Episode 17 Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pipeline management allows you to be strategic and proactive rather than reactioning your business. Hi everyone. Rob Kropp here and welcome back to another episode of the Trade Den podcast. How are you Dan?
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I’m very well, thank you, Rob. Always good. How about yourself?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I’m doing really well, thanks. I’m really looking forward to today’s episode. It’s going to be a cracker.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, I think it’s a pretty important one for where we’re at right now and probably whenever you listen to this, it’s going to have a lot of value.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Yeah, I think this is really topical for where we’re at in the marketplace at the moment. We’re seeing this across our client base and for the business owners that we do speak to who are not yet clients, they’re really starting to feel the pinch in the marketplace. When we record this, we’ve been coming off some really good times, entering into some challenging times. These are just the natural cycles that we go on in business, and so it’s going to happen again and again in the future, but I’m really looking forward to today to really unpack this conversation around pipeline. What is it, why it’s important, and how we can fill your pipeline over the near future. Can’t wait.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, of course. We are talking about sales pipeline. Let’s start with that very first question. If you’re listening and wondering what the hell a pipeline means, then Rob, do you want to just start us off by talking through what do you mean by sales pipeline?
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah. This isn’t around a prospect and the sales process pipeline, and what I mean by that is the pipeline in terms of how an inquiry turns into a lead, turns into an opportunity, turns into a converted sale. That’s a sales pipeline. What this conversation is about today is for those business owners and primarily for those of you who run more of a project style business where you’ve got the ability to look forward into the future in terms of the work that you’re either about to land or have landed and you are looking forward into your pipeline of workload or your workload pipeline to be able to see what’s coming up when in which month, so you’ve got the ability to forward plan in terms of your pipeline of secured work. So today isn’t about our sales pipeline. Today is more around our secured work pipeline in terms of the workload that’s coming up in front of us.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
And we’re talking about more than a concept. This isn’t, think about it, this isn’t what you see in your head. This isn’t all the stuff that’s sort of you’ve got to pull out of the old memory bank every now and again when you’re sort of thinking what’s coming up. It’s more than that. We are talking about a pipeline as a living, breathing sort of document, something you can point to see out, you can pull out and really start to do some work with. Let’s get into it by talking about why it’s important to manage a pipeline. As I said, a lot of people try and carry it around in their head. It’s not really managing it. I think in these times when we’re talking about things tightening up, it is tight, but it is manageable, but you’ve got to have something to manage. So why is it so important that we start to turn our attention and manage our workload pipeline.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
When we think about our workload pipeline, there’s four main reasons of why it’s super important to be able to have a documented pipeline in terms of what’s coming up, and number one, it really helps you anticipate your future for where you’re going from a business perspective.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Why would you want that anticipation? What does anticipating the future bring?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
What it enables you to do is look forward into the future and project what work is coming when, and it’s not just I’ve got these four projects coming up over the next three to six months. It’s your ability then to break up those projects into stages and your ability to be able to go, well in June, I’m going to do this much in July. This is what I’m expecting in August, this is what I’m expecting in September, this is what I’m expecting. So what it enables you to do is really look at a month by month view going forward in terms of what’s my forward projection on my revenue run rate look like so that you’ve got the ability to look ahead and see, well, what is the trajectory of actually where my business is going and what I’m looking at hitting from a revenue point of view?
Speaker 2 (04:45):
And I think it also comes back to what you said at the start. You can either defend your position by looking to blame other people, so how do you get certainty? You can blame other people or you can put some stuff down on paper and really start to anticipate what’s coming and it’s not a hundred percent certainty because it’s dealing with the future, but at least being able to anticipate it gives you a sense that you’re in some form of control that you have got some role to play in this rather than just being a passenger.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, correct. Because what it actually does is a couple of things that it can help you with is when you’ve got the ability, and obviously we’ve got to remember it’s only our best projection of what’s coming, but when we don’t have it, we’re running it by gut feel. When we’ve got something documented coming up, we’ve got the ability to look forward and go, right, what does this mean from a workload point of view, where are the peaks? Where are the troughs? And then you’ve got the ability to plan well in terms of where you’re going in either an upward trajectory or a downward dip specifically what it actually helps you do with two main things. Number one plan for cashflow. It enables you to be able to understand what workload’s coming up, when you’re invoicing, what you’re going to be invoicing projections are, when are you expected to be able to get that cash in the bank, and it really helps you take some of that cash stress away because you’ve got the ability to look forward to know what workload is coming.
