Why You Need a Sales Pipeline ASAP (Back to Basics Month!)

Hello. So here at the Business of Executive Coaching podcast, We are in April 2025 and this month our theme is Back to Basics. This month is all about foundations and specifically we're going to dive into the all the fundamentals, or some of the fundamentals I should say, that you need to have in place that is going to make everything in your business go more smoothly. They are some of this part of it is things you need to think about and decide. Some of are tools you need to have in place or assets, but all of them are really crucial building blocks.

That you need for other parts of your business.

Like always, we're going to be super practical with this series. I want every episode this month to give you some tips that will make your business better, your life easier, and your impact greater. So what we're going to cover is identifying your ideal clients, defining your offers, building your coach bio, and creating your sales pipeline. So while we can't go into detail on exactly how to do those things, I'm going to give you high levels, some thoughts, things you need to consider, and things that you should put in place in order to really support a flourishing business. I encourage you to keep coming back this month for all of the episodes or go back to prior episodes if you've missed some, because all of these foundations build on each other, so they all matter and they all flow somewhat sequentially. So who is this series for? This series is for you if you are just starting out in your coaching business. And it is for you if you have been in business for a while, but you have a sense that there are some steps along the way that you might have missed and you feel like there could be some merit in spending a bit of time going back to the basics. I want to be clear when I say basics that I don't mean oversimplifying business growth with a trite five steps to success kind of plan. Absolutely not. I mean, let's take a look at some of the foundations and then, then you can apply those in the context of your business, which is where a.

Lot of the complexity comes in.

I would also like to make an invitation and an offer to you today. If you're in a place where you want to set up your business foundations with structure and support so you can do it quicker and without reinventing the wheel. Or if you want my eyes on your business, your assets, and to give you practical advice on your specific context, I want to invite you to join the Corporate to Coach accelerator, which is the only way that I currently work hands on with coaches. So the accelerator is a 12 month right? So we're going to get to know each other really well. A 12 month program that helps you to build a plan to get to your next 10 corporate clients with less than 5 hours of marketing per week within an incredible community of coaches. The accelerator is the place to come if you want a regular place to get coached on your business needs, wherever you're at in your business growth cycle. And we have weekly group coaching calls at three different time zones so you can always have a chance to ask questions. It's also the place to come if you want a structure to put in place to help you with business fundamentals, business setup and business growth, specifically in the corporate or leadership or executive coaching space. So we have three standalone courses so pieces of curriculum that help us with all of this. So we have the Corporate to Coach Blueprint which is a 36 lesson 8 module digital course. We have the 90 day quick start Challenge where you set up all of the foundations of your business in 90 days and you can get feedback on.

All of your assets as you develop them.

And we also have the Business Development Accelerator where we put in place the processes and disciplines to get your next 10 corporate clients. It's also the place to come if you want to check that what you are doing is best practice so you can benchmark with other members. I offer video reviews and feedback on all of your assets, things like your bio, your website, your LinkedIn profile, your offers and so much more. The Accelerator is also the place to come to be part of a group of people who are in the same place and who have the same ambitions as you. So business ownership can be really lonely and having a weekly connection point with.

Peers is really incredible.

There is so much more inside the Accelerator. Think tools, templates, masterclasses, guest interviews. We even have a private podcast feed with all of our group coaching calls so you don't miss any gems that happen on the calls that you don't attend. So my invitation is to join us inside the Accelerator in April and my offer to help make this an absolute no brainer is to start with a no commitment one on one coaching call with me where we can identify one of your business foundations so I can give you some live feedback on it or or we can identify the foundations of your business growth plan. So we'll make sure that no matter where you're at in this call with me, we'll make it valuable and we'll make sure you walk away with some really practical and tangible advice we can Also discuss whether the accelerator would be a good fit for you. In my experience, most people that I speak to are a good fit. There aren't a lot of people listening to such a specific podcast that aren't.

In the right category, and many who.

I make go on to join the accelerator. And specifically, if you're curious, about 85% of the people that I meet with decide that joining the accelerator would be.

A great move for them.

So if you do decide to join, after booking a call with me during April, I have a special offer for all my podcast listeners which is one.

Month free on your membership, which means.

That you would join for 12 months, but you get full access to coaching reviews, everything for 13 months rather than 12. So if you think this sounds like it'd be interesting to you, please head to the Show Notes and book a call directly.

