A sales pipeline revolves around potential clients that come into contact with your company or product and the steps your sales representatives take to nurture that lead to purchase your goods or services.
To create an effective sales pipeline for an agency, you’ll need to construct it using data and analysis based on customer data and sales trends. This will allow you to help agencies to develop better strategies down the road that will help them drive more sales and grow your business.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to build a sales pipeline for an agency, covering:
What a Sales Pipeline Is
Stages of a Sales Pipeline
How to Position Yourself Against Competitors
Want to learn more? Dive in.
What Is a Sales Pipeline?
As mentioned above, a sales pipeline is how you keep track of your sales process. It’s meant to help your sales and marketing teams track buyers as they process through the stages of purchasing a product or service.
Building a successful pipeline for an agency will help them see the number of deals their team is working on, where each prospective buyer is in the sales process, and how much each deal is worth.
All these are important to hitting critical revenue targets and managing sales teams. Without a strong sales pipeline, your team is flying blind as to what is going on with prospects.
Sales Pipeline vs. Sales Funnel
Having a robust sales pipeline and a sales funnel are two different things.
A sales pipeline refers to steps that your sales reps take during the sales cycle when moving ideal customers from contact to close.
On the other hand, a sales funnel focuses on sales leads. It includes the stages in the buying process that your potential customers go through before becoming customers.
Stages to Build a Sales Pipeline
It’s important to know that there’s no one way to build a sales pipeline for an agency. It will depend on the kind of company and industry they are in.
However, any business that follows a typical B2B sales process will likely have these built into their sales pipeline stage.
1. Have a Solid Way to Generate Leads
Before you can sell to cold prospects, your business has to have a solid online profile. This means that you have to have a solid outreach marketing strategy, including cold emailing, SMS, or LinkedIn outreach.
You can use outreach tools, like QuickMail, to set up campaigns that will help you generate leads for your business. It’s important that you target people who fit the profile of the business you are building a pipeline for as you set up workflows.
After all, the goal is to find qualified prospects who are interested in the services the company you are helping offer.
2. Remember to Qualify Leads
Qualifying potential leads is about finding out whether a sales prospect will buy a product. This is a vital step in the sales process as you don’t want the agency’s team wasting time and energy on a potential client who is unlikely to buy.
When you’re trying to find the right buyer, you’ll want to find out:
Can your service solve a problem for the buyer?
Is your service or product affordable?
Is the potential customer the right person to make decisions?
If it doesn’t work out with a prospect, agency’s can always focus on qualifying and reaching out to other leads.
3. Help the Agency Contact Leads
After you have outreach software and a way to qualify leads, the agency you are building a pipeline for should consider contact their leads.
This could include:
Cold emailing: After curating an email list of prospects and importing to a cold email outreach platform like QuickMail, you can contact potential customers through email.
LinkedIn outreach: With QuickMail, you can also create LinkedIn outreach campaigns that will help you send messages to prospects and follow up based on the sequences you set.
How to Position Yourself Against Competitors
As a services business, you have two options to position yourself against your competitors:
A differentiated business model that would cost your competitors to lose money if they tried to copy you (Counter Positioning).
A smaller and more focused niche (Branding).
Counter Positioning
This power relies on differentiating your business model to the point where your competition can't afford to replicate it. Think of Netflix's DVD-by-Mail business as compared to Blockbuster. Blockbuster certainly could have offered DVDs by mail, but doing so would have lost more money in the short run than they would have made. When Toptal first launched its talent platform, it had a new business model counter-positioned against recruiters and outsourced development shops. Their metrics from outbound were a factor of 5, better than any of their competitors.
Branding
Life is much better when you’re a big fish in a small pond. Positioning your company to service a smaller niche means adapting your business to the unique needs of a smaller segment of a broader industry. A successful example is a whiteboard video company repositioning itself from a general digital marketing tool to medical explainer videos. Suddenly, they went from campaigns that could hardly get replies to ones that were consistently filling up their AEs' calendars. This repositioning of their business was so successful that the company created a separate brand focused on servicing that specific niche in the market.
Why spend so much time discussing branding and business models in a post about building a pipeline? A solid offer to a well-defined market is critical in any go-to-market campaign. Some call this product-market fit, positioning, or nailing your niche. Whatever you call it, solving new or old problems in new ways is the best way to give your team the best chance of getting a positive result from your go-to-market efforts.
Now that you have your positioning, what comes next? Here are the steps:
Build out your total addressable market (TAM).
Do the sales math (how does it make sense to invest to convert one customer)
Choose your style (do I want to optimize for efficiency or effectiveness).
