Who Needs Leads? 4 Ways Pipeline Marketing Drives Revenue

Marketing isn’t about leads.

Of course, Marketing isn’t closing deals, either. Marketing is about pipeline generation for both new business, and renewal or expansion. Marketing done right is a pipeline engine – agile enough to adjust as markets, buyers, channels, and trends shift, and targeted enough to unlock revenue generation opportunities at accounts throughout the sales funnel. This, my friends, is called pipeline marketing. Pipeline marketing is a comprehensive approach that focuses on the entire sales process, from initial lead generation to closing a sale.

Unfortunately, this form of a highly functioning Marketing and Sales relationship is the exception, not the standard. “57% of senior sales leaders have sellers who complain about the quality of marketing leads, and 56% of marketing and sales leaders say that unresolved disagreements between sales and marketing slowed down progress on shared initiatives.” This begins to beg the question, “how mature is my integrated marketing and sales strategy?”.

The Current State of Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnels

Despite a plethora of sophisticated tools that can help align sales and marketing teams, there is still a divide between the two. The very teams that should be most closely joined on pipeline creation and conversion are more often at odds.

Worse yet, now that money is once again expensive with interest rates at their highest levels in over a decade, the inability of Marketing and Sales to efficiently and effectively partner on pipeline is no longer tomorrow’s problem, but today’s death knell for businesses that don’t get it right.

If you’re still reading, maybe you’re thinking, “Tell me something I don’t know.” Alright, consider this – the best lever Marketing can pull to align with Sales and consistently generate quality pipeline isn’t using LinkedIn posts to drive leads (good to do, though) or preparing for a cookieless future (still, you should think about it), but enabling your Sales team. This requires true partnership across Sales, Marketing, Enablement, and Revenue Operations – a vital cross-GTM collaboration we’ll explore below.

How Sales and Marketing Generate and Close Pipeline, Together

A decade-plus of (basically) free-money commerce drove faster, looser B2B purchase decisions. Growth was commonplace and easier than ever. Now reality has come knocking at our door. The answer to this knock is clear – Sales and Marketing must work together. Like, actually together. The way forward isn’t paved with leads – it is paved with partnership and thoughtful, collaborative work streams that adapt to each business. This is an exciting opportunity borne from the pressure buyers are putting on companies of all types in all industries.

Every Marketing activity must deliver multiples in pipeline for Sales to succeed. How many multiples will differ by company, product, service, and industry, but this core concept will fundamentally change the relationship of Marketing and Sales from begrudging frenemies to profiting partners.

Even better, evolving your Sales and Marketing relationship to be a consistent collaboration on quality pipeline doesn’t require complex marketing strategies or more budget. Consider these three examples:

• Inspect and advance early stage, new business deals: Each business has its own lead qualification definitions, so let’s keep it simple – this is about the first-sale opportunities that sales has qualified, but not committed to actual pipeline. At Highspot, we call these Plan Opportunities. The focus here is not on top of the funnel or bottom of the funnel, but the middle. For many companies, a significant percentage of your overall funnel sits in this stage of the buyer’s journey and can easily get lost if things stall or sellers get caught up closing deals closer to the finish line.
  • Recommendation: Partner with Sales to inspect these middle-of-the-funnel opportunities and either recycle them if they’re stale. Evaluate if they fit your ideal customer profile and identify ways to advance them through the customer journey. It might be a new executive influencer or bridging the gap for a loyal customer who has another team blocking them. Leverage existing Marketing efforts including targeted ads, gifting, or field event experiences, or other touchpoints to unlock the right connection and conversation that will advance the deal to legitimate pipeline.
• Get more from your event budget: Events are expensive and impact the bottom line, so they need to be worth it. Hard-to-measure awareness or a bunch of garbage leads who just wanted your iPad giveaway won’t cut it. But going to major events in your industry where your buyers – both existing and prospective customers – are present offers a very real opportunity to generate first-sale and expansion pipeline through executive meetings.
  • Recommendation: Get ahead of your event – at least 6 weeks – and align on meeting and sales-qualified leads (SQL) goals with Sales leadership. Create a sale play with everything sellers need to know, say, and do to drive meetings with your attending execs. Provide past attendee account lists and create a Salesforce dashboard tracking progress.
    • BONUS: Create a competition for your sellers complete with incentives (ex. Lunch with CMO, team pizza party with CEO) and host a dedicated day where your sellers follow-up in unison to all targeted accounts – boosting event engagement.
• Make content actually matter: Gartner reports a majority of millennial buyers don’t want to engage with sellers at all, so email pitches with PowerPoint attachments are dead.
  • Recommendation: Today’s sales enablement platforms offer “digital sales rooms”, essentially personalised microsites that create a delightful, asynchronous experience for the buyer and let Marketing understand what content works with whom, and support sales in using the right content with the right buyer at the right time. Instead of getting blocked or dumped in the email trash bin, you can be like Corporate Traveller Australia and boost buyer engagement 84%.

