An Expert Guide to Pipeline Generation Strategy (Updated)

Are you tired of feeling like you're on a never-ending rollercoaster ride with your business revenue? You pour time, money, and effort into your marketing campaigns, hoping to see that lead graph shoot up.

But instead, you're left with a sinking feeling as you watch it plummet down. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff, desperately trying to hold on to every lead that comes your way, knowing that one misstep could send you tumbling down.

And with each lost lead, you're left feeling more and more frustrated and defeated. If this sounds familiar, then it's time to take action.

The key to consistent revenue growth lies in creating a lead generation pipeline that delivers quality, reliable leads that you can count on. With a solid pipeline in place, you'll never have to worry about the ups and downs of unpredictable lead generation again.

In this expert guide, we'll dive into the pain points of traditional lead generation and show you how to create a winning pipeline generation strategy that leads to consistent revenue growth.

Let's dive in.

What is Pipeline Generation?

Pipeline generation is a process that allows you to build and maintain a pipeline of potential buyers who are interested in your product or service. This marketing strategy aims to create a steady flow of leads by sparking interest in what you offer.

Pipeline generation is an essential part of lead generation because it allows you to determine which companies are likely to buy from you and when, as well as how much money they might spend. In other words, it helps you identify your target market and find people who have expressed interest in your product or service but are not yet committed.

Significant Differences Between Pipeline Generation and Lead Generation

The main difference between pipeline generation and lead generation is that the former only focuses on people who have shown interest in your product or service. At the same time, the latter requires marketing to a larger audience to generate leads.

Because of the emphasis on volume over quality, lead generation tends to focus on tactics like form-fills and gated content. Pipeline generation focuses on long-term activities that create awareness among potential leads, who eventually become customers. Pipeline generation happens after/with the lead generation.

In addition to these differences, here are the other key differences between lead generation and pipeline generation:

Check out: What is sales pipeline?

Importance of Pipeline Generation

The importance of pipeline generation is that it helps you build relationships with your potential customers. These people will eventually become leads and customers, so you want to ensure they feel comfortable with your business before asking for their commitment to your product.

Here are some essential reasons why you should have a pipeline generation in place:

1. Consistent revenue

Pipeline generation helps avoid the ups and downs of unpredictable lead generation methods, leading to a stable and predictable source of revenue. By understanding the sales process and optimizing it, pipeline generation can increase conversion rates, further contributing to consistent growth. This approach leads to a sustainable revenue source and helps businesses confidently plan for the future.

2. Better forecasting

Pipeline generation helps you predict what leads are likely to convert into customers, which allows you to forecast future revenue. By tracking the number of sales-ready leads in your pipeline over time, you can better understand how many prospects are likely to become buyers.

This gives businesses a clearer picture of their overall financial health and helps them make more accurate plans for growth.

3. Increased efficiency

Pipeline generation is a critical component of a sales process. It allows you to track how long prospects can move through each pipeline stage, which helps you identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your sales process.

This can lead to better strategic planning and the ability to adjust your strategy as necessary—without manually updating spreadsheets or reports every time something changes.

4. Increased transparency

Pipeline generation allows you to track the progress of each prospect through their journey. This helps you identify gaps in communication or when prospects may be falling off track. You can then use this data to understand better why prospects aren’t moving forward and adjust your strategy accordingly.

5. Better alignment between sales and marketing

Pipeline generation helps ensure better alignment between sales and marketing teams by clearly defining their roles and responsibilities and providing a shared understanding of the sales process.

This helps you better align your sales and marketing teams on the type of content that needs to be created and how it should be used.

Challenges in Pipeline Generation

While pipeline generation can help you more effectively generate sales leads, some challenges come with the territory. Here are the five most significant challenges you may face when using a pipeline generation system:

1. Creating a meaningful sales funnel

The first challenge is creating a meaningful sales funnel. While most companies create content and then use their marketing automation software to send it out to their target audience, this doesn’t always result in leads for your sales team.

Instead, you need to create content that supports each stage of the buying process and helps readers move through it towards making a purchase decision on your product or service. Here’s an example of how you can create content for different stages of the buyer’s journey,

2. Aligning sales and marketing

Aligning a sales and marketing team’s goals throughout an organization can be difficult, mainly when the company is large.

Without an understanding of what drives qualified leads and opportunities, the marketing team cannot tailor its efforts to reach a similar audience. The same goes for the sales team. If the sales team can't track where leads are coming from, they might be missing out on opportunities to personalize their pitch and convert more customers.

3. Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is engaging with a prospect to help them reach a point where they are ready to buy. It can include everything from newsletters and emails to sending out informative content that builds trust with those potential customers.

Lead nurturing is all about communicating with your prospects in a way that makes them feel like they know you while also providing them with helpful information that keeps their interest at peak levels.

But properly nurturing leads through the sales process can be time-consuming and requires a deep understanding of customer behavior and preferences.

4. Lack of proper tools

Many companies don’t have the proper tools to help them with their lead nurturing efforts. For example, they might not have a CRM system that allows them to store information about their prospects and customers, or they might be using clunky software that doesn’t allow them to quickly create the types of content they need.

That's why companies need to invest in the right lead-nurturing tools that will help them better manage their efforts.

5. Adapting to changing market conditions

Pipeline generation requires ongoing adaptation and refinement to accommodate changing market conditions, such as changes in consumer behavior or new competitors entering the market.

