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A Playbook For Building a Predictable Pipeline

A business performs at its own pace. However, some excel more than others because of their mission, vision, and goals. Here, we will introduce a playbook for building a predictable pipeline for your business.

Businesses spend their resources to fill their sales funnels with leads, but often overlook basic elements that can create a predictable pipeline. Therefore, it is important to understand the significance of building a predictable pipeline strategy and how sales enablement plays a critical role in building a predictable pipeline.

What is a Predictable Pipeline?

A predictable pipeline is an integrated approach that enables marketers to discover, identify, reach, and convert their targeted prospects into customers by aligning marketing and sales activities.

The goal of a predictable pipeline is to define measurable marketing and business goals that will integrate and align marketing and sales teams, define sales enablement plans in every phase of the sales cycle, and then, enhance B2B marketing for lifetime value, referrals, and customer loyalty.

Building Your Ideal Customer Profile

It’s important to establish the ideal customer profile before working on your campaigns, messaging, or content. The perfect customer profile profoundly influences your brand and its market value. Hence, it’s very crucial to understand what it is clearly. An ideal customer profile includes their essential values, beliefs, traits, and skills. It is a fundamental part because it makes sure that your content, message, and processes line up with your ideal customer’s values.

Recognizing the Buying Committee

Buying committees nowadays are highly complicated. They have many people involved and a broad range of roles and responsibilities. From VPs to directors to managers, everyone plays a role. If you want to get your buyers’ attention, your campaigns must take this ecosystem into account. All the members of this committee must be addressed. 

The Buyer and Customer Journey

The buyer’s journey is never linear. Customers can move forward and backward at any speed and in any direction. Still, there are six primary lenses to look at the customers’ journey.

The first three stages are when someone becomes a customer, while the latter three stages are after someone already becomes a customer. Each step focuses on the buyers’ specific state. Usually, these stages help marketers and sellers better understand the buyer’s needs.

Developing Your Message

The core tenets of sales and marketing success are relevance, personalization, empathy, and timeliness. However, it’s not an easy task to build these foundations into your pipeline, and there are no shortcuts here. People listen and respond to people. Meaningful messaging is about educating people and providing valuable resources to them when required.

Content that Converts

Content remains the eternal backbone of your entire organization. It drives decisions, sets narratives, and creates thoughtful experiences for your customers and prospects alike. A one-size-fits-all approach is not viable at present. People respond differently to different content pieces. When the buyer moves from awareness to decision by the type of content you use, good content guarantees a better customer journey.

Internal Roles and Responsibilities

Having the right people on the right side of your marketing and sales is a definite formula for pipeline success. The roles and responsibilities of your internal teams also carry accountability. You must clearly define the roles and responsibilities to make your whole pipeline starting from lead generation to customer success.

When it comes to the responsibilities that support a predictable, profitable pipeline, the executive team comes into the picture.

The sales team works closely with the marketing team to make sure the lead hand-offs are frictionless for the buyer. It also works with customer success to make sure that the transition from lead to purchase is a smooth one. 

Necessary Tools and Technology 

Your tools and technologies help you effectively and quickly. They help make great things possible for your organization—the right tech stack assists in more meaningful and exciting experiences for your customers and prospects. The wrong tools add complexity and poor experiences to a complex ecosystem. 

Tools and technology can be categorized using these six primary categories: Foundations – Foundational tools are the cornerstone of any business operations such as CRMs and marketing automation platforms like Salesforce and Marketo.

Orchestrators – Orchestration tools help align marketing and sales teams better. These tools may include ActiveCampaign and SharpSpring.

Identifiers – Identification tools help locate ideal audience profiles. These tools may include LeadGenius and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Attention-getters – Attention tools help boost inbound marketing efforts such as SEO, and social media to grab audiences’ attention. These tools may include Yoast SEO, Hootsuite, and Influencity.

Engagers – Engagement tools help marketers engage their prospects with the brand via the company website and various outbound activities. These tools may include ConvertKit and Poptin.

Optimizers – Optimization tools help marketers gather and analyze data to optimize business operations. Some good examples of these tools are Google Analytics, Pulse, and SproutSocial.

You can utilize these groups for assessing your current tech stack and recognizing gaps and redundancies.

Measuring Success

Every organization has different parameters to measure success. Also, different campaigns require different metrics. So deciding what’s more essential and urgent depends on the context of your situation.

You can measure success by extensive goal-setting, selecting the right metrics for your campaign, and analyzing your campaign’s goals and performance. You have to include benchmarking to gauge your campaign’s performance and optimize to understand how you can expand your campaign to meet the organizational goals more efficiently and effectively, depending on your analysis and benchmarks.
Are you planning to build a predictable pipeline for your business? In case you need help in defining goals, streamlining sales and marketing operations, creating a roadmap, or with the tech stack – you can always get experienced, professional assistance from us. We are just one click or call away! Share your concern via Contact us or just say “Hi”/“Hello” via info@marrinadecisions.com, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

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