How to Build a Scalable Lead Generation Pipeline?

Learning how to build a lead generation pipeline is extremely important as a business owner.

After all, the growth of your sales and overall business depends on your ability to find your ideal customers. These are the people who might benefit from your product or service.

However, your competitors are also out hunting for the same prospects and have the same goals as you do.

This is where building an effective and scalable lead generation pipeline can help.

This post explains what a lead generation pipeline means and different ways to build and scale a sustainable pipeline.

Lead Generation Pipeline – Table of Contents

• What is a Lead Generation Pipeline?
• How to Build a Lead Generation Pipeline?
  • Cold Outreach
  • Social Selling
  • Content Marketing & SEO
  • Performance Marketing
  • Strategic Partnerships
• 9 Key Metrics to Track in Your Lead Generation Pipeline
• 3 Most Common Lead Generation Challenges (and Their Solutions)
• Implement Your Scalable Lead Generation Strategy
• FAQs

What is a Lead Generation Pipeline?

A lead generation pipeline is process to build a consistent lead flow that attracts and converts potential customers (leads) who might benefit from your products or services into paying customers.

Building an effective lead generation pipeline can help your business streamline this process, optimize your sales and marketing efforts, and ultimately drive more sales and revenue growth.

Typically, a lead-generation pipeline involves four main stages:

Suppose you want to build an effective lead generation pipeline. In that case, you’ve to figure out exactly how to attract and engage leads at each stage of the customer journey so that they (eventually) become paying customers of your business.

Put another way, the goal of the lead generation pipeline is to systematically & strategically move the maximum number of potential customers from interested prospects to satisfied customers.

Remember, a good lead generation pipeline isn’t just effective – it’s scalable. As your business grows, your pipeline should be able to handle the increasing number of leads without issues.

How to Build a Lead Generation Pipeline?

You have a lot of options when it comes to building a lead generation pipeline.

However, not all strategies will work for your business. Therefore, you need to try the various strategies we’ve mentioned below and find the right mix that helps to build a consistent lead pipeline for your business.

Cold Outreach

Out of all the lead generation strategies and tactics, cold outreach is the most effective and cost-efficient method to generate qualified leads for your business.

If you’ve never heard about cold outreach, it involves identifying and contacting your potential customers who have not expressed interest in your product or service before but could benefit from it.

Unlike other lead generation methods, cold outreach can be done via two channels:

• Cold emailing
• Cold calling

Let’s begin with how cold emailing can help you build a scalable lead generation pipeline.

Cold Emailing

Many business people are not yet aware of the true potential of cold emailing.

If you’re one of these people, here’s what you need to know about cold emailing:

It is basically a lead-generation method in which you send unsolicited emails to your potential customers in the hopes that they will reply to your message and, eventually, purchase your product or services.

Recently, Cold emailing has developed a bad reputation, especially after Google released new email-sending guidelines.

While the updated guidelines have introduced stricter requirements, cold emailing still remains a highly effective strategy to generate qualified leads at scale for your business.

You just need to understand new rules and follow email deliverability best practices to ensure your messages bypass the spam filters, land in the primary inbox, and convince your prospect to respond.

Fortunately, there are plenty of cold email software using which you can build a consistent and scalable lead generation pipeline for your business .

Cold Calling

As the name suggests, cold calling is almost the same as cold emailing. The only difference between cold emailing vs cold calling is you reach out to your potential customers via phone instead of sending unsolicited emails.

Now, you may think that calling your potential customers out of the blue may sound intrusive and, as a result, seem like it may not be very effective.

And it’s true that cold calling isn’t effective for every industry.

Therefore, you must first determine if your prospects appreciate being contacted by phone.

If cold calling is appropriate for your prospects, make sure to keep the following tips in mind:

• Research your prospects before calling
• Prepare a clear and concise script
• Focus on how you can help them, not just on selling
• Be ready to handle objections
• Reconnect with the prospect if needed

In the end, remember that cold calling aims to start a conversation and build a relationship, not necessarily to make an immediate sale.

