generation pipeline strategy: Even the most effective sales pipeline strategy is worthless if you’re not continually feeding new leads into it. Having a solid lead generation pipeline strategy will help you fill out your sales pipeline and ensure it never runs dry.
- Invest in post-sale relationship management: Never ignore the value of your past customers. Provided your customers have a positive experience dealing with you and are satisfied with your product or service, there’s a good chance they could become a repeat customer or even refer new leads into your sales pipeline.
- Closely monitor what happens at various stages of your pipeline: Are you losing more prospective customers from your sales pipeline than you should? It’s important to have visibility of what’s happening at each stage of your sales pipeline by using tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, sales automation tools and analytics to track and optimise the performance of your pipeline.
- Continually tweak and optimise your pipeline strategy: Don’t adopt a set-and-forget approach. If you identify an element of your pipeline where there might be room for improvement, don’t be afraid to tweak and optimise your approach to ensure you squeeze as much as possible out of your pipeline.
Best Ways To Fill Out Your Pipeline
To fill out your sales pipeline, you need to start from the beginning—finding quality new leads.
For any pipeline strategy to work, it needs to continually be fed new leads that are ready to be nurtured through the sales process, creating a steady stream of prospective customers who are always edging closer to conversion.
Lead generation can often seem like a mammoth task that requires a lot of time, money and effort. Then there’s the question of quality. You may invest all this work to capture the details of a new lead, only to find out they don’t pass the qualification test.
Rather than managing all your lead generation efforts yourself, the simple solution is to use a specialist lead generation company like Who Needs Leads to do all the leg work for you by creating a tailored lead generation pipeline for your business.
Key Takeaways
- Lead generation and pipeline generation go hand-in-hand.
- Leads are only valuable if you can convert them into paying customers, but not all leads are purchase-ready. A good pipeline strategy is crucial to your ability to nurture leads through your sales funnel.
- A quality pipeline strategy has the potential to generate a long-term, sustainable source of sales, revenue and profit for your business.
- Even the best pipeline strategy is worthless if it’s not continually being fed new leads.
- Using a specialist lead generation agency is the easiest way to fill out your pipeline.
How Who Needs Leads Can Help With Your Business’ Pipeline Generation
Who Needs Leads is Australia’s trusted finance lead generation company that can help you rapidly fill your sales pipeline with new leads.
Specialising in the finance industry, we’ve used our tried and tested lead generation techniques to capture over one million leads for 100+ brokers.
Leveraging the latest trends and technologies, our personalised lead generation strategies are the solution you need to find more customers, fill out your sales pipeline and grow your business.
How do we do it?
We’ve developed and own multiple brands within the consumer auto, commercial asset and equipment, working capital and mortgage and refinance space which we advertise on Meta, TikTok, Google Ads, YouTube and natively to generate leads for our partners.
Our specialised approach also ensures you’ll only receive good quality, pre-qualified leads. Utilising a multi-step questionnaire to capture multiple lead data points and filter out respondents who don’t meet your criteria, each lead is also pin-verified (using two-factor authentication) to ensure its legitimacy.
Once verified, we deliver the leads to you in real-time by your preferred method (whether that’s in a Google Sheet, email, SMS or fed directly into your CRM), with your first leads arriving in as little as 24 hours.
Fill out your sales pipeline now
Whether you’re after auto finance leads, personal loan leads, mortgage refinance leads or business loan leads, we can deliver you anywhere from 50 to 1,000 leads per month depending on what you need.
Fill out your pipeline and grow your business today with Who Needs Leads.