Business In Real Life

Business In Real Life


Filling Your Pipeline

January 06, 2018

5 WAYS TO FILL YOUR PIPELINE
Are you having trouble filling your pipeline?  These ideas are old fashion but are proven to work.  They do require having conversations, which in many cases also means picking up the phone.  Try one or all of these strategies and see if you begin to fill your pipeline.  

Call Past Clients

Do you have clients that haven’t purchased from you in awhile? Use this is an opportunity to reconnect, see how business is for them and see if there are any business opportunities for yourself. Sometimes people need you, they just don’t get around to calling you. When you reach out to them, you are actually doing them a favor by reaching out to them and checking in.

Connect With Strategic Partners

One of the best things you can do for your business is to surround yourself with other professionals that work with the same customer base as you but who sell a different product or service.  If you don’t have this network in place, it’s never too late to start to build it.  If you haven’t been nurturing your network, this is a great opportunity to reconnect.
Try these ideas:

Schedule lunch
Meet for coffee
Plan a happy hour
Coordinate an invite to a sporting event
Invite them to a networking event

Basically, get in front of your strategic partners on a consistent basis, not just when your pipeline is empty!

Call Your Competition

This suggestion assumes that you are friendly with your competitors.  Assuming you are friendly, connecting with them with your pipeline is empty can be a perfect opportunity for business.  See how they are doing and where you compare with them.  From there you can decide:

Are they busy? If not, that's a good indication that you need to ramp up your marketing
If they are busy, will they outsource to you?

LinkedIn Connections 

Go through your LinkedIn connections and see who is connected with your clients. Then go to your clients and see who they can introduce you to . This can be very effective when done correctly.

Ask Everyone 

Your job as a salesperson is to always teach others how to find you business.  Obviously you want to do this in a way that isn’t offensive, but you’d be surprised how many people want to help you, they just don’t know how.  When you are able to provide them with simple strategies on how to find you business, you’ll see the benefits of your efforts.  

Just remember that this takes time and you must be consistent.  Don’t think that by teaching someone once that they’ll remember 3 months later!
RESOURCES
If you want to learn more about building relationships with strategic partners, check out episode 7 of the podcast where we take a deeper dive.
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