037. Pipeline Acceleration: a Critical Component of your Demand Generation Program

Foreign hi and welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. You might be wondering who am I? And I might tell you, I am Gabriela Garcia. And from now on I'm going to be co hosting with my brother, Emilio Garcia. For those who have you have been here before and for those who haven't, we focused on demand generation and we are geared towards marketers and professionals that are in the field. So enjoy and feel free to contact us through the comments. For more information about the show and our company, Bondifi. We will be happy to answer once the episode is done. Like I said, you already know who he is. So, Emilio, tell us, how are you today?

I'm doing fine. I'm doing great, Gabi, and welcome to the show. And I'm also really, really excited to share the stage with you. I'm sure that while what we share is valuable for demand generation professionals is going to be way more enjoyable than just me talking by myself. So I'm really happy that I have the opportunity to share the state with you. And I hope that, you know, future episodes we can also invite more people and have, you know, not just monologues, but also dialogues and conversations and even debate on things that are happening right now in the demand generation area.

Thanks and I agree. So now let's get down to business. What are we going to discuss today? Well, you might have heard the terms pipeline acceleration and demand generation, right? But did you know that pipeline acceleration in a demand generation program refers to the process of increasing the speed and efficiency at which potential customers move through the sales funnel and from initial engagement to becoming a paying customer, you might write. So let's discuss this. Furthermore, as we explain to you why pipeline acceleration is a critical component of your demand generation program, I would like Emilio to give us his point of view. What do you think of the matter that we're going to discuss today?

Yeah, I believe that obviously it is a very important part or a critical portion for those of you that are new to the whole concept of demand generation. Hopefully those of you listening already have an idea. But for those of you that don't, I typically try to divide the demand generation fallen into four distinctive parts. We have the first two that are the ones that are bringing people into the brand and they're called demand creation and demand capture efforts or initiatives. And usually demand capture is to find people that is already searching for the category of the product, not necessarily for your brand, but for the category of the product usually happens on search engines and you can reach out to them through either paid Efforts like paid search on Google or through content that get indexed on Google or other search engines, typically called SEO. And then you have this whole group of people that is the right buyer, right? Your ideal client profile. It belongs to the market that you want to advertise or target. But they might not have intent right now, or they might not be aware of the potential solutions available in the market. Sometimes they're not even aware of the problem that they have themselves. They just express the symptoms. That whole group of people that is unaware or aware, but not intending right now to search for a potential solution. Usually you use social media and other channels where there's no intent necessarily, and you can advertise to them or you can just reach out organically through social communication. So demand creation and demand capture help you bring people to your website or to the other digital properties that you have. Once you have them there, usually you implement some kind of conversion effort, and I will call it just demand conversion, to transform as many as possible of those anonymous visitors or people that have not obtained into communications with you to do so. That's your forms and off content offers or webinars or any other kind of event or activity where you exchange some information from them in exchange for some content of value that your company can provide. Once you have them on a database or when someone has expressed interest in the company, it's not that they're going to buy from you magically. Right. There is a process that they follow, usually on their own nowadays, that the sales team within the company can influence, but that a demand generation specialist can also influence to some degree. And that's what we mean, or what we call pipeline acceleration. Because the pipeline or the process that someone will follow from the moment that they express interest up to the point that they actually buy will happen on its own anyway. But there are things that can be done to accelerate it to some point.

I agree. So now we're going to talk about what is demand generation funnel, which is another part of the topic we're discussing today. We know that the demand generation funnel is an important tool for businesses to understand and track obviously the progress of their leads and customers. How they do that? Well, they optimize each stage of the funnel and these companies can improve their conversation rates and increase the revenue through the my generation funnel. So what can you say that it's something that you can use through the generation funnel to accelerate the pipeline?

