What Is Pipeline Marketing?
Pipeline marketing is a revenue generation strategy that shifts marketing’s focus from simply gathering leads to nurturing prospects throughout the customer journey.
Moving to a pipeline marketing strategy does not mean abandoning the process of generating leads. Instead, it unites marketing and sales in their efforts to close deals and generate revenue by identifying high-value accounts from those leads and nurturing them through the customer journey.
The Role of Pipeline in Marketing Strategy
Focusing on pipeline changes the key performance indicators (KPIs) for marketing. Rather than planning lead generation goals, marketing starts with the corporate bookings plan and calculates:
- Conversion rate
- Opportunity size
- Sales cycle
Then marketing can extrapolate these figures to segments such as geographical area or company size and plan strategy to reach revenue goals.
The Relevance of Pipeline to Sales Strategy
Having a constantly full and moving pipeline is central to sales strategy. In order to consistently hit sales targets, revenue teams need to be constantly aware of deals at all points in the pipeline forecast.
This means keeping an eye on not just the deals that are about to close, but those that are just beginning to express interest — and those at every stage in between.
The Importance of Pipeline to Rev Ops Strategy
Revenue Operations unites sales, marketing, and customer success under one banner. Using pipeline metrics for all three parts of the team gives each a responsibility and opportunity to influence revenue generation.
With a pipeline and account-based marketing strategy in place, RevOps can monitor all pipeline metrics, including tracking which team was responsible for sourcing and touching which accounts.
Best Practices for Pipeline Marketing
Top Pipeline Analytics Strategies for Marketing-Sales in 2024:
- Bring sales, marketing, and customer success together to create goals and strategy
- Onboard the right martech partner to manage pipeline intelligence
- Plan targets, programs, and activities among teams
- Use your pipeline intelligence tool to accurately forecast demand
- Identify where pipeline is weak and why your team is missing targets
- Launch campaigns for quick impact to address gaps
- Update strategy and goals as prospects move through the pipeline
