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. Subscribe to join 54,470 readers who get Growth Unhinged delivered to their inbox every Wednesday morning.

---

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!)

---

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

---

Orchestrate account-based plays across teams

These days anything that could build pipeline is fair game. Marketing, sales, product, customer success and even ops all play a role in acquisition.

And there’s a noticeable shift away from spray-and-pray tactics where we hope our marketing reaches the right people at the right accounts. More and more, folks are doubling down on an account-based strategy focused on the best target accounts – which often includes existing customers that have expansion potential.

“To drive sustainable growth in H2 and beyond, it’s crucial to have a unified go-to-market. Three key steps to achieving this are to: 1) align product, marketing and sales teams, 2) map all motions to the customer journey, and 3) input metrics at every step of the funnel. 

At G2, we’re focused on prioritizing our GTM team's efforts to develop a unified strategy to accelerate new business, reduce churn, and drive expansion revenue. Our tiered account strategy is rooted in a propensity score based on 30+ attributes that helps us prioritize inbound and outbound engagement for maximum output.” 

- Eric Gilpin, CRO at G2 

“A big focus area right now is coordinating orchestrated revenue plays across CS, AEs, BDRs. So we're focused on anywhere from five to six distinct plays with associated offers. We have a specific list of ICP accounts we're focused on for each play and then associated offers for the customers, plus associated space for the revenue teams. The result we are expecting is to increase the top of funnel with these accounts and hold conversion rate through the entire funnel consistent. We generate $800M+ a year in pipeline, so conversion consistency is crucial.

The entire account team is trained on the offers so that anyone can position them, and then we are going account by account and deciding who is going to pitch it depending on what our relationship is or how deep we are in the account. It's a white glove revenue play experience where the closest and most relevant person on the account team is the one targeting the customer.”

- Sasha Anderson, VP of Customer Success at Procore Technologies

“We’re redefining and doubling down on the ICP. We found a couple of categories where we continue to have success, and we are getting every customer in that category. It's really unbelievable, especially in revenue intelligence. The impact we’re making is significant, with almost everyone in that space either in a sales process with us or already a customer. We continue to go category by category, doing things like custom landing pages, highlighting their logo, and talking about their wins. It’s creating a bit of FOMO, especially in these competitive categories.”

- James Kaikis, Head of Go-To-Market at TestBox

---

Get more creative with outbound

One aspect of getting focused on target accounts is having the time and resources to prospect into these accounts in a way that feels highly personalized and relevant.

Cold calling and cold email are still very much part of the mix, but there’s an added element of creativity involved in breaking through the noise. Think: company-wide prospecting days, personal pages for SDRs, and deep mining of relationship data.

“Since September, we’ve booked 80 qualified meetings using SDR personal pages, generating $340,000 in pipeline. More personal + less prospect friction = More pipeline. That was the hypothesis behind creating SDR personal pages for our sales team.

SDRs were initially booking meetings through their email signatures, which wasn’t effective. Joey Williams, Director of Sales Development, suggested a new approach: routing prospects to a booking page where they could answer qualification questions, directing them to the right AE. This change allowed SDRs to receive credit for leads they didn’t even have to touch, optimizing their time and efforts.

To make the sales process feel more human, we added photos of each SDR to their respective pages and made the copy more conversational than our typical demo page. This personal touch significantly reduced no-shows; prospects are less likely to ghost someone they feel they know.”

- Brandon Redlinger, VP of Marketing at Chili Piper

“Since last fall, we've held 10 company-wide prospecting days, resulting in nearly 80 net new opportunities added to our pipeline. We now have a dedicated tiger team ensuring the success of all prospecting days. The outbound muscle we're building is strong, and our team defaults to outbound activities. Our pipeline has grown by a healthy 20% and each of us holds ourselves accountable for generating opportunities.”

 - Ralph Barsi, VP of Sales at Kahua

“Prospecting using relationship and employee data, and running plays in LinkedIn Sales Navigator that no one seems to think of. For example:

- Who worked for our company that now works in my territory?

- Who worked for our best clients and have changed jobs?

- Who worked for my previous employer(s) and is in my territory?

- Who do my execs know that work in our territory?

- Who do my execs know that know someone that works in my territory? 

Set an alert each time a new executive (title varies based on the size of your company) joins an organization, connect with them and fish their networks.”

- Samantha McKenna, Founder of #samsales Consulting

---

Revisit pricing and packaging for land-and-expand

Over the past five years, the vast majority of pricing and packaging changes I’ve observed have been about increasing prices. Software businesses increase prices by more than 100% on average on their journey from seed stage to $100M+ ARR.

Today there’s an increasing focus on finding the right entry price points – including prices for pilots and pricing floors for the sales team – in order to accelerate new logo acquisition and then set up future expansion revenue. 

“Unsexy as it may sound, I would like to call out pricing and packaging – which is by far the most underestimated lever by GTM teams! We made some daring pricing updates to align with both our self-serve and sales-assist motions, which led to a lot of flexibility for customers to get on our paying tiers faster, realize value from premium features easier, and expand organically. 

More concretely, we removed legacy pricing floors in our self-serve offering, while tightening our freemium paywalls and sunsetting all month-to-month plans. At the same time, we expanded (and strictly enforced) seat-based pricing across all our tiers and introduced usage-based pricing as a secondary pricing lever to monetize a growing number of use cases that relied on consumption of data outside our product and not on user seats. These pricing updates led to a 3x increase in self-serve conversions and a 65% increase in quarterly expansion revenue.”

- Alex Poulos, CMO at Crossbeam

“I know a lot of people say AEs need to focus on new logos, but for us, signing big companies like Intuit means the upsell and expansion in that account alone are bigger than most of our regular customers. We’re already working on second and third upsells, sometimes less than 30 days after the initial contract was signed. We’re doing a lot to deliver value in the POC to prove we can do this, land the deal, and then expand as we deliver and implement the solution.”

- James Kaikis, Head of Go-To-Market at TestBox

“We're committed to maintaining our ‘no free pilots’ rule, even if it's a nominal fee like five grand. This approach ensures that both the customer and our team have ownership in the process, which is crucial for effective testing and delivery. Additionally, these paid pilots give us valuable time to refine our understanding of our evolving ICP. 

By starting with a paid pilot, we can better set the stage for the seed-and-expand model, reducing the risk of onboarding customers who may later churn due to lack of engagement or adoption. It's a strategy that’s proven to be highly effective for us.”

- Andrew Johnston, Head of Sales at Superhuman

---

The TL;DR

For H2 2024, folks are getting focused on their best possible customers. They’re getting creative in how they reach buyers at these accounts with local dinners, virtual events, highly personalized outbound, and scouting their networks for introductions. At some companies, literally everyone is playing a role in pipeline building through company-wide prospecting days. And then folks say they’re lowering pricing barriers to get prospects to try out the products (although they’re not getting rid of these barriers altogether).

Let us know what you’re doubling down on for the rest of H2. Join the conversation on LinkedIn with Kyle, Scott, and Sophie. See you there.

Special thank you to Adam Carr (Head of Global Sales, Miro), Alex Poulos (CMO at Crossbeam), Andrew Johnston (Head of Sales, Superhuman), Brandon Redlinger (VP of Marketing, Chili Piper), Dan Fahy (VP of Sales, Memo), Eric Gilpin (CRO, G2), James Kaikis (Head of Go-To-Market, TestBox), Jeff Perry (CRO, Carta), Kyle Lacy (CMO, Jellyfish), Ralph Barsi (VP of Sales, Kahua), Samantha McKenna (Founder, #samsales Consulting), and Sasha Anderson (VP of Customer Success, Procore Technologies).