If your business is competitive, it’s essential to stay ahead of the curve by continually testing and refining your lead nurturing process. This can include changing how often you send emails or which types of content are most effective at attracting new customers.

Steps to Create a Winning Pipeline Generation Strategy

The key to generating a steady flow of qualified leads is to create a pipeline generation strategy that builds upon the one you used for lead nurturing. Here are some steps you can take to implement this strategy:

1. Identify your ideal customer profile

Before generating leads, it’s essential to know exactly who you want them from. This will help ensure that your marketing efforts reach the right people at all stages in the buying process.

You can begin this by creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. It could be a single individual or group with similar characteristics and behaviors. You can use this persona to help you create content and messaging that resonates with your target audience and define your buyer personas’ journey through the sales funnel.

2. Create an effective content strategy

A whopping 80% of B2B businesses generate leads through content marketing. This proves why content is more important for your pipeline generation. It’s a way for you to connect with your customers, build trust, and educate them about the value of your product or service.

To do this effectively, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your target audience and what they want from their experience with you.

This will help ensure that your content aligns with their goals and needs so they can readily find it when searching for information related to what they’re looking for.

3. Align your sales and marketing teams

Sales and marketing teams are both responsible for generating leads, but they often have different goals and objectives. This can lead to miscommunication, making it difficult for either team to succeed in their role.

To align your sales and marketing teams, ensure they’re on the same page regarding your business goals and how they can help each other succeed. This will ensure that your sales team generates leads that align with what your marketing team needs, so they can easily pass through the pipeline and result in sales.

4. Invest in tools that help to fill your pipeline

Many businesses rely on a simple email drip campaign to generate leads. While this is fine for some, it’s not enough to fill your pipeline and grow revenue fast, especially in this competitive B2B space.

If you want to expand your reach and scale faster, invest in tools that will help you automate the process of generating leads and connecting with prospects.

For example, you can use Storylane to create and embed interactive product demos on your website for lead generation. When the user wants to access the demo, they will be asked to provide their email address. This way, you can fill your pipeline with product-qualified leads and increase your revenue faster.

This is because you’ll be able to focus on closing deals with those who are ready for a conversation instead of spending time searching for new prospects.

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5. Establish a lead nurturing system

Lead generation is part of the process, but if you fail to educate them throughout your pipelines, even the hot leads will grow cold. This is why you need to establish a lead nurturing system that will help you keep your prospects engaged until they are ready to buy.

The best way to do this is by creating an automated email sequence that educates potential buyers on the benefits of working with your company and offers them resources they can use to learn more about your services.

As you nurture your lead, you will also build their trust. Once they reach a certain point in the buying process, they will feel more confident about working with your company.

6. Optimize your website for lead generation to fill your pipeline

Most of your marketing efforts focus on driving visits to your website. Though you can optimize everything, you can't expect leads to flow in until you show the transformation by using your product.

This is where the role of interactive product demos comes in. A product demo is like a sales assistant who shows you how to use the product. It helps your customers understand why they need the solution and what it can do for them. This way, you can build your pipeline with product-qualified leads who are more likely to convert. With Storylane, you can create interactive product demos in minutes. With our drag-and-drop builder, you can easily create a walkthrough highlighting your product's key features and benefits.

Check out Storylane's interactive demo👇

An example is Ignition. They used interactive product demos on their home page to educate the value of their product and the problems it could solve for their customers. It's a great way to showcase your product without being salesy.

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This approach helped them to grow their conversion rate by 20%.

7. Use paid marketing to get traction

Paid marketing is one of the best ways to get traction and attract new customers. You can use paid marketing to generate awareness, build brand authority, generate leads, and drive traffic to your website or sales page.

For example, you can use paid ads on Google Search, Facebook Ads, or LinkedIn Ads. The key is knowing what works for your business and testing different variations using split testing tools.

8. Measure, iterate, and optimize

The most important thing to do is to measure, iterate and optimize. You need to know which marketing channels are working for you and which ones aren’t. Then, use that data to decide how much time and money you should spend on different channels.

For example, cut back on your spending if you’re spending a lot of money on Facebook Ads and not getting any conversions. If you’re spending very little on Facebook Ads but getting lots of leads or sales from Google Search, increase your budget for that channel.

Check out: Guide to sales pipeline management

How Can Storylane Help?

Your pipeline will be solid only if you fill the pipeline with product-qualified leads, as these leads know the features and benefits you bring to the table. One way to do this is an interactive product demo.

With Storylane, you can create a demo for your product that shows how it works and customize it to fit the needs of your audience. You can also personalize the demo using Storylane’s drag-and-drop interface and auto-personalization features.

Experience Storylane personalisation features yourself 👇

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This helps you automate the process without losing personalization. You can use the demo from your website to email campaigns to get in front of the prospects who matter who can invest in your product. Moreover, with real-time analytics and Slack notifications, you can track how your prospects interact with your demo. This helps you customize your sales pitch and increase the chance of closing the deal.

Another advantage of using Storylane is that you can enable your sales team better with the product knowledge that they need to close more deals. You can create multiple demos for each use case and help your sales team to better understand your product. When they have a good understanding of your product, they can handle objections well and push the prospect close to closing the deal.

Want to know more about building a solid pipeline that helps you capture, nurture and convert leads? Schedule a free demo with us, and we will show you how.