This episode talks about a pipeline generation strategy that some of the most-effective agencies are using to generate more leads for their business, and earn a more predictable income from their business.
My favorite thing about this strategy is that it can be done by an agency, or even a solo freelancer. It takes a bit of effort to set up, and will take some time to get moving, but once it’s set up this approach will have a profound impact on your pipeline.
Show Links
- Jeff Walker’s Book Launch
- How To Sell Expensive Things Using Siren
- How To Find Affiliates For Your Product
Key Points
- Pipeline Generation Strategy: Creating low-cost, high-value products that affiliates can sell to generate leads and attract potential customers for higher-priced services.
- Challenges Faced by Agencies: Many agencies rely too heavily on word-of-mouth and networking, leading to unpredictable income and feast-or-famine cycles.
- Importance of Consistency: The need for consistent product offerings and a robust sales pipeline to predict income and stabilize business operations.
- Successful Examples: Companies like Modern Tribe and Mission Lab using products to drive agency services, providing steady income and a reliable sales pipeline.
- Affiliate Program Structure: Utilizing affiliate programs to promote low-cost products and potentially services, thereby scaling sales processes and creating multiple touchpoints in the sales funnel.
What is Pipeline Generation?
Pipeline generation is a methodology to find potential customers who show interest in your product or service. This marketing approach is focused on generating a continuous flow of leads through different phases of the sales process.
Pipeline generation is crucial to lead generation because it helps you identify which companies are likely to purchase from you, when they might do so, and how much they might spend. Essentially, it allows you to pinpoint your target market and find individuals who have shown interest in your product or service but have not yet committed to a purchase.
How This Pipeline Generation Strategy Works
This pipeline generation strategy focuses on creating products that affiliates can sell, which simultaneously generate leads for the business. It begins with the development of a low-cost, high-value product that complements the main services offered. Affiliates are then recruited to promote this product, using their networks and marketing channels to reach a wider audience. As these affiliates sell the product, it not only generates immediate revenue but also attracts potential customers who may be interested in higher-priced services.
By leveraging affiliates to market this product, the strategy ensures a steady flow of leads while providing affiliates with an appealing item to sell. This dual-purpose approach expands reach and builds a robust sales pipeline. It helps identify potential buyers, understand their readiness to purchase, and gauge their spending potential, ultimately allowing for better sales forecasting and more effective resource allocation.
Importance of Pipeline Generation
Pipeline generation is crucial for building strong relationships with potential customers, ensuring they feel comfortable with your business before committing to your product or service. This strategy not only stabilizes revenue streams but also enhances various aspects of the sales process, contributing to the overall growth and efficiency of the business. Here are key reasons why pipeline generation is essential:
Here are some essential reasons why you should have a pipeline generation in place:
Predictable Lead Generation And Revenue
By creating products that affiliates can sell, which simultaneously generate leads, pipeline generation helps avoid the unpredictable nature of traditional lead generation methods. This approach ensures a stable and predictable source of revenue. Consistently selling a low-cost, high-value product attracts potential customers interested in higher-priced services, leading to sustainable revenue growth.
Better Forecasting
Pipeline generation allows businesses to predict which leads are likely to convert into customers, providing better revenue forecasting. Tracking sales-ready leads over time gives a clearer picture of financial health and enables more accurate growth planning. This method is crucial for agencies that have struggled with feast-or-famine cycles due to relying heavily on word-of-mouth and networking.
Scalable Sales Process
Pipeline generation enables the creation of a scalable sales process by establishing a consistent method for moving prospects through each stage. By developing a low-cost, high-value product that affiliates can sell, businesses can attract a steady stream of leads and efficiently manage them through the sales funnel. This scalability ensures that as the number of leads increases, the process remains smooth and effective, allowing for continuous growth without overwhelming the sales team. Additionally, having a consistent product offering provides valuable insights and analytics, making it easier to forecast earnings and conversion rates, further supporting the scalable nature of the sales process.
Increased Transparency
Pipeline generation provides transparency by tracking each prospect’s progress, helping identify communication gaps and reasons for drop-offs. This data allows businesses to adjust their strategies effectively, ensuring that potential customers remain engaged and move forward in the sales process. For instance, agencies can maintain a steady flow of leads without solely relying on their network.
Better Alignment Between Sales and Marketing
Pipeline generation fosters better alignment between sales and marketing teams by clearly defining roles and responsibilities within the sales process. This shared understanding ensures that the content created meets the needs of potential customers and supports the sales efforts. By utilizing affiliate programs to promote products, businesses can expand their reach and build a robust sales pipeline, enhancing both team collaboration and overall efficiency.
Transcript
Today, we’re going to talk about a strategy that helps agencies scale their sales process with a pipeline generation strategy. This allows them to earn more predictable income, gain service clients organically, and diversify their company’s income streams, all with a couple key changes to their business, and sales process.
In this episode, I talk about how to scale your sales process and improve your pipeline generation.
