A sales leader argues that booking meetings isn't productivity if they don't matter. Instead of blaming marketing for weak leads, salespeople should own relevance: show up where prospects are, research what they actually care about, and start conversations about their problems, not your solution.
When we as salespeople here go generate pipeline, the thing that hits registered for us is go book a bunch of meetings. And we confuse being busy with being productive. And often I actually blame the leader far more than I blame the rep. Because we celebrate how many meetings we got booked versus I actually have a series of great conversations. So I think it was 2021 when I was like many sellers getting frustrated with marketing, saying, you know, where are my leads and why don't we have more leads? And my manager at the time said, look, you're not wrong, but you cannot put your W2 in the hands of somebody else. You're always going to be disappointed. Right. And so that was what really changed for me. That's when I started getting more involved in LinkedIn and I started realizing there are conversations happening before buyers have figured out what they want. And I was not having the same conversation with my buyers or when I was looking at my emails and the things that I was sending. And so the best tip that I can give you, the one that worked and truly changed the game for me, is is go show up where your buyers are hanging out and watch and observe what they're talking about. You can do something as simple as like Google the stakeholder that you sell to. Let's say you sell to a cio, Google CIO conferences, and then go look at what are the agenda topics. And that's going to give you a cue as to what your people actually care about. And then figure out, am I having conversations about those things? And if I'm not, stop for a second. Go get smart on those and get smart on connecting the dots back to the problem that you solve. I think the largely the biggest reason we have an issue with building pipeline is just because we're not relevant and we're trying to force a solution conversation when people are out there looking to learn.
