Without leads, there are no deals to close. But while lead generation is crucial, it’s only one component within your overall sales process.
Broadening your lens to take in the view of your entire sales pipeline—pipeline generation—can drive more lead traffic and foster long-term growth. You’re more likely to find areas for improvement, which serve as opportunities to elevate the customer experience and streamline your sales strategy.
You might find that your initial contact with a new lead feels dated and generic, just a cookie-cutter email or phone call script that goes nowhere. Your sales team might not be aware of new product features that the development team labored to execute and the marketing team prepared to advertise. Or, your team’s strengths are qualifying leads and making every last cold call, but their demo content doesn’t convey your value proposition in a negotiation or instill confidence in a buying decision.
Each of these segments impacts the others within your pipeline, so it’s worth taking a step back if you find your sales strategy falling short.
Find out some of the most powerful tactics on how to build, feed, and sustain a sales pipeline so you can close more deals. Then, learn how asynchronous videos can streamline your pipeline, align your sales team, and bring your value proposition right to your prospect, regardless of scheduling conflicts or time zones.
Lead generation vs. pipeline generation
Sales expert Brian Tracy states, “Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continually. Always have more people to see than you have time to see.”
It’s also important to know that a sustainable pipeline brimming with leads goes beyond the awareness stage of the sales process.
Below, you can see how the sales pipeline corresponds to the sales funnel—and each facet of the buyer’s journey your sales team can influence with a powerful sales strategy:
If companies focus only on lead generation, they risk missing opportunities to scale their business in the long term.
Assessing your entire sales pipeline helps you improve many aspects of your workflow:
Boosting awareness: Educate your target audience about your product.
Guiding intent: Engage qualified leads with clear calls to action.
Maintaining contact: Identify additional contact points for your prospects throughout the sales process. Or, implement fewer, higher-quality touchpoints.
Overcoming obstacles: Elevate your product resources and demos that give your buyers confidence in their decision.
As you scale your business and evolve your sales pipeline beyond simply generating leads, a cohesive strategy—and the right tools to implement it—will be crucial.
What makes successful pipeline generation so challenging?
The issue with pipeline generation is that it’s difficult to organize. There are many different tools for project management, prospecting, customer relationship management, lead nurturing, and communication. Tracking each step within the pipeline and numerous prospects in each stage can be tricky. There's so much information coming in, and constantly in flux, that you need to have the right systems in place to keep it all organized and accessible to your sales team.
It also takes time to collaborate with your sales team and other crucial departments to share product or service updates, give feedback, and tackle case-by-case scenarios for specific prospects and their hesitations. In fact, you can resolve all of these challenges, from constant team alignment to quality lead nurturing, with communication.
If sales teams can efficiently collaborate, brainstorm, and make personalized connections with prospects, they can grow a pipeline that keeps momentum effortlessly.
Video messaging tools like Loom increase the quality of your team’s communication while reducing the time and effort it takes to do so. With fewer live meetings, faster updates, and access to dynamic resources 24/7, your sales team can spend more time building and nurturing a pipeline that generates sales.
8 high-impact pipeline generation strategies
What does pipeline generation look like in action? Here are some strategies that help you build your pipeline and feed it with plenty of qualified prospects:
1. Listen
“Listen” might sound like Sales 101, but it’s human nature to want to talk about yourself or the benefits of a product you are passionate about. That’s why it takes constant reminders to stop and listen to prospects.
Mark Jewell, co-founder and president of Selling Energy, the sales training company, says it best:
“If you’re meeting with a prospect and you want to put your best foot forward, you need to not only ask the right questions but also listen carefully to what you’re hearing in response. You may discern details that you can use to tailor your future conversations or proposals so that they truly resonate with your prospect’s needs and desires.”
The classic art of listening will be one of the most impactful strategies you can apply to your business. It’s also a great way to kick off a personalized asynchronous sales strategy—more on that later.
2. Make sales outreach personal with the unexpected
Most sales representatives know that personalized sales win. This strategy focuses on the prospect’s unique pain points, frustrations, and motivations. Personalization also helps build trust and connection—after all, sales is all about customer relationships.
Your sales team can structure their sales cadence with tailored touchpoints to connect with prospects.
There’s a common phrase on social media that says “Do things that don’t scale.” This phrase was made popular by investor and entrepreneur Paul Graham’s essay of the same name. For example, efficient workflows might include a targeted email letter to a thousand people—reaping great results for the time and effort put into it. But you’ll lose out on potential sales if it's not personalized. Now, if you send personalized videos, you’re more likely to connect with a prospect and land the sale individually.