Look for signals/intent data in the market (are there any externally facing signals that would imply that an account is more likely to be a good fit right now).
Create your messaging/sequences (write your messaging to speak to what makes you unique for the particular niche you’re reaching out to).
Build Out Your TAM
Step one is identifying the total number of accounts and contacts that represent your market. We're not just looking for the top-down “the market is this big” kind of data. We are looking for accounts and contacts counts. Your best approach is to identify all possible accounts using multiple data sources. We usually shoot for LinkedIn + one business data provider (like Apollo.io). The number of reachable accounts and contacts will flow into your outbound sales math equation (next step) and ultimately decide your B2B sales development style choice.
Outbound Sales Math
Step two is working out the profitability of the program. The first year will be the worst year, so we advise companies to calculate profitability for year 2 and beyond stats. Here's a sample worksheet that you can play with. It assumes a 90-day ramp to productivity for Sales Reps, which might be fast for a new program at a new company. It also assumes a 30-day sequence to booked period which represents the time it takes a potential customer to go from being added to one of your sequences to booking a meeting.
One last thing to note is that most companies do worse in the first year while running into random roadblocks and significantly better in the second year after they’ve worked through them all. It’s common during this period of working out roadblocks that sales leaders assume that difficulty now means difficulty forever. This is not how it goes. The first months are the worst, so be prepared to persevere when obstacles arise.
Remember that a ramped SDR team scales significantly from a cost perspective than most ad-driven demand generation channels at the end of the day. An SDR team also provides a great talent pool from which to hire.
Choose Your B2B Sales Funnel Style
Before you start writing your messaging or creating sequences, you need to make an optimization choice between efficiency (volume approach) and effectiveness (personalized approach). These are the bookends of the spectrum, and there are many steps in between that are a combination of the two. The size of your market and the cost of your product will factor heavily into which style will be most appropriate. Here are some rough guideposts:
Large market / low-cost product-volume approach
Small market / high-cost product - personalized approach
With a large market and a low-cost product, your best bet is to invest as little time into each prospect as possible to get a meeting. Large markets are best suited to a volume email approach because you can skim the most interested potential buyers off the top with an un-personalized email marketing sequence. Just send more sales emails applies here. Your overall conversion rates will be lower, but your total output will improve.
With a smaller market and a higher-cost product, your best bet is investing more time per potential customer because you don’t want to burn through the list of prospects too quickly. A high-volume email marketing campaign would work, but it might only last 1-3 months. Then what? Instead, we recommend personalizing the approach at the personal or account level. This means researching and writing personalizations by hand for each person or account you come across.
Look for signals
Sometimes the best list of target accounts you can work on is just a bunch of names and nothing fancy. Other times, you can identify a few externally facing factors that indicate an account is more or less likely to buy. I’ll give you a few examples I’ve seen, but these will vary widely based on the problem you help companies solve. Here are a few ideas:
Hiring activity - are they attempting to hire, or have they recently hired a related job title
Organizational structure - do they have a specific type of role or a certain number of job titles that indicate your problem space might be more of a priority
Public filings/social/blog content - have they posted content that mentions a related keyword or phrase?
Many of these can be researched by hand and then automated with powerful tools like Clay. I’ve built a whole library of enrichments/signals, so feel free to contact me on LinkedIn if this interests you.
Create your sequence
The job of our sequence messaging is to write/say the fewest words we can and still book the meeting. The sequence structure (calls/emails/etc.) and level of personalization will be dictated by your style. If you could find a trigger or signal, the messaging should introduce it. If not, a great way to start is a short sequence where we introduce the pain/job to be done that our premium solution solves and ask if it’s relevant to the prospect.
The length of the sequence (number of emails/calls) is usually dictated by how confident you are that this market/persona is the right one to target. If you’re exploring early, I recommend using 2 or 3 very lightweight/relevance-based emails. If you have many customers in this exact market, then it’s okay to go a little longer and make more assumptions with your messaging.
Wrapping Up
Building a predictable agency sales pipeline is not just about aggressive marketing assets or hard sales goals. It's about strategically positioning your agency, understanding your market, and tailoring your approach to meet the unique demands of your target audience. The journey from identifying your TAM to crafting effective sequences is a blend of art and science, requiring a deep understanding of your market and unique strengths.
Ultimately, the key to success lies in persistence and adaptability. As you navigate through the initial challenges and fine-tune your sales strategies, you'll discover that the effort to create a well-defined, efficient pipeline will pay dividends.
If you want to learn more about setting up cold email and LinkedIn outreach, try a 14-day trial of QuickMail.