Or.

Or head over to LinkedIn, tell me you came from the podcast and we can book it in directly there. I really look forward to meeting you soon and talking about my very favorite thing, which is, I'm not sure this is surprising given how much I talk on this podcast, but my favorite thing is talking about you and your businesses. So let's dive in now.

Hello and welcome to the last episode of this podcast for April, which has.

Been Back to Basics Monthly.

So I have had lots of messages.

From people who've enjoyed this series.

So if that's you and you would like to have a chat, don't forget to book in a call with me ASAP where we can talk about your business priorities. Okay, so Back to basics. Today we are talking about sales pipelines. Now, I should clarify. I think that your sales pipeline is a basic as in Back to Basics, in that it is foundational or fundamental, but absolutely not basic as in it is simple. Right? It is actually not that intuitive, especially for coaches who may not be as confident or as excited about marketing and business development. But it is one of those things we need. Think of it as eating your vegetables.

So today I want to share what.

A sales pipeline is and why you, as a coaching business owner, should definitely have one. Okay, so what is a sales pipeline? A sales pipeline is a visual or documented representation of all of your prospective clients, Right. And where they are in a purchasing process. So that is anywhere from a lead to a warm or qualified lead, to a meeting or discussion stage, to sending a proposal, to negotiating, to becoming a client. Right? But while the visual representation of the pipeline is what we're talking about, the most significant part of it is really the existence of the thing that is represented in the pipeline, and that is the progress of leads, you know, organizational clients that are going through your sales funnel. Now, if we think about sales in our business as a funnel, then anyone who comes into our orbit is in some way part of our sales funnel. So at the top of our funnel are our leads. Leads are people who have entered orbit, who we have permission to communicate with. And they might be cold. And to be honest, we don't really spend a lot of time in the accelerator talking about cold leads for a number of reasons, the most important of which is effectiveness. Or these leads might also be warm or hot, and that's where. Where we focus our energy. So through your strategies, things like outreach or content strategy, a proportion of those warm or hot leads are then going to become even warmer to a point that they become prospects, right? So lead becomes a prospect. A proportion of those people are then going to agree to meet with you. A subset of those who meet with you will have a real opportunity that they would like you to pitch for. Right. And you will send a proposal. You know, and sometimes you're pitching in competition. Sometimes you are the only person they're having a conversation with. That's my favorite. But a small subset or a subset of those people you pitch and send indicative pricing or proposals through to a set of those will then become clients. Right? So we've had people work through a funnel, and a group of those will sort of pop out the bottom as clients. And many of those that you've engaged with through this process will remain in your funnel and will convert later when they have a real opportunity. Right. So there may not be something specific now, but it may be that later on they have something. So your investment of time all the way through your funnel can pay off. And it might pay off quickly, or it might pay off in six months or 12 months. So that is what your sales pipeline is capturing. But why am I suggesting that you put all this effort into building one? Like literally building the spreadsheet or the pipeline tool to capture the data of your sales funnel? I want to share today. And you know, and it's not. I'm not going to go on for long because I think these are really important. But I've got three key reasons why I think you need a sales pipeline. And most of them come down to the benefits of having visibility of your sales and marketing efforts and outcomes. So the first reason that you should have a sales pipeline is that it lets you work with data rather than feelings. So what do I mean? Okay. So I talk to a lot of coaches and there is often a lot of anger anxiety that is associated with our business development activity. And a lot of that anxiety boils down to questions like, am I doing the right things in my marketing? Am I going to. Am I able to build a sustainable flow of business? Or there's no money coming in right now. You know, the sky is falling. You might recognize some of those from your own greatest hits. And sometimes those things are true. Like, I'm not denying that there are times at which this can be super stressful and it is legitimately and objectively true. But often what is happening is that you are viewing your business through a negativity bias, right? So, for example, you have one meeting that doesn't go well, or you don't hear back and you assume that all of the meetings are going to go badly, or that there's no prospect of these things working, or that people like that are never going to buy from you, or you have a down month, right, where you might have even a zero revenue month. And then suddenly you're worried that every month is going to be a zero revenue month and you can't see the opportunity. You can only see the lack of certainty and the lack of income in the door. It's hard to then see, you know, all of this work that is sitting in your pipeline. What having a pipeline does is