(06:11):
The second point is your ability to manage labour going forward for a trades business, one of the biggest costs and one of the biggest sunk costs is labour within a business. And so when you’ve got a forward projection in terms of what workload’s coming up, it helps you go back to the whole matching of revenue to resources principle that we’ve spoken about in previous, and it helps you know who you’ve got to hire when if you’re on a growth trajectory, but if you’re on a downward trajectory and you don’t have the ability to chalk work into your pipeline in a short amount of time, then that’s a leading indicator that maybe you’re going to be over-resourced and you might have to rightsize your workforce over the short term to ensure you’re not bleeding profits and therefore having a worse cashflow position over the next little while.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
And I think that ability to have it on paper and really work with it, as we said and interact with this pipeline, brings us to the second reason, which is reducing overwhelm. Most business owners manage their future in their heads. They don’t tend to write it down. They’ll try and guess what’s coming and they’ll go through scenario based things in their mind. When you’re doing that, you’re looking at scenarios like you said, in terms of growth, when are we growing? Who do we need to hire? Big decisions can be stressful. Same thing if we’re seeing there’s a hole in our pipeline or there’s nothing coming up, we’re then starting to look at, well, geez, I might have to lay some people off and that can play games on your mind as long as, and the same thing with the cashflow position that you just mentioned. So I think reducing overwhelm is another really important reason why this pipeline needs to be managed.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
When you’ve got it documented, how does it actually reduce overwhelm, do you think?
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I think one of the biggest things, I mean this is almost like a little side strategy. If like you’re someone that has overwhelm, what it really means is that you’ve run out of bandwidth in your mind. You can’t process any more information at that time. You’re overwhelmed with information, be it decision scenarios, whatever you’re looking at. So overwhelm is that extension or overextension of your mind by getting it down on paper. What it does is it takes the need out to remember. It frees up that space in your mind. So anytime someone’s overwhelmed with anything, what we’ll do as coaches is tell them, get it out of your head and get it on paper. Free up that room in your mind to start thinking rather than just trying to remember and recall things where the buffering happens where you can’t move anywhere and it starts to feel really tense in your mind. I think the other thing that is important for this pipeline is it provides you with a sense of clarity, and we’ve already talked a little little bit about certainty, but what would you say to pipeline management providing clarity?
