Is Pipeline Anxiety Keeping You Up At Night?

Is Pipeline Anxiety Keeping You Up At Night?

Pipeline Anxiety is real. It affects all departments within a business. However, if you’re in a revenue-driven department like sales or marketing I’m guessing you probably had it more than once, considering pipeline is a key indicator of performance and potential future success. 

Pipeline Anxiety Should Be Taken Seriously

By now you’ve probably caught on. But if it’s still unclear, pipeline anxiety refers to stress and concern from sales teams when they have a low number of deals in the pipeline, or the potential deals they are working on go cold. So, when pipeline is scarce, it can bubble up debilitating fears of not meeting set sales targets, or opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and customer retention in the future. 

We are all thinking about pipeline anxiety in one way or another. From getting ghosted on deals that you have been working on, and then having to answer why it went cold, or to make quota and keep your job. The latter is all too real, especially with the current state of tech in 2023, over 16,000 workers in US-based tech companies experienced lay-offs, according to Crunchbase News tally. 

Budgets have been cut, revenue goals are aggressive, and targets are more difficult to reach. Today there are many tech companies with similar experiences including limited pipelines, a decrease in the number of bookings, and customer churn on the rise. All of these factors could place a large amount of pressure on revenue teams, reducing morale, and increasing anxiety. 

Maybe you already developed some useful strategies for managing pipeline anxiety that helps to reduce your stress levels and increase your focus. Making it possible for you to sleep like a baby at night. But many of us are still trying to figure out what we can do to grow our pipeline. Look, there’s no silver bullet to grow your pipeline. But there are a few things that you could do better to increase the number of opportunities in your sales funnel while keeping anxiety levels at bay. 

Monitor Accounts 

One way to reduce pipeline anxiety is by monitoring accounts. If you are regularly reviewing the status of deals in the pipeline you can easily identify which deals are likely to close soon and which ones may need additional attention. This helps you to prioritize your efforts and be more focused on the deals that are most likely to result in a sale. 

Additionally, by monitoring accounts you can identify new opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, or increasing the size of current deals, helping to boost the pipeline, therefore reducing pipeline anxiety. Monitoring accounts can help you stay on top of the pipeline and make more informed decisions and increase your chances of success.

Five Account Monitoring Steps To Increase Pipeline 

1. Identify and target prospects: Search across social media to find and connect to the right individuals or accounts. Target new customers using keywords, phrases, and #hashtags that will uncover information publicly shared on LinkedIn and other social platforms.
2. Connect to the right buyers: Once you’ve identified potential customers, be sure to use social media consistently as a part of your outreach, follow them, comment, or like their posts. Being engaged and authentic can help you build rapport and get into conversations faster.
3. Remove risk: As you connect with prospects, focus on building trust and not pitch-slapping. Pipeline anxiety makes you feel as if your back is against the wall. However, by selling too quickly you can turn off prospects. Instead, provide value by empathizing with their business challenge to demonstrate you understand their needs. 

• Share relevant information
• Answer questions
• Offer helpful advice

Once you’ve built a relationship and position yourself as an advocate, you minimize the risk of losing a potential customer. And when it’s time to discuss a solution, you’ve already proven your worth.

4. Qualify and close: As you move deeper in the pipeline, use the information you gathered from monitoring your accounts to qualify your leads.

Are they sharing business challenge information across social media? This sales insight can help you understand where they are in the decision process. If not, move on. Stop wasting your time looking for the wrong prospects. Find intent data that leads you directly to your ideal customer.

5. Monitor and update: Finally, monitor accounts regularly to keep track of the status of your leads, and to update your pipeline with new leads. Be sure to go back to older closed lost deals, or existing customers to monitor and see if there are new opportunities based on changes in their business.

It’s Time To Put Your Pipeline Anxiety To Rest

The bottom line, potential prospects can smell you coming a mile away, especially if you start selling to them out of the gate. If you want to ensure you generate an opportunistic pipeline that closes over time, you must position yourself as a subject matter expert rather than coming across like a vulture circling them across social media. 

Plus, it doesn’t hurt to use a solution like Trender.ai that can reduce the amount of time it takes for you to find, engage, and get new qualified prospects in your pipeline. Our customers generate up to three new prospects per day and see an increase in their sales pipeline by 300% each quarter. Try Trender.ai for free for 30 days and experience for yourself just how easy it is for you to find and target buyers who are looking for your solution.