it lets us take our feelings out of the equation and look at what is right. So look at the facts and look at the data. It lets us say, for example, okay, well, let's say April has been a low revenue month. But let me see, I've got five proposals out there that I anticipate landing in May and June. And the value of those proposals is $150,000. Now, if three of those come through, then that might translate to $90,000 of revenue in two to three months. Right? But it hasn't landed in April. But I've done the work to build the pipeline. But if all we' looking at is, you know, what's actually sitting in my bank account and my feelings about that, then it's really hard to sort of have that faith that things are working the way they. They should do. So it's also really, I don't think you can underestimate the value of removing some of the emotional labor of business through having data that you can easily access. And what that means is like when someone like, so, for example, if I'm talking to my clients and I say, hey, you know, how does. How's your pipeline looking? What most people do when I first ask them that is that they go, oh, it feels. It feels. And I'm using that language deliberately. It's feeling like this is going to be tough, like it feels hard. It doesn't feel like things are going to work out. I'm worried. And that's the feeling. But if I ask them that question, they've got a sales pipeline. What they can do is they can actually say, well, no revenue came in in April, but if I look at my projected revenue for the rest of the year, it actually looks like a really solid year. And, you know, if 50% of what is currently in my pipeline converts, then that looks like this amount of revenue. And then, so then if I want to increase that, then I know that I've got to build up certain areas to have, you know, more in the pipeline. So it lets us focus on the data, which lets us be strategic with our actions, and it lets us get out of that cycle of reacting, rather responding. Okay, so a second reason that you should have a sales pipeline is that a pipeline is a key strategy to make sure that opportunities don't fall through the cracks. So you are likely doing a lot of marketing and business development. But if you're honest with yourself, I wonder if there are times when you have not followed up, when a prospective client, for example, might have said that they would like to meet, or when you haven't sent a proposal within a reasonable period of time. That's super important. Or when you've had a meeting and you were waiting for more information or for an introduction to a different stakeholder, but you didn't follow up and now you feel like too much time has passed or you know, all of those sorts of things where you haven't followed up, maybe that, you know, you've been maybe subconsciously hindering yourself, or it might be that you have your systems you just have forgotten. But you, you really. I don't want you to let any opportunities fall through the cracks because I want you to be sure that all this effort you're expending on business development and marketing, that you get the most out of that investment of the time and you bring it home. Right? So a sales pipeline is a way of tracking your activities and making sure you never forget to, you know, follow the bouncing ball and implement the next step of the process and follow up, and follow up, and follow up. So the third and final reason why I think you must have a sales pipeline is that it will keep you honest. Now, what do I mean, no, I don't think you're lying to anyone, but I think that there could be a chance that you are diluting. That's a strong word, diluting yourself in terms of what levels of activity are required to hit your revenue goals. So I have a method I teach where we step backwards from your annual revenue target and we break it down into your offer, offers and pricing. And then we figure out, well, what activity level is actually going to be required to hit that target. Right. We want to be so granular as to have a hypothesis about how many proposals we need to send, how many sales meetings we need to have, how many conversations we need to be having, how many outreach messages we need to send, and so on. And when we know those numbers, our pipeline lets us see very starkly if we are hitting that level of activity. And it also lets us track which part of the funnel might be letting us down. Right. So do we have trouble hitting our target percentages of sales meetings that convert to proposals or proposals that are accepted or conversations that, you know, where we go from outreach to having a meeting. Right. We start to be able to see the data, see the details of those things so that we can then strategize. And we might have to strategize in saying, well, actually what I thought was a reasonable amount of outreach needs to be, you know, 10x or 3x or it means that, you know, I might need to fix the way I'm having sales conversations. So it informs our strategy, it informs our priorities. So I hope that has been pretty clear that I think having a sales pipeline is a must. So I teach the how of the pipeline inside the accelerator. But you can also create your own tool, as in such a simple away as a spreadsheet if you want to do it yourself. If you would like to learn more about the accelerator, I can tell you about how we build, you know, the support I give to build a sales pipeline inside there. And if it might be a good fit for you, head over to the Show Notes to book a call with me. Or you can go to elliscarf.com book and let's have a chat. So have a great week and I have got an awesome interview for you for our first episode of May. See you then.