Speaker 1 (09:00):
What it does is it gives you confidence in the direction and the trajectory of where the business is actually going. And in the absence of having clarity around your pipeline, you can become susceptible to the noise that’s going on out there in the marketplace. You listen to the news, you listen to the radio, you listen to your mates. I’m sure if you ask someone in the industry at the moment and you ask them, how’s workload, how’s work going at the moment? Oh gee, leads and sales are starting to dry up, and that’s the common conversation out there in the marketplace at the moment. And so one of the biggest traps is that when you don’t have clarity around your pipeline, you can start listening to the noise around what’s going on out there, and then negativity breeds negativity and it can cause you to get sucked into that negative conversation, which then causes a downward spiral. The opposite to that is having clarity around where your business is going, getting it down on paper, getting it documented, it gets it out of your head so you’re not swirling around, like you said, all these different scenarios that you’ve got. Then you’ve got the ability to have confidence in where you are going and where your business is going so you can make far better strategic decisions around the future direction of where this business is going to go.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah, so what you’re saying is it’s revealing things that are important.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Correct, absolutely, and I think it helps well, have we got too much in our pipeline? Do we need to hire more people or do we need to push back on some customers to be able to say yes to that job? But we’ve got to say yes to within three, starting that in three weeks time so you’re not pissing off one of your customers saying you can do the job in the next couple of weeks. Or if you’re noticing a big hole in your pipeline where you do have a big hole because you either missed a sale or a job doesn’t start when you expect it and it gets pushed out, then what that does is create that element of urgency then for you to get off your ass and actually push the sales front to be able to get there and do something about filling that pipeline. So that’s what it does is it gives you the confidence to be able to know where you’re at and where you’re trying to go,
Speaker 2 (11:22):
And that’s our point 4, which is it does reveal a sense of urgency. So what you get is when you combine that sense of importance because now you’ve got clarity and you’ve got some certainty, you understand the importance of what needs to be done, you’ve then got this pipeline document revealing the urgency of things. Like you said, if you’re in a hole, you need to fill it in. If you need to be selling into another month, you can go and chase that work. What it allows you to do is make better decisions. So this reminds me of a client we had Phil Dawes from The Great Outdoors. He was a client that used a pipeline, learned to use a pipeline, I should say, and relied on it relentlessly. So rather than being stressed, staying up late at night, all the things that you are probably experiencing, if you’ve got overwhelm or anxiety around where your pipeline’s at the moment, then Phil’s story is going to be great for you to hear because what he started to do was use it to get over those overwhelmed things, but gradually it went from being almost like a coping mechanism to sort of give him that sense of clarity to really giving him the idea about where did he need to be strategically, what month did he need to sell into?
(12:29):
What was filled up, where was the projects going to be starting, where were they going to be ending and shifting those as they came so he could go to clients and start talking about bringing jobs forward or pushing them back to fill the pipeline where the holes were. So that was really big for him. The other thing when he started to work with that stuff is that Phil’s demeanour changed dramatically. He went from sort of worried about work to just looking at the pipeline and going, okay, I need to get work there, and over time he built up this history and he could see the rhythm of the work that he would win in his business. So he knew that seasonality because Great Outdoors is a business that does landscaping, right? Summers a real busy time. Winter not so much, but with the pipeline, Phil could start to strategically get to a point where he’d fill out months in advance and fill that pipeline hole that he knew was coming.
(13:18):
We always had one eye on the future. It was never just sort of what’s coming up. It was well planned in advance. So the point is, as Phil’s coach, he’d be like, we’re going to be right. It’s okay. I’m selling into that month now, and sure enough, I’d be sitting there looking at this thing going, Phil, you’ve got a pretty big hole. And he’d be like, yep, it’ll be okay. And he’d sell. He’d do the work knowing that that was strategically the importance and the urgency, he knew that. So his decisions around who he spoke to when he spoke to them, who he ramped up in the team, he was all across that all because of his pipeline, so really, really important document in his business and allowed him to go from doing almost losing or non profitable months in a winter to really making profits and excelling even in those times when the business probably wasn’t expected to perform as well as it should.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Would you go as far as saying that his pipeline has been his leading indicator of where he’s taken his business over the last number of years? It’s almost been that thing that’s helped him drive his business forward over the last few years?
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, it absolutely has. I’d absolutely say that it’s his way of, like we said, the very first thing anticipating the future, there’s always uncertainty in business, but if you can learn to anticipate the future and you’ve got a way to start focusing on it without obsessing over all the what ifs, you’re starting to direct your business in a way you probably haven’t before. You’re not responding and reacting to what’s going on, you are really driving the bus in terms of, well, where is this business going to land when those months hit? So having that visibility for Phil allowed him to look at that front windscreen and probably further than he has before, and it’s no surprise that the business was able to turn what was typically the high point of a summer, became now the new point of winter, and then he went to a new level. So he just kept growing his business in terms of the sales activity and the projects he was winning, all based on the fact that he was anticipating what he needed and was keeping focused on what was important to him.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Yeah, what I really like about that story is that he’s used his pipeline of work to drive his business forward. Now we’re going to talk about it in a minute around where to put your time and any energy and focus from a sales perspective into what to do to fill your pipeline. We’re going to talk about that in a minute, but first up, we had to address this concept that is what is a pipeline? Because in the absence of having a forward projection of what your pipeline is, it’s almost hard to be able to know where to put your sales effort if you actually don’t know what your pipeline is, especially when you are in the project space, especially if you’re a business to business type of trades business because this pipeline, as you said at the start, Dan, it’s a living, breathing document in terms of what are all the projects I’ve got on?
