A VP of Sales shares how he increased his team's outbound pipeline by 142% in three months. The four steps: build a weekly pipeline-generation plan, maintain fresh call lists daily, add new prospects daily, and build target lists for ongoing success.
I was hired as a global sales VP with one urgent priority. Get my teams generating pipeline and just three months later we increased outbound pipeline generation by 142%. In this video, I'm going to teach you four things you can start doing today to more than double your outbound pipeline generation. I'm going to cover how to Build a great PG plan Two things to do every day to guarantee success in pipeline generation. The only way to break through the noise in prospecting and and then the two lists you need to build this week for ongoing pipeline generation success. Let's dive in. Most people watching this video have heard of PG plants, but very few have seen them done well. Done well they give you a foundation to build all of your pipe gen off of that will make you way more efficient. Done wrong, they're a waste of time to build and they end up as a worthless checklist. But they are so important that they were the first thing I implemented when I joined LaunchDarkly. The team was struggling and they needed that structure. The team the company had thrown off a ton of inbound only leads. Then the market got worse, the inbound slowed down. Sound familiar? And everyone in sales of the company started failing. Reps that were easily hitting the numbers before started hitting 50% or worse every quarter. As I assessed the team and processes, I knew that proper PG plan structure would make a huge difference. Here's exactly what your PG plan needs. First, your target accounts for the week. Your PG Plan should include 1 to 2 top target accounts if you're an enterprise, 3 to 5 if in mid market and 5 to 15 if in SMB. Then the prospects in each account you'll target. For each account you should have somewhere between three and 15 prospects on the lower end for SMB per account. More for enterprise, I like to break them out as above the line like your directors, VPS and C level and below the line managers and ICs. But it's not required. Accounts plus a few target prospects is where most PG plans end and they end up failing. You also need to add your point of view for each account across three categories. First pains and problems. What challenges is the company facing today that you can help with that you can help solve? Second, your initial value hypothesis. How do you think your product or service can add value or solve the problems you identified? And then three A relevant customer story. When you start prospecting into the account, you'll want to be ready to share great and relevant customer stories that will match to the account. Including this in your PG plan Make sure you are ready for these conversations the last piece of the PG plan is the key goal for the week for each account. Most reps think that the key goal is always going to be set a meeting, but it's actually kind of shortsighted, especially when you're targeting your valuable accounts that are harder to break into. Some of the best PG plans I see keep the same account on the list for several weeks in a row. The key goal for week one might be learn what they are using for feature management by cold calling engineers. The next week might be learn what goals and metrics the engineering team is measured by by cold calling managers. Then, once we've learned what competitive solution they're using and what their main goals are, we have a strong enough understanding of the account for our key goal to be set in meeting with a director or higher contact. By using the information learned in prior weeks, the best PG plans build on themselves week over week with evolving accounts, prospects and goals you can use for this. It's linked in the description. A great PG plan gives you struct for your week. You'll be organized and you'll spend less time thinking what should I be working on? But you still have to do the work. I've managed a lot of AES that are pretty good at keeping busy. They work a lot of hours, log a lot of calls, but they're constantly scrambling at the end of the quarter to try and scrape their way to their number. I've managed other AES that are really good at being productive. They make every hour in the week count and they're usually way over quotable before the quarter ends. Now that I've showed you how to build great PG plans, I'm going to share with you two of the things that the best reps I've worked with do every day to be consistent in building Pipeline. The first thing they do is they keep their call list super fresh to increase their probability of having conversations rather than just cranking out dials. Making a ton of dials to look busy is one of the most common feel good wastes of time in sales. I've even seen reps fake dials, which is not just a waste of time, it's it's pretty stupid. I remember being in the office as an SGR and in line for lunch hearing about one of the newer reps said this about and fired for logging fake dials. Just don't do this. It's easy for sales leaders to catch no matter how clever you think that you are. Plus, what's the point of looking busy if you're not actually generating pipeline that you can use to make a lot of money in sales. Calling stale lists of contacts you probably know won't answer or that you know probably won't answer won't get you fired, but it's still a waste of time. To avoid this, the best reps prioritize adding new prospects to their call list every single day. At least 10, but they'll shoot for 20 to 30 if you add at least 10 new prospects to your call list every day, you'll never run out of fresh people to reach out to, and you won't waste your time dialing through the same.