The mistake that I think a lot of agencies make when building their business is they assume that an affiliate program doesn’t work for their business. This is usually because these businesses primarily focus on getting people to contact them for a quote. From there, most agencies have an initial meeting, maybe do some discovery, and then prescribe some way to start working with them. When I was running my agency, I spent a lot of time either quoting out custom projects, or sending out flat rates for a discovery.
I was quoting, and occasionally selling, mid to high-dollar projects, always several thousand dollars, and generally enough for me to make a live-able wage by taking on 3-5 of these projects each year.
But I, like I know most of you, depended almost entirely on word of mouth for my business. I just did a ton of networking, and that network drove an occasional lead. I was able to sell projects for a reasonable price because I had already established trust with the person, since I was literally being referred by someone they knew personally.
The biggest problem I had was that for the longest time, I didn’t have a way to build that trust organically. The consequence of this was that I was largely at the mercy of my network, and couldn’t really choose when an opportunity could come to me. This meant I had to either delay the project, or try to take on both of them at the same time, and I didn’t love either of those options. But more concerning was the opposite thing – the dry spells.
The dry spells in my case would cause me anxiety because I had no money coming in, sometimes for months at a time. This caused a dynamic of feast or famine, where I was either overworked, or underworked basically all the time when I was running my agency business.
If you’re listening to this, and you’ve ever been a freelancer, you can probably relate to this. You’ve probably been in this situation at some point in your career. You might even be in this situation now.
When I look back at it, it’s clear the biggest problem at that phase of my agency business was that I depended entirely on my network to bring me leads. I would crawl various communities for when people would ask for help on a project, or sometimes just ask the community for work directly. It works pretty well, but it’s really not predictable. In other words, I had a pipeline, but I didn’t have a pipeline generation strategy.
Another issue was the inconsistency between projects. One project would be a website build. The next would be a custom WordPress plugin for an e-commerce store. The next is a custom WordPress block. Every single project had an entirely different pitch, perceived value by the customer, price, and just about anything else.
The combination of these two things made it impossible to predict how much money I can expect to be earning on any given month. Not only did I never know how big my sales pipeline was going to be at any time, but I also had no idea what the conversion rate was going to be since every pitch was completely different, and I didn’t have a lot of reliable ways to determine the likelihood that they would convert aside from a generic “confidence level” based on our meetings.
I honestly believe this is the single biggest problem most freelancers, and agencies have when they’re getting started. For me, I was always stressed about money, but it wasn’t because I didn’t have enough work – it was because I never knew when it was going to dry up, or had any idea on how much money I could expect to come in.
And all of that stress came from two things – inconsistent product offerings, and a lackluster sales pipeline.
With a pipeline bursting with leads, and a consistent product to sell, you can start to get a sense of what percentage of your leads convert, how long before they convert, and a few other metrics that ultimately make it possible to correlate your pipeline with a much better sense of how much money you can expect over the next quarter.
I mean just imagine how much more secure you’d feel if you knew based on your analytics and the size of your pipeline that you would be very likely to hit your sales goal, and be able to fully pay your budget and yourself enough to make a comfortable living.
A common way I’ve seen agencies accomplish this is by having something easier to sell, that fills their pipeline with potential leads who can buy their higher-priced services.
One of the first examples I can think of is Modern Tribe. They have since been acquired by Liquid Web, so their approach has changed a bit, but For a long time, they maintained and sold addons for a well-known events plugin called The Events Calendar, and also ran an agency.
Another similar example is Mission Lab, an agency that focuses its efforts mostly on church websites. They sell a couple different plugins that help churches manage their website easier, but they also offer to build the websites for churches, as well.
For both of these companies, their products provide the company with a source of income, sure, but it also serves as a way to fill their pipeline with leads. As companies who used their plugin came to need web development services, these companies are uniquely positioned to serve those people.
That’s so cool about this approach is that it creates a very clear funnel that directs people into buying high-dollar products, such as websites, but along the way it ensures that the company earns some money from these people well before they’re ready to convert to actually build a website for them. These leads, and this pipeline is a lot less-likely to rely solely on their network, since they’re able to build trust with a much smaller priced item.
Plus, now that these agencies have a consistently priced product, they can start to gather those analytics I was talking about earlier. They can start to get a feel for how much money they’re going to make based on how much traffic they’re getting to their website, alongside the conversion rate of their product. These products renew annually too, so they have a good sense of how much money they’ll make from renewals, as well. This may not be able to account for the agency work, but it does help provide some predictability to their businesses. Who knows, maybe they’re even seeing some conversion predictability from their product to their services?
Compared to a custom service, like web development, a pre-packaged product is significantly easier to sell. Not only because it’s much less-expensive, but also because there’s a lot less of a time commitment from the customer to get what they want out of it. This helps customers who aren’t ready to make a larger commitment start working with you on a smaller scale, where you get an opportunity to earn their trust, while still getting paid along the way.