(16:13):
Where am I trying to go? When are they going to land? What’s the start date, stop date, and what’s my projection in terms of where things are going? Now obviously every single job then has a detailed programme or schedule that you do on a job by job basis, but this whole pipeline enables you to come up at a higher level and manage this business forward so when your busy periods are, but also where all your troughs are in your business so that you can strategically know, you got to know when to push when you’ve got some holes in your pipeline, but also when to take your foot off the pedal when things might be getting a little bit crazy from a sales perspective.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we get this pushback from guys that sort of look at it and go, yeah, but I’m already busy and they’re caught up in what they’re doing. I think the other thing is it sounds like a lot of work if you are listening to this and thinking, well, this is just something else I’ve got to look at. I’ve got enough paperwork, I don’t like admin. I think asking yourself is the price of doing some work to set up and have a work pipeline that you can look at, is it worth doing that effort to anticipate your future better? Is it worth that to reduce the overwhelm you’re feeling? And this is what we mean by either you take control of the situation, you start to work with it, or you sort of just let it smack you in the face as it goes, which a lot of people are doing at the moment in the market.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Correct. Because if you know that your break even point, for example is $120k a month and you’ve got certainty around what your pipeline looks like over the next three to six months and you are feeling the uncertainty of what’s going on out there in the marketplace and you’ve got the ability to look forward and in two months time it says you’ve only got $80k worth of work booked in, which means you are $40k short, that is worth its weight in gold because what that does is kicks you into action to be able to go, shit, I’ve got to land a job there because otherwise in that month, in two months time, we’re going backwards. And so it’s not extra work, it’s your ability to manage your business so much more strategically. So what’s coming when are we in profit territory or loss territory? And then this pipeline helps you drive your business forward rather than everything swirling around in your mind and you’ve got that overwhelmed feeling because you’re trying to juggle 5, 10, 15, 20 jobs of what’s coming up. It’s literally impossible. And that’s why that’s what’s adding to the pressure over and above the uncertainty of what’s going on out there and out there at the marketplace at the moment.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, absolutely. It’s sort of our refrain at the moment as we’re recording this is that yeah, times are tight but they are manageable, but people leave off that bit about it being manageable and just focus on what’s tight. So let’s go Rob into where to focus your attention. So I know there’s a concept that you’ve talked for many years and it’s the sales bullseye concept. So let’s walk through that and as you’re listening start to think about how you approach similar things at the moment and take away what you can out of what are some things you can change up in order to build out this view of your pipeline.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
So as I talk you through this, what I want you to think of is having a target, a picture of a target in your mind. There’s the centre circle and then there’s all the rings that hang off that centre circle for that target. And what this bullseye helps you do is it helps you to know where to focus your time and energy and effort from a sales perspective so that you can get the best bang for your time and energy and effort depending on where you’re at in your business at this moment. And the concept is we always start in the centre circle. We exhaust all opportunities there and then we move to the next layer, then we exhaust all opportunities there and then move to the next one. And we always keep moving through the layers, but we always start in the centre and work our way out to the outer rings from there.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Terrific. Alright, well let’s do that. Let’s start with the centre or the bullseye if you like. What’s that made up of?
