Wouldn’t this be a lovely response from marketing when sales asks, can I have some new leads please. I don’t know about you but I’ve never felt anyone else should be responsible for delivering new leads other than myself (as the experienced sales rep) and I believe this is how every experienced sales rep should think about pipeline growth. 

As soon as the expectation is that “my SDR hasn’t delivered any leads in ages” or “I don’t know what marketing is up to but the last time I received a lead of any quality was months ago” that’s the day you’ll be disappointed. 

After 22 years in B2B MarTech sales I can tell you the way to consistently over achieve is to take responsibility of your pipeline generation. And, guess what, it’s not about the number of calls you make or how big your marketing budget is. It’s about relationships, human interaction and communities - whether it in person or digital, we live in a world where most of our interactions are digital, so ‘phygital’, which is a term I heard today, combining physical and digital interactions. 

When I cast my mind back to some of the biggest wins or milestones in my career one aspect stands out. My relentless approach to building new relationships, quickly. I’ve always loved LinkedIn and would use a combination of LinkedIn and email effectively however, if I could meet someone either at an ‘event’ (now there’s an expletive in sales, haha) or 121 meeting, I found it easy to build relationships, largely based on a value exchange. I would challenge myself to make the person I was meeting feel like they could take something of value away from the conversation. 

This would stand me in good stead in my sales career, consistently overachieving by working hard to build relationships and where possible align our marketing efforts with my sales efforts. As a rep, the alignment was achieved by leveraging whatever marketing was doing to benefit my sales strategy.

Until I moved into sales leadership and found I could influence the go-to-market strategy with much greater impact on the overall pipeline growth and revenue my team delivered. My most successful years in sales leadership were when I was responsible for a large region and able to influence the focus of all teams, sales/pre-sales, marketing, partnerships and customer success.

Yes we had a growing team, which started with 1 person in year one and ended with 40 people at the end of our fourth year, when I moved onto another role within the company. Not because we were lucky, not because we had the best sales reps in the company or because we had the biggest marketing budget, in fact in our most successful year our marketing budget had been slashed by 80%. There was also an oil crisis in our region affecting buyer confidence and in our 2nd best performing country there was a military coup, which saw one of our customers offices hit with a tank missile! 

With all that going on, I put our success down to our ability to build relationships. I would often use a phrase, “we need to sell without selling”. Build relationships and provide value with people and connect people with others they can learn from. I went against popular opinion in our business and brought prospective customers and partners together at meet-ups, we did fun things like have give-aways and we started to give awards out. What started with a few people getting together for a few drinks and a panel discussion, grew into a regular meet up of between 20-40 people and in our fourth year we were getting 60 people together and the atmosphere was fantastic.  

Sharing this on a recent Digital Download hosted by Eric Doyle (link below), one of the audience said “you created a safe place” and thinking about it, we did. And as a result those human interactions naturally turned into commercial conversations. 

I hope we get back to more in person interactions as there’s nothing quite like it for building deep human relationships with others. In the meantime, I have challenged myself to use digital channels even more effectively, to build human relationships. After all this might be the only way to build relationships in the Metaverse! Social Media and Digital has been around for 25 years and we’ve ALL got into a ton of bad habits using digital to interact as humans. It’s time to think about Social Media & Influence in Digital differently, if we want to answer the question with, “as many leads as I can handle please!”. 

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