At its core, “do things that don’t scale” means that going the additional mile, or the things that seem irrational, are often what actually work.
Think of a small business owner who wants to adopt a payroll and bookkeeping tool but isn’t sure how to organize its full-time and part-time employees, plus its new addition of remote freelancers. A salesperson could provide a quick canned response or some vague supporting documents, or they could choose to go beyond expectations. The salesperson can send a 5-minute video with the exact context, prospect business name, and use case to show how that small business owner can adopt the app. This platform gains the upper hand and is much more likely to land that sale.
With Loom, you can do things at scale that you couldn’t do before. Asynchronous video unlocks personalization and efficient outreach at scale, so you can implement an efficient, yet personalized workflow.
Loom’s video messaging makes personal connections fast, easy, and affordable. In less than five minutes, you can capture your prospect’s attention, connect with them, and propel them closer to the sale.
For example, a website development salesperson can use Loom to record their walkthrough of a prospect’s site and explain a unique solution. Or, imagine a salesperson implementing a SaaS workflow tool using actual tasks that the prospect would input themselves, demoing direct solutions for the process their prospect is struggling to streamline.
These personalized experiences help your potential customers feel heard, and they can often picture themselves using your product or service—developing a stronger connection that leads to better sales.
Pro tip: Record one Loom video and use Variables to automatically change the name, producing custom video titles for that personalized touch.
3. Implement a referral program
Another way to strengthen your pipeline is to empower other paying customers to participate in the sales process. If your clients love your product, they’ll want to share the news—especially if there’s a reward involved.
There are numerous ways to build a referral program. You can award gift cards to your existing customers if their referral leads to a sale. Or, if you operate in a SaaS sales model, you can adopt a referral tactic like the Morning Brew newsletter and create a gamified program such as winning a T-shirt or a MacBook after a certain number of conversions sign up from subscribe referrals.
Referral programs can be a triple-win—for you as a seller, your current customers, and future customers who will get value from your product.
One great way to launch your referral program is by recording a Loom video presenting the offer, sharing it on social media and email, and embedding it on a landing page within your website.
4. Create a sales engagement program
Sales pipelines aren’t effective without the people bringing your brand to the world. You need a high-performing sales team that’s passionate about your product, sales, and fostering relationships.
That also involves equipping your reps to do the best job possible. This might include:
Offering regular sales training or workshops for both mindset and sales tactics
Inviting an expert to host live seminars for your team
Creating a resource hub with short Loom videos that showcase best practices, industry expertise, and solutions to common challenges within the sales cycle
Not only does sales development and training help create better results, but it also boosts morale. As you invest in your sales team, they can confidently advance their skills and careers, closing more deals for you.
5. Collaborate regularly with the team
Just as your sales team should communicate regularly with leads in your pipeline, they should also be able to connect with each other.
A culture that encourages idea-sharing and continuous growth strengthens your team internally and drives powerful networking practices.
You can also stay in the loop about what’s working well within your pipeline, or what isn’t:
Are leads easily guided into your pipeline after discovering your product or service?
Are your salespeople making crucial touchpoints?
Is the content about your product personalized, and well-paced?
Are your salespeople connected with other departments to stay current on your product?
Can your sales teams articulate solutions to prospect objections?
Communication and project management tools like Slack, Asana, and Loom help teams facilitate faster feedback loops within your sales team and beyond, allowing them to improve quickly without having to wait for scheduled or unnecessary meetings.
As you gather this qualitative feedback, tweak and experiment with your team’s workflow, tools, and product content.
6. Use data to strengthen sales
How do you know if your pipeline experiments work? Data. You can analyze sales conversion rates and essential pipeline indicators like viewership or readership metrics.
Sales pipeline analytics goes beyond just lead generation metrics—it focuses on the end-to-end process from lead to conversion.
Key sales metrics include:
Prospect conversions to leads
Qualified-unqualified lead ratio
Number of presentation views or meetings
Successful sales
Collecting and analyzing data within each stage of the pipeline can give you a holistic view of the sales process to improve more efficiently.
A video messaging tool like Loom can help you gather sales pipeline data whenever you send a video to a potential buyer.
Not only does it collect data like viewership and click-throughs on a CTA, but it also provides indirect data insight via engagement features. If your potential customer comments or sends a video reply, you know there’s genuine interest, and you can address their questions, creating a real-time opportunity for connection.
Pro tip: With Loom’s Salesforce integration (beta), you can connect your Loom engagement insights into your Salesforce CRM to know who is engaging with your content and which content is performing the best.