Speaker 1 (20:44):
The centre circle is made up of existing contacts or open projects and so when it comes to sales it’s always 10 times easier to sell to those people who already know you, who you’ve already done business with you because they know like and trust you. That’s the principles when it comes to sales, it’s sales 1-0-1 and so yes, it is a short-term strategy and you are going to exhaust this pretty quickly, but there’s no point looking for new sales opportunities until you’ve exhausted all the opportunities with your existing client base or you’ve knocked out all the quotes that are sitting on your desk at the moment. Don’t worry about thinking what’s next until you’ve maximised the sales opportunities from everyone you’re currently doing business with at the moment. And there’s always low hanging fruit that I can guarantee you can pick up additional jobs within the next 30 to 60 to 90 days if you just start here in the centre of the bullseye.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, we see that all the time. We’ve turned many pipelines around on their head in the case of a week from just this very first ring. I think the other thing that this centre circle does, if you are someone that probably isn’t comfortable with sales and especially if you’re under pressure to go and fill that pipeline because you’re facing a hole, this centre ring is more around or it can be more around account management versus what people typically think of as cold selling or really trying to pressure people. We get that all the time. How can I fill my pipeline without being pushy? This is what this centre ring is really where you can get some great strides without having to have that pressure correct.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
And so this opportunity around this whole account management concept is it’s your ability to come up with a bit of an account management matrix. There’s nothing sexy about it. It’s literally going into your job management system or your accounting package and downloading a list of all the people you’ve done work with over the last couple of years and you rank them in order of the ones that are highest priorities and lowest of priorities and say let’s say you’re a plumber that does work for builders, you might spit out of your system that you do work for 10 to 15 builders in your that you’ve done work with over the last couple of years. What we want to be able to do then is rank them in terms of order of priority. Then we want to be able to consider does that builder, have we done all our different service offerings for that builder as well so we can start to create a bit of a matrix in terms of who have we done work for and have we done all our scope of available work for that builder. Then what we’ve got the ability to do is then set up a bit of an account management plan to be able to get in front of those builders, have the conversation and ask them how are you going? What have you got going on? How can I help you? So that matrix really helps you set your intention around how you can go out there and start shaking trees to be able to get some leads or a set of plans on your desk straight away that you can quote immediately.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, and don’t forget, you just said it’s people that know and trust you. So how do you feel when someone reaches out that like and trust and they say, ‘Hey, got 10 minutes’ or maybe ‘I’m going to be in the area’ or ‘catch up for a coffee in a couple of weeks. I’d love to see you’. That to me that’s the low pressure way of getting yourself in front of these opportunities again, which is great.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
It reminds me of that time that we worked with actually Anthony Rentzis, the guy that we had on a recent client feature. We set up this matrix, we downloaded all the builders that he was doing work for at the time and he still is doing security, electrical and heating and cooling, and we put together this matrix to be able to go, well, these builders we do electrical work for but actually we don’t do security and we don’t do heating and cooling. And so what we identified was all these gaps in terms of what he does and doesn’t do work for and then we ranked them all in order of priority and then it was the ability for Anthony to jump on the phone and go, ‘Hey mate, how are you going? What are you up to next week? Can we meet on site or can I come over to your office?’