Yeah, there are some activities that you can implement. I think we were talking about this when we were rehearsing and planning this first event, I'm an engineer by trade and you know, whenever possible you can use formulas, equations or concept from physics to explain things, even on areas like marketing or sales. And there's one for sales that I like a lot. I think it comes from, maybe it doesn't come from, but the first time that I remember seeing it was from a company called Terminus, which is a account based provider company and they call it sales velocity. So the way that they describe the funnel, beyond the fact that you have stages, right. Someone express interest and then they had an initial meeting, a conversation, they might have a, a second, a third conversation, eventually there's a proposal and finally they close. That's helpful to understand the process itself. But usually the challenge for a demand generation specialist or a B2B market in general is that they struggle to understand from the stages what they can do about it to improve the performance. And so a better way is to use this concept of sales velocity. And the idea behind it is that if the goal of the company, especially if the sales department is to maintain or increase revenue, part of that will happen by the volume of opportunities that you have and how quickly they go through that funnel. So it's an idea like, similar to speed, but there's a formula and that formula has actually four components, not two. It's not just the raw volume of opportunities and the speed of them, but there are another two that it will be helpful to discuss. And that is for me the best way to tackle the question of what is a demand generation funnel. Well, it's a funnel where you have, yes, the volume of opportunities that you are getting at them and they will have different stages, but it also matters how fast are they moving through the cycle. And I want to stress that the speed is not just up to the seller. It's usually depending on the buyer. The buyer is the one that is moving at some pace. So I'm not saying let us annoy the buyer and ask for a sale all the time. Rather let us discover what are the things that we do during that buying process and find if there are places where we can do changes to speed up the process, but also given benefit and value to the buyer itself. It's not just because we obviously want to improve the revenue of the company, but also we want to provide value to the client because ultimately that is what will have the biggest impact.

I agree. And this leads us to what are the different stages of the demand generation funnel along with the buyers journey. Right, let's talk about this. I think it is also important to understand that the funnel should not be seen as one time event, but rather than that as a continuous process that requires monitoring, optimization and nurturing, which is I think the key to accelerate that funnel. By understanding each stage of the funnel and the buyer's journey, a company can tailor its demand generation efforts and move those leads through the funnel and convert them into customers. So I will like you to try to explain to us what are those stages which are the key points to those stages along the buyer's journey.

Yeah, I obviously every company will have their own definition of the stages that work for them. There are some general principles that can be applied. The first question that usually some companies and clients will have is should I have one? Funnel or pipeline is also called, it's more popular to call it pipeline acceleration. The funnel acceleration. Probably the first thing that companies have to ask is what kind of services or products do I sell? And if the sales process of each of those categories or business units is different, then you will need a pipeline or a funnel for each of them that will have different stages. The most popular example that I can find is when you have products or services that are sold in a one time event or large project that lasts a short period of time. Imagine that you launch a new treatment plan or someone hires you to do a big audit or a similar service that is a one time event and they will not continue to recur over time. That will have a very different sales process that a type of product where you are offering ongoing services. Imagine a contract for a year or two years and where you will have to pay on a monthly basis, more of a subscription. So the first question is how many pipelines do I need? And once you have those, then you can build those stages again. It can be two stages, three stages, it can be 20. But a general recommendation is I wouldn't make them super granular. Having a lot of steps, usually that's not helpful for the sales rep. And that is one of the reasons sometimes they don't use CRMs because it's super complicated. But I obviously I will not make it so simple that you cannot act on the stages and do something about it. But probably the biggest thing to remember or take for stages, what kind of stages you need for the funnel, is that they need to be seen from the buyer's perspective and not from the seller's perspective. And let me put you an example of that. For example, there are cases where someone says, well, my first stage is that I reach out to the buyer. So that's from the seller point of view that happened instead of saying the buyer agreed to have a meeting with me. Which is actually something that if you look at again from the buyer's perspective, it's like, oh yes, I took a step. And so if the stages can be seen from the buyer perspective, that's better or helpful rather than from the seller. And the other one that is also super critical there is that each stage can be corroborated. That is actually there's a way to say that had happened because if not, then that definition will move over time. And one example of that is like you have to say something like contract received rather than something like buyers bought in. Right. Which is usually means that they told me that they feel that the proposal is good. How do you check that? And instead if you say something like, well, contract received, you have the evidence that a contract was prepared and that it was sent through an email or any other form to the buyer and that the buyer said I have it. And so it's a very easy way to check that stage. If you are working on improving the stages. I will focus on those two things, make it buyer centric and make it easy to check on facts.

All right, so now that we are talking about different stages and all of this, I, I would like to discuss to the benefits of accelerating your sales pipeline, which is obviously very important to this matter because it's actually what's going to give you those keys. This is the main objective of accelerating that pipeline among many that we are going to find out here. What do you think that in your personal opinion would be the one that it's always like a checkpoint, like something that you have to do?

