How to Monetize Your Sales Pipeline Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

To monetize your sales pipeline, you need to fill it, prioritize it and tackle it. This whole idea of knowing what to do and not doing it, is rampant. It seems ridiculous. It's like, well, who would do that? And the answer is nearly everybody does it. And none of us do it on purpose, but we all, to some extent, end up doing it.







David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to monetize your sales pipeline. Welcome back, Jay.







Jay: Thank you, David. It's such a pleasure to be here, and I really can't wait to talk a little bit more about this process. I see people who kind of think they have a pipeline, but they're not sure exactly what to do with it. So a good, important topic today.



David: Yeah. What to do with it or in a lot of cases, even what it is. I think even before we can talk about how to monetize it, you almost have to identify it. What is it? What is your sales pipeline? Who is it? Who are the people who are in it? Where is it located? Is it just inside your head?



Because if it's just inside your head, leaving enormous amounts of money on the table.



Jay: Yeah, and we've talked in the past about key performance indicators, KPIs, and so first you have to know what that pipeline is. Then you have to know how to track it and where people are at in each stage so that things ideally trigger automatically. I think that's the end goal, but getting there can be difficult.

3 Steps to Monetize Your Sales Pipeline

David: Yeah, I mean I think of it in terms of filling it, prioritizing it and then tackling it. Because if you're not sort of doing it in that order, I think it's going to potentially be problematic for you.



Jay: All right. Well then let's start with filling it. Let's get that going.



David: Okay, Well, when we talk about filling our pipeline after we've identified , after we've identified what it is and where it is, filling it obviously is the biggest thing. And I think a lot of salespeople tend to think of this as being pretty important, getting new leads into their pipeline.



And of course, it is very important. It's the number one step because until you know who's in there, you don't really have anything that you can do. You've got to have the prospect first.



So filling it starts with asking yourself, who goes in here? And what types of clients am I looking for? Are they in particular types of industries? Are they located in a particular geographic area?



What are the different things that I'm looking for in terms of a good, solid prospect for my pipeline? So who goes in is very important. But who stays out is also extremely important. And we don't think about this, but it is so critical.



In my sales career over the years, particularly in the early stages, I just thought if someone was willing to talk to me then they were a good prospect.



And I learned, not as quickly as I should have, that that's just not the case. There are people out there who will be happy to talk to you again and again and never actually buy anything from you.



So when you're looking at who goes in and who stays out, you want to think in terms of exactly that. When you are talking to someone, if you're not able to get them qualified in as quickly as you'd like, to make sure that they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend, then you don't want to keep going back to that well and expecting to get water out if there's no water to be found.



Jay: You know, we had exactly this problem here recently with the company I've been doing consulting for. They wanted to start using Google ads and



David: mm-hmm.



Jay: So they just put out some general pay for click kind of stuff,