In fact, if you learn to do it right, cold calling can also be an effective way to reach new potential customers and grow your business.

Social Selling

Social selling is another great way to build a consistent lead generation pipeline.

As the name suggests, social selling involves leveraging relevant social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc., to find, connect with, and nurture prospects.

Simply put, social selling is about building meaningful relationships rather than directly selling. Unlike traditional lead generation methods, you need to focus on engagement and providing real value to your potential customers.

It’s a modern way to laser-target your prospects, establish a positive reputation, and increase social sales.

In fact, 1 out of every 3 consumers use social media to discover new products and brands.

That said, if you’re serious about building a lead generation pipeline through social selling, keep the following tips in mind:

• Identify social media platforms where your potential customers hang out the most.
• Make sure your profiles look professional and highlight what you offer.
• Keep a close eye on what people in your industry are talking about.
• Develop a social media calendar and post things your potential customers find useful or helpful.
• Answer questions and comment valuable information on others’ posts to show your expertise in your field.
• When your potential customers show interest, don’t immediately push for a sale. Instead, help them solve their problems and build a rapport.
• Finally, measure the success of your social selling and adjust your strategy based on the insights you gain.

Remember, social selling is mostly about being helpful and building genuine relationships. If you succeed in these areas, leads will start coming in automatically.

Content Marketing & SEO

Content marketing and SEO are two powerful aspects of your inbound marketing strategy. When they work together, they can build a sales funnel of qualified leads.

Well-executed content marketing and SEO can help provide a qualified leads pipeline for your business. You will tap into the traffic of people specifically looking for products or services like yours to solve their problems.

For those who want to learn more about it, content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and helpful content to attract your target customers and drive profitable customer action.

SEO, on the other hand, is the practice of optimizing pieces of content (and the entire website) so that it ranks higher in Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Put simply, you need to produce SEO-optimized content that is both valuable and informative to your potential clients, as well as search engine optimization for Google. This integrated method allows you to create a solid pipeline for lead generation and ensure that your content reaches aspirant customers and drives other sales.

Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is a digital marketing strategy focused on measurable results and return on investment (ROI).

In this approach, advertisers pay for specific actions or outcomes rather than just ad impressions or visibility.

Unlike display ads, where you must pay to place your ads, performance marketing only charges for specific actions like clicks, leads, or sales.

In simple terms, performance marketing is a pay-for-results model where advertisers only incur costs when desired outcomes are achieved.

This approach, in particular, will help you build a lead pipeline and ensure that your marketing dollars are spent wisely. You get a more specific lead because you are charged when prospects examine your post. If you run ads that only cost you money when someone fills out a contact form or newsletter subscription, you ensure that your marketing targets only the most likely conversions.

Furthermore, performance marketing is also easily trackable and data-driven. You can see which of your ads are performing well and which are not. This enables you to iteratively improve your targeting and messaging to more effectively find and engage with potential customers over time.

Performance marketing is one of the most promising ways to attract interested prospects and convert them into paying customers.

Strategic Partnerships

Simply put, strategic partnerships are collaborations between two or more companies aimed at mutual assistance to generate additional selling sources.

It generally involves finding and partnering with another company that can introduce or promote your products or services to its customer base.

These partnerships can take various forms, such as joint ventures, co-marketing agreements, or shared technology development.

The main idea is to combine your strengths, resources, and customer bases to create greater value and opportunities.

For example, you run a digital marketing agency and partner with a web development company. Together, you can start providing a combined, comprehensive package that includes digital marketing and website development services.

By working together this way, you can reach new customers who might initially be interested in website development but then discover the benefits and importance of digital marketing. Similarly, your digital marketing clients will appreciate the added value of website upgrades to enhance the visitor experience.