And because of all of these things, these products are excellent candidates for an affiliate program, focused primarily on selling your product instead of your services. With this program, you can find affiliates who can promote your product on your behalf, and pay them a commission for the sale. This allows you to scale your agency’s sales process by creating a way to generate leads, and incentivizing other people to fill your services pipeline for you. To me, this is one of the best ways to outsource one of the hardest things to do really well in an agency business – sell!
So, if you want to scale your agency’s sales process, earn more predictable income, gain service clients organically, and diversify your company’s income streams, it makes a lot of sense to make a product that compliments your services.
Now, in the examples I provided, both ModernTribe and Mission Lab created WordPress plugins, but software is not your only option here. As long as what you’re selling is low-touch, fixed in-scope, and something your customers actually want, it’s something you can probably turn into a product.
Now what may not be quite as obvious about this strategy, but is also very important, is that in both of the examples I provided, both companies ended up zero-ing in on at least one specific vertical for what they’re offering. This is abundantly clear with Mission Lab, with their laser-focus on churches, but it’s also the case with ModernTribe, at least when you look at it from the lens of the leads they’d generate from The Events Calendar.
The Events Calendar would only attract people who need a calendar on their website, right? Well, it turns out a lot of those websites happen to be colleges, so it’s no surprise that several portfolio pieces for Modern Tribe are colleges.
In other words, their low-cost offering actually helped tailor their niche, where Mission Lab did the opposite – they picked a niche, and built software to serve those people.
This level of focus can profoundly help in your marketing decisions, and makes pipeline generation much easier to accomplish. For example, Modern Tribe has several blog posts focused specifically on Higher Education on their site, and I’m sure Mission Lab finds themselves at conferences and networking events specifically for churches. With a clear avatar, so much of these marketing decisions just sort-of click into place, and having a product can help you narrow that down.
What you’re selling doesn’t even have to be a plugin if that’s not your skill set. Some things that I’ve also seen include a course selling your process, a basic website setup service, pre-packaged website templates, website audits, books, or even consultation services.
Spend some time thinking about your ideal client, or pay attention to other products your customers have purchased. Can you make a better version? Something more-tailored to their needs? Is that product something that a lot of other people want?
I found Launch by Jeff Walker to be a great read. A lot of it feels fundamental, but his product launch formula is a solid approach to developing a product, and building an audience to sell that product at the same time. If you’re feeling lost on where to start, consider picking up this book.
Once you have a product that you’re able to consistently sell, you can start to think about scaling your sales process around your funnel. The key here is that you’re consistently selling the product, and the product is being sold without requiring your involvement to make the sale. The customer should be able to complete the entire purchase without needing to contact you, and should instead be purchasing your product using a cart, or some kind of e-commerce tool. By setting this up, you can now create an affiliate program to promote that product.
Siren is a great fit for this type of affiliate program because you can create more than one program at a time. With multiple programs, you can find people that fit best at different points in your sales funnel. You can start with a traditional affiliate program that focuses on selling your low cost product.
As your business grows, you may find that some of your affiliates would be great fits for selling your services, as well. In these cases, you can set up a lead-focused program. This program can credit affiliates with a commission when they generate a lead that turns into a sale.
It’s even possible to take this even further, and create a third program that’s focused entirely on closing a sale. Perhaps you pay another affiliate as a salesperson who actually takes the meetings that the lead-focused program generates. This is a much more traditional approach to sales, and probably requires that you hire them on as an employee, but a sales program like this with good lead generation is definitely viable.
The key point here is that Siren can serve as a stepping stone to help you move yourself out of the sales position in your own business. It starts with an affiliate program, and then can grow into a full blown sales process that has multiple touch points from a combination of salespeople and affiliates who generate leads and close sales. Instead of jumping right into having a salesperson, this process focuses on building your pipeline at each stage, ensuring that any salesperson who you do hire is set up to be able to close deals regularly.
I explore this concept on a video on Siren’s YouTube Channel, titled “How to sell expensive things using Siren”. I’ll link that video in the show notes.
The secret here is that you’re actually creating two products – one is your actual product for your customers, and the other is your affiliate program. Both of which you can sell to the right people. And both of them are key parts of your pipeline generation strategy – one sells the product, and the other sells the product.
What’s really convenient about this is that you can usually find both potential affiliates and potential customers at vertical-specific conferences. These conferences often have companies that sell things that run parallel to your products, but does not directly compete. Such people can be great affiliates. Of course, you can also on the lookout for the companies that would actually buy your product and services, as well, but the point is you now have a product to sell to pretty much everyone who attends the right conferences.
If you haven’t listened to my previous episode, “How to Find Affiliates For Your Product”, definitely give it a listen after this, because it’s a natural extension of this episode, and I talk a lot about other ways you can find affiliates.
There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to what kind of product you can develop, and honestly this episode barely scratches the surface of that. My goal here is to make a case for having a product in the first place, and showing how a product can be a sales tool that also makes you money in the process.