I think we will cover some of them, each of them as a specific example. But before we go through them, I will go back to that idea of the sales velocity, right? The four levels or levers that you have to change the sales velocity for better or for worse. And so the first one is the volume of opportunities. That is the one that is the easiest to understand and usually the one that most marketing and demand generation team focus. If you, you are getting 20 leads or 10 qualified leads per month and you want to sell more, probably what you might need to do is to just double that amount. You will not cluster necessarily as many. If you are not cautious on how you are sourcing those leads. If you are just sourcing them because you need to hit the number, you might have lower quality. But it makes sense to say, well, if I want to increase sales velocity, I just need more opportunities that's the one thing that you can do how that will be a different conversation, but that's one lever that you have. The second one is how do you increase the probability that the opportunities close? There is this con, the second part of that equation, sell velocity, is close rate. What percentages of the opportunities that I start or open actually close as business. The other way that you can do this is I will have the same number of opportunities, but I will do better at closing, maybe in qualifying them or presenting a better process or being more effective on showing how the solution might help them in the future or making just easier for them to buy. So if I can increase the close rate from 10% to 15% or 20%, then I don't need more leads. I will work with the same one, but I will have more revenue and therefore I will increase the sales velocity. So that's the second level or lever. The third one is the deal size. This is also one that is not always easy for the marketer to implement because it will depend on more of the product management team. But is if I'm having this conversation and it will cost me in money, time and effort the same amount to sell $10,000 of services than to sell $20,000 of services. Maybe what I need is larger engagements. And so that's part of the reason sometimes companies go up market or bundle or upsell cross sell. It's not an easy task. But that's another way in where you don't have to just increase the amount of opportunities, you just make them larger. And finally everything staying on the same time is the speed of the deal itself. You say, well, I have deals and on average they tend to take six months. Why? Because once we get a lead, it takes us three or four days to contact them. And once we have an initial conversation, it takes another week to get the most the subject matter moderate expert from our company to talk to them. And then the contract, we have to build it from zero every single time instead of having template and packages and so forth and so forth. So if your sales cycle is very long, one thing that you can do is just make it shorter. And you make it shorter by automation, but reducing the complexity by eliminating friction. Again, something from physics. If you do that, even if you don't, if you don't bring more opportunities, even if they're not larger, even if you don't close as many or you close the same amount of opportunities, you will increase the velocity. The same deals will grow faster. So your sales rep will be able to focus on new Opportunities that will come down the pipeline. Those four aspects can be changed and therefore those are the benefits. For example, if you work on reducing that sales cycle because it will increase velocity, that will be a benefit. I think that one is incredible because it's helpful for the buyer, is helpful for the seller, it reduces waste, it is very good, but is the one that looks like working on process improvement because you have to walk through your sales process and understand where are the pain points and automate where it makes sense. But that's one of the first benefit. Obviously the second benefit is it doesn't matter what of those four points you work with, you will increase sale velocity and that will increase revenue, which is helpful for the company. However, I will say that out of the four, the one that increases revenue but not necessarily keeps the cost at the same level will be to just increase the raw number of opportunities, which is sadly the one that is usually choose because that is the easiest. But the problem is that to increase the revenue using that way, you just need to put everyone to work more, right? Because there's more conversations to have that will take as long as they have been before. And you might have the same or worse close rate that you had in the past because maybe trying to get more of them, you didn't pay too much attention on the quality itself. So I think that increasing their opportunities by themselves is the worst of the four things that you can do. But any of the four will definitely increase your revenue. Obviously if you shorten sales cycle or you increase the deal amount, or you increase the percentage of opportunities that a sales rep close, then another big improvement or impact or benefit for the company will be boosting the sales rep productivity with the same people or with a slightly more people, you will accomplish way more. And that's not only helpful for the company, is helpful for the person itself. They will be doing more meaningful work and accomplishing more and necessarily working more hours, if that makes sense. And finally, I think it is clear from these suggestions that nothing like this will happen if marketing and sales do not agree on some terms and some initiatives. The biggest one is to improve the percentage of opportunities that close. Practically not the only way, but the main way that you make that happen is that sales and marketing get alignment on what a good opportunity is, what is the right buyer, what is the right profile of the company that I want to close, Having the right materials to present to the buyer, and making the proper qualification process to pass to sales only opportunities that have a higher chance of closing and then nurturing the Ones that are not ready. One of the benefits of implementing these techniques is that you will improve communication between those two teams.