Put simply, strategic partnerships allow your company to attract new clients and provide additional value to your existing customer base.

9 Key Metrics to Track in Your Lead Generation Pipeline

Building an effective lead generation pipeline is only half the battle. If you want it to succeed in the long run, you must also track the key metrics to scale it as your business grows.

If you’re unsure where to start, we’ve already laid out 9 important metrics to track when building a lead generation pipeline.

1 – Lead Volume

The lead volume metric basically tracks the total number of leads you’ve successfully generated through a specific or mix of strategies over a specific period.

For instance, monitoring the lead volume can help you gauge your campaign’s reach and effectiveness if you run a monthly digital marketing campaign. Furthermore, whenever you see a sudden increase or decrease in lead volume, it can help you identify whether it was due to changes in market demand or the success of your latest marketing efforts.

2 – Lead Quality

The lead quality metric basically refers to assessing how closely your leads match your ideal customer profile. For example, a cold outreach software company will prioritize leads from lead-gen agencies or enterprises with large sales teams.

In other words, lead quality is determined based on job title, company size, and engagement level. This way, you can easily understand and focus your efforts more on the most promising leads, which could, in return, help to increase your conversion rate and sales.

3 – Lead Source Effectiveness

As you’ve learned, many different ways to build a lead generation pipeline exist, including cold outreach, content marketing, social selling, etc.

However, tracking the effectiveness of each source is supremely important because it allows you to understand which lead generation channel has been most effective for your business. For example, if cold outreach generates higher-quality leads than performance marketing, then consider allocating more budget to scale your cold outreach campaigns.

4 – Lead Response Time

Lead response time is a crucial metric to track because the speed at which your sales team responds to each lead can significantly influence the lead’s purchase decision.

For instance, if a potential customer fills out the contact form on your website, responding to that query within an hour can significantly increase the chance of conversion compared to responding after 24 hours.

If you want more leads to turn into paying customers, tracking and reducing the lead response time as much as possible is imperative. You can even consider implementing certain tools, like AI-powered chatbots, to help manage and improve this metric and, ultimately, your business’s bottom line.

5 – Conversion Rate

As you can already guess, conversion rate is obviously one of the most important metrics to track in your lead generation pipeline. For the uninitiated, it helps you calculate the percentage of leads that turn into paying customers.

Tracking the conversion rate is essential because it directly contributes to revenue growth overall. If the conversion rate is low, problems might exist in how your sales team nurtures the lead or in the process itself.

If that happens, you’ll have to analyze the conversion rate at each sales funnel stage to identify where most leads are dropping off. Once you’ve figured out that part of the equation, you only need to implement targeted improvements to ensure leads are moving down smoothly.

6 – Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead is another super important metric to track because it helps you determine exactly how much it costs to generate one lead through whatever lead generation channel you’re using.

The best part? – It’s extremely easy to find out your cost per lead. You just need to divide your total lead generation expenses by the number of leads a particular channel has generated in a month.

So, for example, if you spend $10,000 on a performance marketing campaign and generate about 500 leads, your cost per lead is $10,000 divided by 500, which equals $20 per lead. For any business, lowering the cost per lead while maintaining lead quality is important if the goal is to increase overall profitability.

7 – Revenue Per Lead

Like cost per lead, revenue per lead is an equally important metric to track because it helps you determine exactly how much revenue you can make on each lead you generate.

But more importantly, tracking your revenue per lead also helps you identify which leads or lead sources are helping you generate higher revenue compared to one another. This can help you understand where to focus to build a powerful lead generation pipeline.

For example, suppose leads generated via content marketing & SEO generate higher revenue than those from strategic partnerships. In that case, focusing your efforts on the former channel makes sense.

Doing so will help refine your targeting and investment strategies and improve ROI.

8 – Sales Cycle Length

As the name suggests, the sales cycle length helps you measure exactly how much time it takes, on average, to convert a lead into a paying customer.

