Pipeline Over Everything by Kevin “KD” Dorsey

Kevin “KD” Dorsey wears the top sales leader hat across many platforms - LinkedIn, DemandBase, Crunchbase, Salesforce, and the list goes on! From scaling teams to building their revenue from scratch, he is an ace through and through.

With years of experience, he has perfected the art of keeping the pipeline full and healthy.

“Companies die because they starve of an empty pipeline.” - KD

And so, in this Masterclass, KD shares his frameworks, templates, and hot tips to keep a pipeline from running empty. 

Why Your Pipeline is Everything

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of where (the stage) your prospects are in the sales process. Depending on the prospect's interactions and reactions, they move through the pipeline until they reach the very end. The end could be a deal won or a closed lost. 

With a flawless pipeline, you get to close your deals faster, remove any room for slip-ups and follow a fool-proof process while talking to your prospects. With a standardized process and insights every step of the way, you can follow a workflow that has seen success in the past. 

How can you make sure your pipeline keeps blooming and remains stronger? Keep speaking to prospects to make sure you’re never short on leads and don’t sever the communication with your interested prospects for too long - keep the follow-ups going. 

How to Keep Up with Your Pipeline

Metrics are very important when it comes to your pipeline. Doing constant checks on the numbers will help you stay on track. As KD says, even if you fall short of a few numbers, it’ll be hard to meet your targets. 
 

Some metrics to keep a close eye on are your call connect rate, conversation rate, open rate, reply rate, click rate, and sentiment analysis amongst others.

A good number for your conversation rate is 20%. Eg: You need to talk to 50 people to hit that number. 

At the same time, you must read up about your personas and study the pain points of your users, buyers, and beneficiaries. 

There’s a stark difference between all of them as they all have different pain points, and we have to cater to them individually. 
 

Leverage Inbound for Outbound

KD says that this is where most of the pipeline hides. In your inbound. 

You can connect with your marketing team to learn about the top keywords, performance ads, webpages, etc., and use this data to approach your prospects using outbound. 

Not just your marketing team, but your customer success team can help you sharpen your outbound messaging. Ask them if they can connect you with a few customers to understand their journey better and use that information for your future reach outs. 

Sample questions from KD: 

1. Why did you buy {product name}?
2. What’s changed the most since buying?
3. How would you describe us to someone else?
    

Outreach Framework

A good framework to use in your messaging is the KPIC framework. 

• Know/Learn about your prospect, company, and personas. Focus on your research before you reach out. 
   
• Problem. Your outbound messaging has to focus on the problem, not the product. 
   
• Impact. Answer this - What does the problem cause? And how important is it to solve it? Tie this in with your outreach messaging. 
   
• CTA. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to respond, watch a video, or click on a link? Make it clear in your CTA. (Call to action)

Hot tip: Ask for an agreement as a CTA at the end of a call. (More than one CTA kills the response rate.) Eg: {name}, are you seeing this too? 

Since it takes around 16-18 touches for a prospect to respond (on average), make sure you’re following a multi-channel outreach in your sequence to spread your messaging across channels. 

A good breakdown is - 4 good calls, 4 emails, 4 social touches, and 4 videos. 

But the most important thing is practicing! (We love this tip.) If you’re not practicing with each other or your manager, then you’re practicing with your prospects. And there’s a very high chance you’re losing money because of this. 

Watch KD’s full Masterclass whenever you want and get access to other helpful resources based on his session here.