We Have It Ass-backwards, Lead Gen Is Your Least Important Priority!

OK, I’m being purposefully provocative. But I do think we have things backwards, hear me out.

Everything I hear these days is about, “We need more pipeline!”

We are failing to meet our numbers, supposedly, because we don’t have enough opportunities in our pipelines. And the answer to this is more lead/demand gen.

We introduce all sorts of new programs and technologies to create more leads and demands. We have programs that can look for signals, doing very tailored outreach. We have others that scrape the web for names, emails, etc. We are leveraging multichannel–email, text, phone, social, and others. We have 1000s of companies that will do this for you and will set up initial meetings. We have our own people doing the same things.

And do save us all, we have Agentic AI, coming to the rescue, with hyper targeted, and hyper personalized outreaches, all to generate more leads and demands.

And over the years, it’s become much tougher. Prospects aren’t responding the way they used to. The leads produced by 500 email outreaches now require several thousand email outreaches. The prospects are not responding at a rate that exceeds our ability to do these outreaches.

And we keep piling on. The solution to our weak pipelines is more outreach!

But, I have a very different point of view! I think we have things ass-backwards, and we need to change!

We do have a pipeline problem! But it’s not insufficient leads!

We and our people suck at managing the opportunities we have in our pipelines! We are squandering the opportunities that we qualify and pursue.

Just look at the data, average win rates are 15-17%! They continue to plummet Sales cycles are getting longer, deal values are declining!

The most important thing we must focus on is improving our ability to manage and win the deals that we have qualified! What does it take to improve our win rates? How do we better manage and engage those customers who are really interested in buying? What do we have to change?

Just look at how the dynamics of our pipelines change if we become better sellers. If we move our win rates from 15% to 30%, look at what it means. Our pipeline metrics change profoundly, rather than 5-6X coverage, we need a little more than 3X coverage!

And the majority of my clients have win rates exceeding 50%!

Becoming better sellers, better managing the opportunities we have qualified is the single most important thing that we can do.

And as we do this, look at the dynamics and the impact of something as simple as improving win rates. Again, our pipeline dynamics change profoundly. That ripples through to changing the dynamics of our lead gen efforts. We need fewer, better leads to keep our pipelines filled.

And it’s more subtle than that. Improving our win rates gives us a deeper understanding of our prospects and customers. It enables us to more effectively target the right prospects. It enables us to message and engage those prospects with greater relevance and impact–actually driving up the response to our outreach.

We need to stop all the noise about Lead Gen being our problem. We need to dramatically improve our ability to sell and win the deals that we have found. Only then, can we understand and focus on how we create the highest quality, best outreaches that our prospects will want to respond to!

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  They really get it, it’s a great discussion, enjoy.