(25:19):
We have a chat around how things are going, ‘let’s talk a bit about what you’ve going up, coming up any live jobs you’ve got on the go. And actually I just realised that, mate, we’ve got some offerings that we haven’t even been doing for you. Can we have a sit down and see if there’s anything we can do to help?’ And it’s as simple as that. You’ve already got a relationship with these people you’re doing work with. You don’t have to feel like you’re selling yourself. It’s literally just a conversation going, ‘Hey mate, how are you? What have you got coming up? How can we help?’ That’s as simple as account management has to be.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah, I love it. And that sort of then leads itself, so that’s existing clients open projects. Let’s have a look then at the second ring, which is leads and past customers.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah, I think this is a great one because it’s your ability to be able to look back and when you download your whole customer base, you can actually look back and then go, actually we don’t do work for them anymore or we don’t do any work for them anymore. And actually over the last number of years, there’s maybe 15, 20, 30 customers that we actually haven’t done work with over the last little while. You’ve already had a previous relationship with them. Let’s get on the blower and have a chat to them and re-engage the conversation. Obviously you don’t necessarily want to talk to those ones where they may have been a customer that dipped off your priority list because they stuffed you around or were in bad payer or whatever it is, so you’ve got to filter this list, but getting back into old leads that didn’t convert or previous customers that you had converted a job for, it’s the easiest way to get on the blower and start having a few phone calls and see what drops out.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, I did this with a client literally I think it was about three weeks ago, and they were stressed, they were overwhelmed, all the things we said, they had all those sort of symptoms and it was like, all right, let’s go through this bullseye. We did that and we turned around into actual quoted work and real opportunities. We went into 24 opportunities within a couple of days and $2.1 m worth of work undecided, but that was from 0 all because we went through the bullseye and went, right, let’s go through these leads and pass customers, reach out, what can you find out? They did that and low and behold, the pipeline wasn’t as empty as they thought in their head it was, but once you start to put it on paper and you start to really work with it, different world.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Yeah, I think this is why it’s so important that we work in the centre and exhaust these opportunities because if you are pipelines starting to dry up, the first thing you’re thinking about is going, shit, I’ve got to do business development. I’ve got to spend money. I’ve got to generate new leads. I’ve got to start getting my foot in the door through either LinkedIn, Instagram or paid advertising. Whatever your strategy is, you think you’ve got to spend money to be able to get new avenues, but I can guarantee there’s opportunities in your current contacts lists, whether they’re current or previous or non-converted work. I can guarantee that there’s probably a couple of hundred thousand dollars at lease of quotes that’s sitting out there that you can drum up with over the next 90 days that if you put in the time the energy and effort, you can have the ability to convert some of that, which will make a massive difference to your pipeline going forward.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Absolutely. Let’s get into the second half of our bullseye. We said there was 4 rings. What’s number 3?
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Number 3 is new referral partners. And you noticed here we haven’t done any activity where we’ve spent any money yet. All we’re doing is spending a bit of time so far on our activity and what I mean by new referral partners, and these are noncompeting people in your industry who are already serving your target audience. And so what I mean by that is if you’re a trader who’s working for builders and you are looking for more builders to get in front of, why not ask every subtrade who’s on that job site that you’re on at the moment, who they can recommend that they know that they like and that they trust? Who can they put you in front of? So if you’re a plumber, ask the sparky, ask the roofer, ask the heating and cooling guy, ask the concreter, ask the landscaper. You’re already hanging around these guys on a day-to-day basis, shake some trees and it’s your ability to get a nice warm referral to be able to get a foot in the door with someone that they trust. So it reduces that chance of getting on board with someone who may not be doing so well financially at the moment in this current marketplace.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, I love this one and I think we can make it easier than what it sounds like because a lot of people think, well then now I’m sounding like I’m desperate or I’ll come across the wrong way. I think it’s all in how you ask the question. I always coach guys to ask the question because if you just go, ‘Hey, do you know someone?’ Chances are someone, I can’t be bothered with that. ‘No, I don’t.’ And you get a really blunt response. So the way I’d recommend you ask that question is, ‘do you or anyone you know need X, Y, Z?’The service you want to sort of push for quotes, done stuff done in a hurry if you’re trying to fill in short-term pipeline, but that ability to say, do you or anyone you know sort of puts the emphasis back on the person answering, well, I don’t, but I do know this person. You’re sort of asking, you’re getting two questions for one in there. So if you are going to go out into that third ring and you’re up to that, always ask, is it you or someone that can use our services? It really works well and it takes all the pressure away and all that desperation comes out of it.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
I like that and it reminds me of a conversation I had the other day with a Sparky who’s in our Launch programme. He does work for builders here in Bayside in Melbourne, and he works pretty much in the high-end space and it’s amazing that believe it or not, a lot of the high-end builders all talk. They know what jobs are coming up, they know what’s going on around each other, they’re all connected in a certain way, whether they went to school together, their family, whatever it is, the six degrees of separation is there, and it’s amazing that the moment that he started doing work for one and did a great job, he got his foot in the door with the next one, then that project manager left that business and went to that builder, he got dragged along to that. And so if you do a good job and you communicate well and your prices are fair and you follow your nose through all your contacts in the industry, you’ll be amazed at what opportunities can open themselves up over a very short period of time.
