SE7EN: The 7 Steps of Building a Pipeline for Life

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Love Selling Hates Sales. Let's face it, sales is a performance-based game. It's our job to produce revenue results for either our own organization or the organization that we're working for. Pipeline is of the utmost importance.

But what if we didn't think about pipeline for the month or for the quarter or even for the year? What if we thought about pipeline for a life? The concept of pipeline for life is super important to me because I think it really separates sellers in the marketplace. It sets you up with a distinct advantage over those other people out there who have short-term thinking.

Those people that are thinking about the month, the quarter, the year. If you have a pipeline for life mentality, you have the best interest of the person that you're speaking with at heart. And that will differentiate you from your competition. So in today's episode, we're going to deviate from our standard interview format.

And I'm going to provide you with seven steps to building a pipeline for life. Without further ado, let's jump right into it. Step one, sales is a trust game. everything you do should be done through the lens of building trust with another individual.

So think about how that changes any interaction you may have. Instead of thinking about what you're selling, instead of thinking about your product, your service, think about what you can do to build trust with the person on the other side of the phone and the other side of the desk, wherever you may be. That will change your mindset for how you approach that individual. We're not thinking about the outcome, we're thinking about the person on the other side.

Super important concept. Step one, trust. Step two, you have to do the work. And I know there's all of these different thoughts on social selling, cold calling, emailing, whatever it may be, regardless of the channel, the methodology you have to put in the work, especially early in your career.

But I will tell you that if you put in the work you get yourself in front of as many people as possible You start to build and build and build It will help you later in your career to lessen that load The concept of pipeline for life is built on building, doing the work early, building a solid foundation so that at the end, you are going to reap the benefits of the pipeline for life. It's super important, but it doesn't come without work. So step two, make sure you're putting in the work, especially early on in your career.

Step three, something that I find very important. There's always this concept of product market fit. Well, I like to think of seller market fit, and this really comes down to you and your personality. So have some self-awareness.

Where do you fit well? Who do you sell well to? Personally, I sell in the sales and marketing world. I sell to marketers.

I sell to sales leaders, the CMOs, that's a good fit for my universe. But maybe you're more of a technical salesperson and selling into a world where you sell to engineers is a better fit for you. Use a little bit of self-awareness and understand a product, a service, a market, more importantly, that really fits you, something that you're going to be passionate about. Because if you're passionate about that market, how you fit in that marketplace, it's going to help you with steps one and two, building trust and putting in the work.

So step three, seller market fit. It's super important. Step four, connection. This ties in very, very closely to trust, but it's more about connecting with other individuals and then using those connections to expand your network.

LinkedIn is a great example of this. When I started my sales career, there was no LinkedIn. There's the concept of the Rolodex, right? Every seller had this Rolodex of people that they could call on the people that knew them, trusted them, did business of them.

The idea behind that Rolodex was that you could use it to get to other places. You could use those connections to make further connections. Now we have LinkedIn to help us with that, but it's your job as a seller to continue to build connections on connections. When you meet someone, if you're building trust, you're putting in the work and you know your market it easier for you to make solid foundational connections and move on and move forward to help connecting that network That could be you connecting people with people people connecting you with people but really start to build out a framework for helping to broaden your network through connection The fifth, it's super critical.

Understand the business of business. You can't be in sales without understanding fundamentally how businesses work, what they care about, how they make money. At the very high level, anytime a company is looking to grow, which is most organizations, they care about three things. They care about acquiring new customers.

They care about retaining their customers and then increasing that lifetime value. On the other side of it, there are profit margins, right? So how does a company make money? How does their profits get calculated?

What is their acquisition cost? What is their overhead? How do they look at cashflow? Really start to understand what a CEO, a founder in your industry is thinking about.

Anytime you're going to engage with someone, you better know how they make money. And even further, better know how they look at profit. Are they a public company? Are they reporting to their shareholders?

Are they a private company that's looking to grow or look for acquisition, really start to understand the business landscape and how businesses work. And if you can tie that into the market that you serve even better, that'll grow your expertise. Step six, and this is one of my personal favorites. It's conceptual thinking.

Oftentimes we get taken down a rabbit hole of the details and our prospects and our buyers will do this to you as well. But one of the things that I pride myself in, and I suggest that you do as well, is have the ability to process information quickly. Active listening is critical here. As you're taking in information, have a framework in your mind that allows you to plug the things that people are saying into a conceptual framework that allows you to engage with that person on the other end.

Something that happens in my business all the time is you get a brain dump. People will come in and they will dump 10 minutes of information on you of what's going on in their business You have to quickly process that information distill it down into very simple concepts that allow them to feel that you are understanding them So really get into conceptual thinking that allows you to connect with your prospects and your buyers. And finally, step seven is the application of experience.

I hate to say it, but there are no shortcuts. Nothing helps you separate yourself like experience. This ties back into step two is put in the work. And step five, understand the business of business.

You need to gain experience along the way and use that experience to mold who you are. What's your point of view? How can you help to grow connections, help people out no matter what it is you're doing? Then once you've gained the requisite amount of experience, I'm not here to say how long that is.

sometimes you can compress a large amount of experience in a short period of time sometimes it may take a little bit longer it doesn't really matter but make sure that as you're gaining your experience you're starting to build out the application of that what's your point of view how does that experience mold who you are and shape how you fit in the marketplace again the concept of this show is really about building out the pipeline for life not having short-term or near-term thinking about the month, the quarter, or the year.

If you take these seven steps of building trust, putting in the work, finding the right fit market for you as a seller, building and helping people make connections, understanding the business of business, leveraging conceptual thinking, and applying your experience, you will build a pipeline for life that outpaces any sort of near torn pipeline. Play the long game, build a pipeline for life. Thank you for joining Love Selling Hate Sales. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast channel.

And you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Josh Wagner AZ or at lovesellinghatesales.com.