How to get your pipeline of new business flowing again
Unblocking a constipated sales pipeline: lessons learned from our journey
Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club
This seems to be a concept I often return to. It’s frequently the missing ingredient in a healthy, sustainable, scaling business.
What is Sales Leadership?
Sales leadership is about taking accountability for a revenue and profit target. It sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Yet, it’s often a missing quality in small businesses aiming to scale. Sales leadership gives you, the business owner confidence in your business’s revenue and profit targets. This means you can invest safe in the knowledge that the sales are going to come in.
What does accountability actually mean? It starts with setting targets and KPIs around sales success. You may already have a sales target. But what happens if you’re falling short of it? This is where sales leadership comes into play: looking at the pipeline, identifying the gaps, and executing a plan to bridge them.
Too often, businesses react to a shortfall by blaming external factors: "It’s not our fault," or "It’s tough out there." Some might reforecast rather than ask, "What can we do to fix this?"
I recall a former employee whose responsibilities included bringing in new clients and retaining them. Initially, they were eager, qualifying leads and following up diligently. But over time, their enthusiasm waned. They began expecting warm leads to be handed to them and miraculously hit only the exact forecast some months—never exceeding it. This should have been a red flag.
When asked to take accountability for their forecast, they often shifted blame: the CRM wasn’t good enough, the conditions weren’t right, the marketing was poor or we were not listening to them. Despite wanting the title of ‘Head of Growth,’ they lacked the willingness to own a revenue target. They were missing the key trait of sales leadership.
Building Your Pipeline
In June this year, we identified a significant problem in our business. Our marketing efforts had been inconsistent and ineffective for over a year. Our email list had been neglected, marketing projects left unfinished, and our website was in disarray. Heads rolled as a result, and I took over responsibility for marketing.
I started with an honest assessment of our new business pipeline. Here’s how we break it down:
Committed spend: Signed engagements where work is ongoing.
Visible spend: Work in the pipeline, where clients are committed but haven’t signed yet.
Speculative spend: Potential opportunities that haven’t been fully qualified or budgeted.
At-risk spend: Current engagements at risk of ending without renewal or continuation.
This categorisation helped us uncover issues. For example, lucrative ad hoc projects masked a decline in our core business. By addressing each category systematically, we began to see growth in our pipeline.
The Role of Management Focus
As a founder, I’ve been guilty of being too trusting. I often let team members with sales targets get on with their work, with minimal oversight. This was a mistake.
When we attended two trade shows earlier this year, we expected to generate significant new revenue. Yet, while our booth was busy, many conversations began with, “Who are you and what do you do?” These weren’t warm prospects, and follow-ups led to very little, if any return on our investment in these trade shows.
Recognising the gap, I stepped up as a sales leader. We set ambitious yet realistic targets and implemented daily accountability meetings for business development. For the last six weeks, every fee earner has reported on their daily BD activities. At first, I found this discipline uncomfortable, but the results were undeniable. We’ve since gained new members in the Accountants’ Growth Club and secured nearly a full order book of corporate work for 2025 for the ‘How to make partner’ side of our business.
Streamlining Business Development Processes
Sales leadership also means ensuring your processes for attracting and converting leads are effective.
In fact business development involves:
Marketing: creating the lead
Sales: converting the lead into a paying client
Account management: expanding the work from the current clients.
However, not everything works as planned!
This time last year we restructured half of our business. I’d like to say we chose to restructure, but this decision was forced on us by 3 out of my 5 fee earners resigning on one day. But that’s a story for another day. This crisis gave us the opportunity to look critically at what we were doing.
We realised that we had a problem with a key role in our business, our Growth Specialists. We were expecting them to win clients, service clients and find opportunities to upsell more work to their clients. So, we decoupled the role and brought in our relationship manager role. We introduced a relationship manager role, which significantly reduced client churn.
Our client churn rate and upsell rate was such that it showed our account management processes were now pretty slick and optimised. But if we don’t have enough leads coming through in the first place there is no point in having a great account management process. Clients don’t stay with a coaching business for ever. So our leadership team reviewed all of our marketing and sales processes. We identified problems with:
Our leadership team identified several issues:
A dated, broken website
Lack of nurture emails to our list
Broken links between lead magnets and the email list
Poor lead-to-client conversion rates
A CRM that was overly manual and unclear
Over the last 6 months we have solved all of these issues. Our CRM is now such that our team know exactly who and what to contact. We have standard templates for what to write and when. We’ve also reduced a huge amount of the manual elements of what we were doing. Funnily enough, fixing all these broken windows coupled with the accountability and focus has unblocked a constipated pipeline.
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Your actions this week.
Sales leadership is not just about hitting targets; it’s about owning the process, addressing gaps, and continually improving. If you want to turn your toddler or teenage business into a grown up, you need sales leadership. This means:
Categorise Your Pipeline: Break it into committed, visible, speculative, and at-risk spend. Then see whether you need more activity to hit your revenue and profit targets
Set Clear Targets: Be ambitious but realistic, and ensure accountability within your team.
Review Marketing and Sales Processes: Identify bottlenecks and fix them systematically.
Stay Involved: Regularly check in on progress and show that you’re invested in the outcomes.
Create a Culture of Accountability: Use daily or weekly reporting to maintain focus on business development.