Top 4 Pipeline Marketing Strategies that Make it Easy for Sales to Close Deals

Marketing plays a crucial role in driving the sales pipeline by creating awareness, generating leads, nurturing new leads, and converting them into customers. Here are five pipeline marketing strategies you can use today to grow your business and drive sales:

1. Lead Generation / Inbound Marketing

Content Marketing: Sales and Marketing can work together to create valuable content such as blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, webinars, and videos to attract potential customers, capture their information, and drive them down the funnel. Don’t underestimate the power of content marketing. On average, B2B companies that invest in content marketing generate 67% more leads.

SEO and SEM: These two marketing strategies go hand-in-hand. With most buyers turning to Google to find a product or an answer to their pain points, it’s essential for your company to be present when they search for a solution. Take time to optimise content for search engines (SEO) and use paid search (SEM) to drive traffic to landing pages and capture leads.

Social Media Marketing: By leveraging social media platforms to promote content, engage with prospects, and drive traffic to the website, you can quickly drive more pipeline. Social selling is a popular sales methodology that most businesses use, and see a great impact on their conversion rate. In fact, social sellers are 66% more likely to drive pipeline and hit their quota.

Events and Webinars: By hosting and participating in events, trade shows, and webinars you can build awareness and generate interest among potential customers. Many businesses see an immediate boost in sales during and after events, as attendees make purchasing decisions based on direct interactions and demonstrations. Events also provide numerous follow-up opportunities to nurture leads through personalized communication.

2. Lead Nurturing

Email Marketing: This is a cost-effective, easy way to personalise and interact with specific personas in real-time. Sending email campaigns to nurture leads through the sales funnel, helps keep them engaged with relevant content and offers. It may seem like a no-brainer to use email marketing, but for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI and gives marketers the broadest reach of all the channels available to them.

Marketing Automation: Studies show that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead overall. Digging into the data yields even more compelling numbers for small businesses: A study by the Annuitas Group reveals that companies using marketing automation to nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads. Those nurtured leads, in turn, make purchases 47% larger than their non-nurtured counterparts.

3. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Targeted Campaigns: Seek to develop highly personalised marketing campaigns for specific high-value accounts to drive engagement and move prospects through the funnel. Companies with aligned ABM strategies see a 208% increase in business revenue and profits 27% more quickly over three years.

Collaboration with Sales: Working closely with the sales team to align marketing efforts with sales goals and ensure a seamless experience for the target accounts.

4. Brand Building

Public Relations (PR): Managing media relations, securing coverage in industry publications, and building a positive brand image to enhance credibility and trust.

Thought Leadership: Positioning the company as an industry expert through thought leadership content, speaking engagements, and influencer partnerships.

By implementing these strategies, marketing can effectively drive and support the sales cycle, ensuring a steady flow of qualified leads and opportunities for the sales team.

Enablement and Revenue Operations Are Fundamental for a Healthy Pipeline

Growing sales pipeline doesn’t end with marketing and sales teams. There are two foundational teams, and related technology investments, that make each strategy above possible – Sales Enablement and Revenue Operations (RevOps). And before you think, “But I’m in Marketing…”, consider this – 56% of CMOs consider improving sales enablement a critical challenge that must be solved in the next 6 months.

Consistent pipeline generation and conversion requires the rigor Enablement brings in unifying your go-to-market (GTM) teams and the system expertise and data excellence RevOps delivers. Consider the prior example of inspecting the middle of your sales funnel to unlock potential pipeline – RevOps empowers the inspection and analysis of progress, while Enablement drives the new seller behaviours necessary for success. Working together, Enablement and RevOps teams can both identify where there are issues in your sales funnel and drive the changes across your sales team to address them – giving Sales and Marketing the system of insight and action through which pipeline can flow freely.

Of course, there are a few key tools that are vital to this virtuous cycle of inspection, action, rigor, and reward. The right sales enablement platform gives Sales, Marketing, Enablement, and RevOps a holistic system to define, execute, measure, and evolve their most important GTM initiatives. With the advent of generative AI, enablement platforms are poised to turbocharge sales productivity in ways that were impossible just two years ago. For example, a natively-built enablement platform, which unifies content, training, practice and real-world coaching, revenue outcomes, and the associated data from each area, can deliver personalised, just-in-time coaching at scale throughout a seller’s daily work.

Predictable Pipeline is Possible

Marketing isn’t about leads, it’s about pipeline. A thriving GTM team is powered by a strategic approach that focuses on the entire funnel and combines marketing and sales data. It includes partnership across Enablement and RevOps – and the underlying technology that maximises their impact – with (pre- and post-) Sales and Marketing accountable to, and aligned on, pipeline creation and conversion. It’s time to leave behind archaic ideas of Marketing’s impact and embrace the opportunity to unify your GTM through operational rigor, deep inspection, and shared accountability. Doing so will deliver the predictable pipeline generation and conversion that sustain a business no matter the economic environment.

If you’re ready to rise to this challenge, download our free resource and discover how you can define, execute, and measure your marketing programs to increase sales adoption.