If your sales cycle is long, it can delay revenue generation and ultimately strain your resources. Therefore, you must track this metric as soon as your leads begin to convert into customers so that you can figure out ways to shorten it.

In addition, measuring your sales cycle length can help you discover and streamline/solve any bottlenecks in your current sales process. This can convert leads into customers faster and increase your business’s overall growth.

9 – Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV)

Finally, the lifetime value of a customer, often referred to as LTV, is a key metric because it gives you an accurate estimate of how much money a customer is likely to spend at your business over time, from the first purchase until they stop buying from you.

For example, let’s say that you sell a subscription-based service. In this case, you can find the LTV based on the average subscription duration and monthly revenue.

Keeping track of this metric can help you uncover insights into your lead generation pipeline, sales process, and overall business.

For starters, LTV can help you understand the long-term value of your leads. But more than that, when you compare your LTV with cost per lead or cost of acquisition, you can determine if your marketing and sales efforts are profitable in the long run.

If your LTV is significantly higher than your cost to acquire a customer, you’re making a good return on your investment.

This information can guide your decisions on how much to spend on marketing and customer acquisition. It can also help you identify which customer segments are most valuable so that you can focus your efforts on attracting and retaining these high-value customers.

3 Most Common Lead Generation Challenges (and Their Solutions)

Building an effective and sustainable lead generation pipeline is critical to any business. But as you already know, the process has its own set of challenges.

Out of all lead generation challenges, the following three challenges are the most common and possible solutions you can implement to mitigate them.

Challenge 1 – Low-Quality/Irrelevant Leads

One of the common and biggest challenges in the lead generation pipeline is attracting low-quality or irrelevant leads. These leads almost always don’t convert and often waste the time and efforts of your sales team.

These leads generally don’t fit your ideal customer profile (ICP), or they may not be interested in your offerings. Either way, they are highly likely to waste your sales team’s time and resources, which can lead to lower conversion rates.

Solution:

• Define your ICP – When you realize the leads coming in are low-quality & converting well, it may be because you’ve not properly defined your ICP. For the uninitiated, ICP comprises demographic information like age, gender, job title, and company size, as well as psychographic information like interests, challenges, and goals. The more you research and create detailed ICP, the higher quality leads you’ll be able to generate and convert them faster.

• Targeted Marketing — After defining a detailed ICP, the next step is to execute highly targeted marketing campaigns to reach it. As shared earlier, there are many different ways to do this, such as cold outreach, social selling, performance marketing, etc. The goal is to generate leads matching your ICP to achieve a high conversion rate.

• Lead Scoring – To go one step beyond, consider creating a lead scoring system to rank your leads based on their value to your business. For example, you can give scores to leads you generate based on how they interact with your content, how well they match your ideal customer profile, and their chances of becoming a customer. Then, your sales team can focus on leads more likely to buy and become your paying customers.

• Enhance Marketing & Sales Alignment – Once you have a well-defined ICP and a lead scoring system in place, it’s crucial to ensure that your marketing and sales teams are aligned. This means they should be working together closely to identify high-quality leads, share insights, and tailor their strategies accordingly. Regular communication and collaboration between these teams will help streamline the process, making sure that marketing efforts generate the right leads and sales efforts convert them effectively. This alignment will ultimately lead to better results, higher conversion rates, and more efficient use of resources.

Challenge 2 – Long Sales Cycles

The second most common challenge we’ve witnessed in almost every business is long sales cycles, which lead to losing interest or choosing a competitor.

When this happens, the business incurs significant effort, capital, resources, and losses.

Fortunately, you can take a few actions to smoothen your sales process, shorten the overall cycle, and convert more leads into paying customers.

Solution:

• Streamline Your Sales Process — If you’re a business facing a long sales cycle challenge, you should know that it’s a common challenge that most businesses face and is easy to overcome. Usually, if you identify the areas in your sales process that are currently causing delays, half of your problem is already solved. You need to figure out the best possible solution to streamline them. This might involve automating certain tasks, simplifying the purchasing process, or providing your sales team with better tools and resources.