I highly agree on that. Because that increased visibility and collaboration between those departments. Right. Providing that visibility into the sales pipeline will accelerate and will increase obviously collaboration between those two sales and marketing teams. And obviously this will improve alignment around common goals that they might have. And maybe they're not communicating as well or not even trying to because they're working separate ways or different objectives. And that's the main reason. I guess that is one of a. One of the key points too. Okay, now let's pass to another subject, which is what are the ways that we can accelerate that so sales and increase our pipeline. What do you think are those ways?

Yeah, some of them. Probably someone that is listening right now will get a sense already. Right. I have to work on those four areas, but obviously we'll say, well, how exactly? So here are some ideas. Some of them apply mostly for B2B but can be implemented to some extent on B2C scenarios. But the first one, the account based selling, I think is one approach. Focus on that idea of alignment between marketing and sales. Because usually for B2B sales, we already know definitely the type of companies that we want to sell to, but usually also the names of the companies themselves. We already know the big brackets of companies that we want to sell to, especially on the enterprise and medium sized type of companies. Maybe for the small companies that will be a very broad group of people and companies and we will not have name accounts. But for the larger ones we usually do. And so one way to improve the performance of marketing efforts is to say, well, let us focus on those campaigns. Fortunately, there's a lot of business data available about companies and the people that work at those companies, especially in larger ones. So you can target them directly. If you're doing that digitally through advertising and if you are doing just in the real world, there are trade shows, associations, magazines that is specifically catered to those group of people. So if you have that in mind, you can use account based selling or account based marketing to talk to them directly. That will be one option or one thing that you can do to accelerate the pipeline. Another important thing is sales automation, of course, right. It goes with that reducing the friction and shortening the sales cycle. And there are many tools that can help you accomplish that. Automation platforms like HubSpot and many, many more that will allow you to especially take tasks that the sales rep do very frequently or especially if you want to standardize the way that they do things. A word of caution there is do not start automating because you can't or because, you know, it's a nice or cool thing to do. It really automation has to come after you have really invested time and understanding the process. And when you walk through the process, the first question that you have to ask is not should I automate this? The first question is, should I eliminate it? The first question is, do I need this step or can I just completely eliminate it? And if I can eliminate it, can I simplify it, make it faster, or combine it in a way that it doesn't take so much time out of a person? And only if I cannot do that, if I cannot eliminate it, try and change it, or simplify it, and still this is requiring a lot of investment from a person or from a group of people, then the question of should I automate it? Should arise. Because if we automate things that are not optimized, we are just magnifying the waste instead of reducing it. So definitely sales automation is a great idea across the board, especially to improve sales cycles, but use it with care, right? And one final one which applies to many of these kind of initiatives, especially for process improvement on accelerating the pipeline. This is start at the C level, right? Start with management. You need at least the buying of the head of sales and the head of marketing to work on this together. That's for starters. And for more complicated process or more complex process, probably the person responsible for customer success or service will have to also be involved. Because one of the things that accelerate the pipeline and impact revenue generation is to first understand if your clients are happy, if they are not happy, do something about it. And if they are happy with the service that you offer, leverage that in the form of testimonials or recommendations, or upsell and cross sell opportunities to increase the revenue coming from your current clients and not just from leads and prospects that you might have. So I think, you know, obviously there are more and more things that can be added to the list. But I will say that as long as you have in mind those four concepts or those four levers, right? Volume of opportunities, speed or sales cycle, percentage of opportunities close and deal size, I think you're going to be fine.

I agree on that too. This has been aligning the. This is what we all are always or often looking for in information in new ways or maybe things that we already know that we can do, but we don't have like a guideline, right? So there's like a key. I don't know, like a tip, like a pro tip that you can provide or you can say to the audience that it's going to see this on about this topic.

Well, I will say that probably you want to start with an action right away. And it's very hard when you have a complex process and you have many opportunities. I like the idea of the 2080 rule I think it's called in English, right, Is that look at the 20% of the stuff that will have 80% of the impact and start there. Instead of trying to fix everything at the same time, everything will have an opportunity. Really focus on the ones that will have the highest impact and that will help you get the buying from the rest of the organization to work on the other 80 or continue to just focus on the 20. Right. I will say that to put this thing in action, focus on the important aspects and work from there.

That's something really important to keep in mind too. So let's just say goodbye to our audience and hopefully we'll see you guys on the next episode. Please don't miss it. Get notified. There's the link down below and we are glad to be here. I'm super glad to be here on this time. Hopefully we get to talk again. Have a nice day and see you. On another episode of the Man Gin Studio, Gabriela Garcia and my brother Emilio Garcia. And hopefully guys, a good day.

Thank you, Gami.