(32:35):
Now, this Sparky that I’m talking about in particular, he was stuck at $1m for a couple of years. He’s now got something like $2m-$2.5m of pipeline in front of him purely by just investing the last 12 months and squeezing his way through all these opportunities and he’s set himself up for the best year that he’s going to ever have in the next 12 months purely off the back of just pushing from referrals from those people that he’s already doing work with on similar job sites. It’s amazing what a cracking story.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
It is, and it’s so consistent. This isn’t a one-off, he’s the only guy in the world that this will happen to. If you do the work this way and you start to put in these disciplines for yourself, it’s almost like that’s what happens. It’s just the natural progression of this. So we see it all the time. Number 4, we’re sort of getting into the outer edges here and we’re talking about the fastest way. So I don’t think we need to spend too long on this one, but take us through number 4, which is cold traffic. Yeah,
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Cold traffic is when you get to the point where you’ve spent time, not money. So when you’re getting into cold traffic, now you’ve got to spend money to generate leads, and that’s because when you’ve gone through the first 3 rings, you’ve exhausted a lot of the low hanging fruit and that low hanging fruit is exhausted, and now you’re like, okay, now I have to move out there out into the marketplace to be able to generate new leads. So depending on what space that you’re in, if you’re in the B2C space, the business to consumer space, this is going to have to mean that you’re spending money on SEO. It’s Facebook ads, it’s Google AdWords, it’s website optimization, it’s email marketing, SMS marketing. It’s that a lot of those high cost ad spend to be able to generate leads. If you’re in the B2B space, this is now spending money on getting your projects updated on your website. It’s capability statements, it’s LinkedIn connections and marketing. It’s social presence and awareness. They’re two different strategies depending on what space that you live in, but now you’ve got to invest some money in marketing to be able to get that cold outreach of people that don’t know you, but you only do the cold outreach ring when you’ve exhausted the first 3 rings because this is the unknown now, and you might have to spend some money for no return in the short term until you can prove that your campaigns work.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
And I think that’s the big thing. You’ve got to find a strategy that works when you’re in this out of ring before you really dump money at it. And I think one of the big things people do is they tip money into it, expecting it to work straight away. That’s one thing. And the second thing is what they do is they believe that because it’s easy, it’s available to them. There’s no shortage of people out there willing to take your money saying they can generate leads. So people go for the convenient option of saying, well, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to just go throw some money at this and let’s see if we can pick up some clients. And time’s ticking pipeline holes are getting deeper and they’re ignoring what was available earlier on in the target that we’re speaking about.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Correct. And when you’re in this outer ring with the cold traffic, it takes time for these campaigns to kick into gear. It takes time for Google AdWords to get optimised SEO to start working or time for you to develop capability statements to get it in the hands of someone to generate some inquiry. It takes time to actualize the results. So if you’ve got a hole in your pipeline now that you need filling, don’t go dumping money into cold traffic. Use the earlier rings in the bullseye to be able to get some quick wins right now. Get a set of plans across your desk, price it, get it back, follow up, convert the job and move on so you can keep filling your pipeline over the next 3-6 months. And especially when the market’s being a little over the place at the moment, don’t go down the line of necessarily gambling your money away with cold traffic. Spend some time on people that know, like, and trust you and you’ve got the ability to convert work much quicker and fill those holes in your pipeline so you can get on with getting business done over the next 6 to 12 months.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
For sure. So let’s just recap that really quick, fastest way to fill your pipeline. Stick to the first 2 rings, existing clients, open projects first, tap those people on the shoulder, spend some time deepening relationships. Second one, leads and past customers. So who have you worked with before that know, like, and trust you? Getting reconnected with those people, asking for opportunities, asking for introductions? Do you or anyone have an opportunity or something we can do there? So being able to hit those first two is probably the fastest way that we know, and that’s based not just because we feel it, we experience it every week with clients that we deal with. That’s probably the quickest way to turn around the feelings of overwhelm, reducing the level of uncertainty and starting to get a really good strategic view of where your business can be and starting to fill those pipeline holes that you might be experiencing at the moment. Rob, I think that’s probably us for today. Anything else you want to add or any key takeaways that you want to share with people as we wind up today’s episode?
