How to build more pipeline in 2024

Tactical ideas from revenue leaders at Carta, G2, Jellyfish, Miro and more

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.

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One topic comes up on nine out of every ten calls with founders and revenue leaders: how do we build more pipeline for the rest of the year?

I’ve tackled this topic previously with deep dives on lead routing, outbound automation, going account-based, and real-life experiments from ActiveCampaign. Now I’m crowdsourcing even more pipeline ideas for the H2 roadmap.

I teamed up with Scott Barker and Sophie Buonassisi of GTMfund, who also write a newsletter by the fund’s media brand, GTMnow. We polled their network of 350+ go-to-market leaders including CROs and CMOs from well-loved software brands. Four themes emerged from these conversations:

1. Bet on events – both large and intimate

2. Orchestrate account-based plays across teams

3. Get more creative with outbound

4. Revisit pricing and packaging for land-and-expand

Keep reading for more than a dozen winning pipeline ideas from revenue leaders at Carta, G2, Jellyfish, Miro, Superhuman and more. (And don’t miss Scott and Sophie’s GTM Newsletter here on Substack!)

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Bet on events – both large and intimate

Look, events aren’t a new strategy. They’re logistically complicated. They require time, coordination, travel, rapport building and *gasp* minimal pitching. This is about as far from AI-driven go-to-market as you can get. 

And yet events were the top area where revenue leaders say they’re doubling down in H2. Folks are seeing fantastic ROI from virtual events, dinners, happy hours and sporting events — including a 40% conversion from attending a dinner to becoming a sales opportunity.

“It’s commonplace to shrug off virtual events now that we have space between us and the dreaded 2020. While I do believe in-person events work and should be part of any marketing strategy, our virtual conference continues to be one of our top tactics year after year. It is a massive source of pipeline generation and deal support. It far outperforms any of our other channels. We typically look for a 10-15x return on cost to pipeline generation for any of our marketing channels. Our virtual conference produced 28x return, considerably higher than any other channel in our arsenal.”

- Kyle Lacy, CMO at Jellyfish

“Memo hosts 10-15 prospective buyers at each dinner event. Roughly 80% of those in attendance take a sales meeting with Memo after the event, with over 50% becoming sales opportunities. From those opportunities, 25%-40% become quality leads or closed deals.” 

- Dan Fahy, VP of Sales at Memo

"We are continuously reminded of the importance of small, in person events, with a carefully chosen mix of customers, prospects and partners. Our team has leveraged these high touch events for select customers and prospects. These events provide a great opportunity to update a group of prospects on our product offering, have customers share their real experience and strengthen partnerships across our network. 

Over the last 6 months, Carta hosted 17 events, including everything from dinners focused on policy or other topical matters, to happy hours, sporting events and a concert. In doing so, we’ve raised awareness of Carta’s fund admin and other investor services to over 500 GPs and LPs, helping influence over $2.5M in pipeline. A combination of our executive team, sales, business development and marketing collaborated on everything from personal invites to on site execution of the events."

- Jeff Perry, CRO at Carta

“Focusing on identifying key strategic initiatives within target accounts and building an outside-in value hypothesis supported by proof points ensures that our outreach is always aligned with the customer’s strategic goals. To build the right relationships to make this happen, we are doubling down on field marketing to engage potential champions & executive buyers through local dinners, conferences, “Miro experience days”, partner events, sporting events and more. We host or attend 15-20 events per quarter, ranging from large trade shows, roundtables, hospitality events (dinners or suites at games), Agile city tours, happy hours, Miro Days, and more. We strategically map events back to target personas and levels.”

- Adam Carr, Head of Global Sales at Miro

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Orchestrate account-based plays across teams