7. Embrace asynchronous sales
Asynchronous communication often entails sending a message on Slack, a LinkedIn DM, or an email, rather than hosting a live meeting. Those mediums can be effective at reaching a high volume of prospects, but your sales team can be more persuasive—and efficient—with video.
Video messaging can also counter common prospect hesitations around live meetings.
Think about your last “no.”
Your prospect replied to your email saying they couldn’t meet because they had a busy schedule or lived in a different time zone. Or, they flat-out said they weren't interested in your product. Worse, they might have never answered your email at all.
Traditionally, you face a dead end. Asynchronous communication kicks those challenges to the curb.
You can send a video message, and prospects can watch it whenever, wherever, on any device. They don’t have to search for a convenient time to meet. If they didn’t want to feel pressured to commit during a live meeting, watching a video about your product gives them space to consider your value proposition. And if they are easily bored by a typical wall of text from a typical salesperson, your dynamic, personalized asynchronous video helps you stand out in their inbox.
With Loom video messaging, your prospects can comment on the video page and even send a video reply with questions. Your team can also track video views and by which prospects. To identify the strongest leads and who know is engaging with your content, you can even request that they enter their email to view your Loom recording.
“Loom lets you speak visually and expressively…That face-to-face contact makes your brand seem more trustworthy, and it’ll stir up a willingness in customers to invest in your services,” says Josh Hirsch, CEO of MetaGrowth Ventures.
8. Adopt sales tools for more sustainable pipeline generation
Assess your tech stack of sales and communication tools to establish, maintain, and optimize your sales prospecting. For example, you can embrace a CRM like Zoho, Pipedrive, or HubSpot for tracking leads. You can use task managers like Jira to power and improve your workflow.
Your sales team should also have the right communication tools. Utilizing and growing a pipeline is impossible without engaging and interacting with both your team and your prospects. Live meeting apps like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams help with those in-the-moment live meetings.
Sales tools like Loom offer an asynchronous solution via video messaging. Your teams can easily record and share videos with prospects and each other.
Here are some ways to integrate Loom into your sales journey and experience the power of asynchronous sales:
Lead generation: Your sales team reaches out to prospects through outbound sales or produces assets that attract prospects through inbound sales. They can record a Loom video that showcases product value to generate interest. If a prospect comments on a social post, you can respond by showing a specific use case with a Loom video.
Lead qualification: Send a personalized Loom video covering expectations, budgets, and key points to verify interest and qualification. If the prospect responds with continued interest, you can move forward.
Product presentation: Meeting with qualified leads at this stage might just be a conversation to discover if your product would be the right fit. If your prospect can meet live, set up a meeting with Zoom. Or, you can send a personalized Loom presentation with a clear call to action (CTA) if they’d like to move forward.
Education and negotiation: While prospects consider your offer, they can ask questions directly on the Loom video page, through an email reply, or by sending their own Loom video response. Ideally, the salesperson would get a commitment, whether that’s interest in moving forward or a promise to meet again soon.
Decision time: Finally, your lead makes a purchase decision. A brief, personal Loom video welcoming them or directing them to onboarding resources about your product builds rapport beyond the sales process. For leads that don’t end up purchasing or subscribing, your sales professional can move them to a longer-term segment in your sales pipeline, sending future Loom videos with updates, use cases, and features for the long term if there’s hope for a future fit.
Ultimately, the right blend of tools empowers your sales team to do what they do best. Asynchronous communication solutions like Loom can elevate your workflow and help you stand out among the competition.
Choosing the asynchronous solution to pipeline generation
Loom is a well-rounded asynchronous video solution that can elevate each part of your sales pipeline. Your sales team can quickly press record on any device, such as an iOS or Android mobile phone, a MacBook or Windows PC, or right in their Chrome browser with an extension. They capture their screen and webcam for personal, contextual sales messaging in seconds.
There’s no more waiting for your video to render, either. With instantly shareable links, your salespeople can share videos anywhere whether they’re sending them via email or DM. You can embed the video directly on your website or a sales landing page. After viewers watch the video, they get an automatic CTA for the next step.
Your sales reps don’t even have to be perfect on camera. Loom is flexible and can help you dial in your video content. You can record videos like you would naturally have a conversation for a personal, authentic sales experience. Your sales reps can use Live Rewind if they make mistakes instead of starting over from scratch.
With Loom’s AI add-on, you can remove filler words and generate titles, summaries, and message invites, saving your team valuable time creating and sharing sales content.
Streamline your sales pipeline with Loom videos to strengthen prospect connections, increase high-quality leads, and maximize sales.
Record your first personalized sales video for free.