Speaker 1 (38:03):
My top two takeaways would be that pipeline management allows you to be strategic and proactive rather than reactioning your business. It’s takeaway number one. Number two would be the best way to predict the trajectory of your business and your pipeline is to measure it, manage it, and improve it.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Yeah, I like it. Absolutely agree with you a hundred percent. I think the key things for me is one of the best things you can do for yourself is stop running your pipeline by gut. Feel just anything to get it on paper. Just give yourself that gift, that exercise of saying, right, what am I staring at right now? Break it down month by month and sort of go, what have I got planned? What am I staring at? And start to get that experience of taking out the overwhelm. That’s huge. The last one I think for me as well is that low hanging fruit is always the easiest to pick, no matter how sophisticated, how well you’ve been pitched in terms of the next great social media marketing agency that can do wonders for you, that low hanging fruit is always going to be the easiest to pick. So if you’ve got a hole in your pipeline and you haven’t exhausted those first two rings, hit ’em up as quickly as possible.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah absolutely. So from here, what you can do is draw out your own sales and marketing bullseye from today’s conversation and make the commitment to start actioning it today. Get on with the job, start getting in there, working out where you’re at, where your opportunities are, and let your feet do the talking and get on with the job. And the next thing you can do is give some feedback around what action you’ve taken and what results you’ve generated in The Trade Den. We’d love to be able to hear it. I know that if you put this into action straight away, you’re going to be able to generate some quick opportunities, some quick plans to be able to quote, you might be able to land something straight away, so let us know, give us some feedback. I’d love to be able to hear what opportunities you guys out there are going to be able to land immediately and fill some holes in your pipeline over the next little while.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Terrific. I love it. So Rob, by now people are going to be probably falling into two camps. One camp’s going to be absolutely. Tell me what it is. How do I go about this? This sounds amazing. The other camp’s probably going to be, it sounds like work, sales. I really get uncomfortable and there are people that get really anxious about this stuff. So we’re about to go into where to focus your attention and cover off a whole lot of strategic stuff related to sales. It’s not how to sell, as we said at the top, but for the people that are probably wavering at this stage, what would you suggest that they do? Right now?
Speaker 1 (40:40):
The best thing that they can do is jump into either the Shownotes and follow the link to book in a call, or if you’re listening to this in your car, you can jump on strategysession.com.au and book in a time with me and let’s have a bit of a chat around your pipeline. Let’s talk a bit about where you’re at with your pipeline, where you feel like you pipeline is heading over in the next little while, and let’s talk through some of the concerns that you might have around your business and where it’s going. And let’s put a plan in place to be able to work out where you’re at and where you’re trying to go. And let’s see if we can put some strategic plans in place for you to be able to help you out.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
I love it. Yeah, there’s nothing to shy away from. It’s not difficult, it’s just breaking down that door and really having a go at this.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Thanks for tuning in today and like always, if you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you hit that follow button and share it with one of your mates in the industry. I know that there’s lots of trades businesses out there who are doing a little bit tough at the moment, and they’re in uncertain times, and they’re a little bit unsure around where they’re at and where they’re going. So please share it with your mates. I know that there’s plenty of opportunity to be able to win some great work using the sales bullseye that we’ve taught today. So share it with one of your mates and let’s all help each other out to ensure that we have the best year yet coming up. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you on next episode. Catch you soon.