In this talk, the speaker highlights the critical gap many sales organizations have in tracking self‑sourced pipeline and proposes a disciplined, metric‑driven approach to pipeline generation. He explains how to reverse‑engineer quota by calculating average conversion rates and contract values, then setting aggressive pipeline targets—advocating a 5× pipeline assumption rather than the industry‑standard 3×. He stresses the importance of measuring activity (e.g., three self‑sourced meetings per week, 30‑day activity checks) and holding reps accountable. The speaker also shares practical sourcing hacks, such as mining closed‑lost deals, monitoring recent job moves, leveraging executive networks, and asking top customers for introductions to their former employers. Throughout, he ties pipeline health to personal earnings, emphasizing that sales performance—and thus compensation—is largely within the rep’s control if the right metrics and sourcing strategies are applied.
Chapters
So I think a couple of things here. One, one thing that really surprised me, sorry for any LinkedInners on the phone, but something that really surprised me when I got to LinkedIn was there was absolutely no metric around self sourcing pipeline, which I think is bananas. One of the ways that I've always been so, so consistently successful as a rep is I've thought never about what's going to be inbound for me with my BDRs, my marketing leads, etc. But really thinking about, okay, I owe a million dollars in quota. What's our, what, you know, what's the average of conversions, what's our average contract value? Doing the quota math and then working my way backwards from there to make my responsible for my own quota. I think one thing that is interesting is that I didn't instill that. So my expectation of my reps, right, which were enterprise grade reps, was I want you to have self source three meetings a week, which is really, really hard by the way. Three meetings a week, existing clients land and expand moles inside your company. It doesn't matter. Three meetings a week that hopefully turn to two demos, that turn to one opportunity. And it's a tough metric to hit. We're not going to hit it, right. But if we're striving for excellence, right, and if we can come close to that more often than not, really going to keep our foot on the gas. The other thing that I would just say in terms of motivation, one more thing to consider from a metric, companies always look at what their average win rate is and then expect that in terms of the amount of pipeline they have. So if a win rate is 33%, all you need to have is that 3x of your pipeline. What I've always thought about is always having that assumption that I'm going to hit 20% of the pipeline that I've got and that's going to close. I'm looking at that industry average and I'm keeping 5x as my metric, which again is really, really hard. But if you do that, not only can you build better relationships with your clients because you're not going to hustle somebody into having to be the only deal that's going to get you over the line. But it also means that if some of those deals do come in all at the same time, like you're going to get into accelerators pretty quickly. Keeping motivation on pipeline to me is just frankly, how much money do you want to make? It is completely in your control. That is the beauty of being in Sales, highest highs, lowest lows. But you, your effort, you really get to control the amount of money that you make. Final thing that I would just say like, you know, if one, if it's not measured, like I said, if it's not measured, it's not going to be done. So making sure that you as a leader are really keeping a hold on that metric. Are we bringing in the sales, are they moving forward, have we had activity in 30 days, etc. But then to making sure that we're looking in smart places for our pipeline. I think that we, most organizations do this all wrong, right? They're just going after their network, they're spraying and praying they're doing all this stuff. When instead we, we can look in our graveyard of closed loss deals from the last 18 months. We can look at people who have changed jobs. We can look at people who used to work for our employers that now work in our territory. We can look at people that are connected to our executives that are now in our territory. There are so many smart ways to look at this. When we were remix in Chicago, which sales assembly, Mason and Matt were so nice to host us for, but when we got to do that, Kevin Chu, who's the co founder of Catalyst, was on stage and one of the things that he talked about was asking your best customers for introductions to their last two employers. And I about fel of my chair, I was like, what the hell did I think of that? Right? Like, what a great hack. There are so many smart places for you guys to look for a pipeline. It doesn't have to be that hard.