• Educate Your Leads — After streamlining the sales process, keeping the sales cycle as short as possible is important to avoid facing this challenge again. One definite way to achieve this is by giving your leads valuable information so that they make decisions faster. For example, you can consider developing various case studies, whitepapers, webinars, and even detailed product information and sharing it to educate your incoming leads. Remember, the more informed your leads will be, the quicker they will decide to purchase your product or service.

• Nurture Leads — While educating your incoming leads is important, you must not neglect to engage them through the sales process. We recommend developing a lead nurturing strategy involving email marketing, personalized follow-ups, and regular updates to keep leads informed and interested in your product or service. If you implement these steps, you will successfully lower your overall sales cycle length.

• Provide Clear Value Proposition – To further shorten your sales cycle, ensure that your leads clearly understand the value your product or service offers. A strong value proposition highlights the unique benefits and solutions your business provides, addressing the specific pain points and needs of your potential customers. Make sure this value is communicated consistently across all marketing and sales materials. This will make it easier for leads to see the benefits and make a quicker purchasing decision.

Challenge 3 – Inadequate Follow-Up

The third most common lead generation challenge is failing to follow up with leads, eventually resulting in lost business opportunities.

If you’re currently in a similar situation, you must first understand that it is quite common and can be easily solved.

You see, inbound or outbound leads will always require a few touchpoints before they are ready to purchase. So, if you don’t follow up properly, many of these leads can either forget about your product or lose interest.

Therefore, we always recommend the following solution so that you can effectively manage your follow-up process.

Solution:

• Use a CRM System — You should use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track all your interactions with potential customers. This system helps you remember every lead and maintains a record of all your communications. With this history, you can easily personalize your follow-up messages and, more importantly, make them more relevant to each lead.

• Automate Where Possible — Next, you should set up automated follow-up emails using tools like Saleshandy to keep in touch with your leads consistently. Saleshandy can allow you to automate the initial email and the entire follow-up email sequence so that your sales focus on more personalized interactions as leads move further down the funnel.

• Personalize Your Approach — When setting up the automated follow-up sequence, make sure you personalize your message to meet each lead’s specific interests and needs. Personalizing your approach will make your leads feel more valued, increase lead engagement, and improve conversion rate.

• Train the Sales Team – Finally, you need to ensure that your sales team is well-equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively use the CRM system, automation tools, and personalized communication strategies. Regular training sessions can help them stay updated on best practices, new features, and techniques for engaging with leads. This way, your sales team can make the most of these tools, build stronger relationships with potential customers, and ultimately increase sales success.

Implement Your Scalable Lead Generation Strategy

Building a scalable lead generation pipeline is essential for any business looking to grow and succeed.

As a business owner, your ability to identify and attract your ideal customers is crucial. It’s about finding potential buyers and convincing them to choose your product or service over competitors.

Remember, your competitors are hunting for the same customers as you, so having a well-structured and scalable lead generation pipeline is extremely important.

FAQs

1) What are the steps of lead generation?

Lead generation steps include identifying your target audience, attracting them with valuable content or offers, capturing their contact information, nurturing the leads through personalized communication, and finally converting them into customers.

2) What is lead generation in B2B?

Lead generation in B2B (Business-to-Business) involves finding and attracting businesses that might benefit from your products or services. This process typically includes methods like cold outreach, networking, content marketing, and partnerships to reach and engage potential clients.

3) What are the 3 approaches of lead generation?

The three common approaches to lead generation are:

• Cold Outreach – Contacting potential customers who haven’t shown interest yet through cold emails or calls.
• Content Marketing & SEO – Creating and optimizing valuable content to organically attract and engage potential customers.
• Social Selling – Using social media platforms to connect with and nurture potential customers by providing value and building relationships.