Chasing Light

It doesn’t matter if you are a sales rep, a business developer, an operations line manager, senior business executive, or entrepreneur, one of the measures of the health of your business is your pipeline. 

Having a robust, qualified pipeline is the goal of any business that wants to stay in business. 

A weak pipeline may be due to many things. 

But it seems the common knee-jerk mindset is that to increase your pipeline you just need more activity. 

And everyone knows that more ‘activity’ always leads to opportunities that fill a pipeline.

Remember back in elementary school when the teacher would take a box and cover the opening with black construction paper? Some light source would be put in the box and the classroom lights would be turned off. 

The teacher would take a pin and begin to poke holes in the construction paper. Out of these holes came little rays of light, usually intending to simulate the constellations. 

It was cool. And the more light beams that emanated, the cooler it seemed.

In business it’s sometimes like being back in that elementary school classroom with the lights off. 

When it’s dark in the room every little ray of light catches your eye. The tendency is to grasp for that ray of light. 

Then, the next beam catches your attention and you reach for it too. And then the next, and the next and the next. 

And when you are in the dark (struggling to build your pipeline or show progress toward your goals) reaching for every ray of light (i.e. activity) seems the quickest way to get out of the dark.

The problem with this is that not every activity or new opportunity are beneficial. 

Activity, for activity’s sake, usually does little for the bottom line. It may make you and upper management look and feel like you are being productive, but it seldom does anything else. 

For it to be productive, that ‘activity’ needs to lead to actual ‘opportunities’ which must be then qualified as real or not. And usually, very few opportunities are added to a pipeline by just having ‘activity’. 

What I mean here are meaningless marketing and customer activities and management ‘directed’ activities that historically produce no results; and/or filling a pipeline with deals that may turn your activity dashboard green but that you know won’t lead to no new revenue.

Regardless of the pressure you are under, real or perceived, your resources (time, people, money, etc.) can only be spread so thin before they become ineffective for any of your opportunities, especially the ones that are winnable. 

So the discipline that is needed is to not reach for every ray of light but to determine which ones are the right for your business. 

The sales and BD reps should know their waterfront well enough to know what activities interest and benefit their customers. 

They should also know which activities don’t lead to better market awareness of what you’re selling, gain more customer intimacy or increase in the size of the pipeline. 

Management, as well, needs to trust that their front line reps know their market well enough to understand what works and doesn’t work to fill a pipeline with opportunities to pursue.

So then, when you have chosen which rays of light to reach for, a disciplined qualification and prioritization process, if followed, will help you stay focused on what actually works and help prevent you from just Chasing Light!

For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you and your sales or business development force, or with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

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