What I ask to see when a rep's pipeline is lean

A seller we coach was using six or seven different channels to build his pipeline. Every one of them works.

He was putting a fair amount of time into them, too, and his pipeline was still lean.

He's a full-cycle seller at an MSP, so his job is both finding deals and closing them. A few leads come in from marketing, but most of what he sells, he has to go create himself. He asked me recently what I'd recommend.

I started with the channels. "Which ones are you using? Walk me through it."

He was doing some LinkedIn, some canvassing, some cold calling, and going to some networking events.

"Let me see your calendar," I said.

I wanted to know if the effort was there, and it was. He had prospecting blocks on his calendar, time-boxed, and he was putting in the effort.

But he wasn't getting any results. And telling him to work harder wasn't going to fix that.

"Look, man," I told him. "Everything on your calendar technically works."

LinkedIn is great for lead gen. Canvassing works, if you do it right and follow up properly. Networking works great, as long as you're in the right room, running the right playbook, and you know how to turn introductions into conversations.

And we have about 65 SDRs making cold calls for MSPs, so I've got overwhelming data that cold calling builds pipeline too.

"They all work," I said. "The problem is you're doing a little bit of all of them."

"You canvass for a couple of hours, then write a LinkedIn post and don't do anything there for another week. You send one or two DMs, make eight phone calls, and send a few emails. You're dabbling."

Add it all up and you've got a full week of prospecting. But break it down by channel and no single channel got much of anything.

That's why a full calendar can fool you. It shows the total hours and hides how few of them each channel gets. You can work your ass off all week and still just be skimming the surface.

The first is volume. You never do enough of any one thing to get real traction.

You don't have to make a thousand calls a day, especially when prospecting is only part of your job. But without some concentrated volume, you don't get enough reps to get the feel for it and you never build any momentum.

Quantity leads to quality.

The second is skill. Every channel is its own skill, and it takes a long time to master one.

Take cold calling. You've got to figure out who you're going to target, build a good list, and work out the best opener, pitch, and ask. Then you've got to make a lot of calls before you work out the best way to deliver it, the best times to call, and the right tooling.

There's a huge difference between doing something and doing something well. And there are no participation trophies in business development.

You've got to learn how to get good at a channel in order to get results — learn the skill. But if you split your time across six or seven, you're trying to learn six or seven skills at once.

Apply that same approach anywhere else, like learning an instrument. If you try to learn guitar, drums, piano, and violin at the same time, it's going to take a long time before any of them sound any good.

Take LinkedIn, for example. As a consultant, I drove $3 million in sales from LinkedIn organically. All of it from content and engagement on the platform.

I didn't write one post and get inundated with leads. I didn't send one DM and get a sale. I had to learn how the platform works.

And LinkedIn has a lot of moving parts.

When you message somebody, your posts show up in their feed more often, and theirs show up in yours. When you engage with their content, they're more likely to look at your profile. Then you can see who viewed your profile, and that ties into Sales Navigator, LinkedIn's paid sales tool.

All of those things work together. The better I understood how, the more valuable my one, two, or four hours of LinkedIn time became.

I only learned that through a long time of trial and error, and a lot of "oh, I didn't realize that's how that worked." Learning it required the volume, and the volume required the focus.

I recorded a 1.5-hour LinkedIn training last year that breaks down all of these parts and how to use them. You can watch it here.

"Pick one," I told him. "Any one of them."

"Pick the one you're best at, or the one you like the most. Maybe there's one that's both. You're going to be doing a lot of it."

Then I told him to give that channel his whole prospecting block. Not part of it, and not spread across everything.

The other channels stay open. You're obviously going to continue taking inbound, referrals, and any low-hanging fruit that comes your way.

If you're focused on canvassing, you can still go to a networking event you know is good. But your dedicated outbound time goes to one channel, so the effort compounds.

You can add a second channel later. Think of the first one like a flywheel: it takes a lot of effort to get moving, and once it's moving, it doesn't take as much to keep it going.

When that channel is producing results consistently, and more effort no longer gets you proportionately more results, consider adding another. Most full-cycle sellers never need to master more than one or two.

The more common mistake is jumping to another channel early, out of boredom or to avoid the hard work of figuring the first one out.

And if the channel you picked isn't working, ask yourself one question: is someone else using this channel and winning? If the answer is yes, you just haven't figured it out yet.

Switching feels like a fresh start, but every channel comes with problems you can't see until you're in it, and a new one restarts the clock. I call that ignorance debt, and I break it down in this video.

If your pipeline is lean and you feel like you're spinning your wheels, the instinct is to add another channel or more hours.

Before you do, pull up last week's calendar and break your prospecting time down by channel. Then ask whether any one of them got enough of your time to learn how to make it work.

If none did, that may be why. Pick a channel, master it, and double down.

Adios,

Ray

P.S. If you manage a rep with a full calendar and a lean pipeline, forward this and look at last week's calendar together. Check how the time is split before you hand them another tactic.