Power plays: Pipeline-generating sales plays your team should use

Even in ideal circumstances, SaaS sales is never a walk in the park. But in today’s challenging business climate, connect rates and sales cycles seem slower than usual.

Despite this reality, sales teams need to continuously keep driving pipeline — even when businesses are reining in spending and reevaluating their approach. 

To help teams like yours figure out how to accelerate momentum when business activity dwindles, we recently hosted a webinar that highlighted several sales plays you can use to cover more ground throughout the year and featured:

• Parker Eide, director of sales development at Tray.io, former senior account executive and sales development manager at Gong;
• Moses Castillo, senior regional sales and manager of business development at MSPbots.ai, former senior manager of enterprise and commercial sales development at Outreach;
• Brooke Bachesta, head of commercial learning design at JLL Technologies, former revenue enablement and sales development manager at Outreach; and our very own
• Millie Brooks, director of digital marketing and demand generation.

In this post, we examine some key takeaways from the webinar and highlight some of the most effective B2B sales plays you can use to drive pipeline.

Seize the moment & manufacture urgency

B2B SaaS sales is not easy. However, just because many businesses are tightening their purses right now doesn’t mean sales teams are out of luck — quite the contrary.

“There’s so much opportunity at a time like now,” Brooke says. “The economy’s tough, we’re doing more with less. You just get back to the basics.”

The way Brooke sees it, sales is always a number game, and you have to be willing to grind it out. In today’s difficult economic climate, you also have to have a product that solves real problems — not something that’s just nice to have. The last ingredient is good timing, which is often a stroke of luck. In the absence of being able to automatically time outreach perfectly, you can create urgency by manufacturing timeliness.

Reps “really need to know not only your value prop but flipping that context and say what’s the negative impact of doing nothing,” Brooke continues. “What’s this person likely to do if they don’t make any change?” 

Prior to hopping on the phone, Brooke encourages reps to research their prospects. Find out what they do all day, find out what’s happening within their company or across their industry, and then relate it all back to the macroeconomic environment. 

For example, since Brooke works in commercial real estate, she often talks about return-to-office strategies — a blazing-hot topic in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Move beyond your value proposition

All too often, reps become laser-focused on their company’s own value propositions and fail to really try to understand the pain points potential customers are experiencing. When a prospect doesn’t respond to the first message, many reps are unsure of what to do next. 

To overcome this common challenge, Moses encourages reps to spend a lot of time trying to understand why their products might be valuable to each person they are speaking to from their point of view — not the company’s. 

“The value to them could be completely different than what we’ve created as our value prop,” Moses explains, adding that it’s important for reps to understand that prospects have multiple pain points and to construct email sequences accordingly. That way, if your first message doesn’t land, you can move on to the next issue and see if it resonates.

Add value instead of asking for time

When was the last time you received a sales email or LinkedIn message that contained some variation of this message: Do you have 30 minutes to spare next week?

In today’s fast-paced world, time is a luxury, and people are wary of freely giving up their time when they have to juggle so many other responsibilities. Rather than asking for someone’s time and expecting them to make a commitment, nurture the relationship by going out of your way to add value.

“I like switching it up and adding some value in there,” Parker says. “So, maybe inviting them to a webinar or an event or dropping them some sort of article that maybe has nothing to do with the product but more about the space we’re in. Just putting some nuggets in there to break up the outreach has worked really well.”

Moses agreed, citing a study that revealed closing on interest is more effective than closing on time.

“The hard close is reserved for somebody who’s already bought into interest,” Moses explains. “I’m interested, I’m on the fence, then you bring in a hard close. When we do that as SDRs, it turns our prospects off. It becomes a nuisance. If you’re still closing hard on time, statistically it’s not as effective.” 

In addition to prioritizing interest versus time, sales reps also need to understand that sales cycles are likely going to be much longer than usual.

“Understandably, buyers are like, ‘Please don’t ask me for money. I am under so much pressure. Please don’t put me in a position to have to say hard no to you,’” Brooke adds. “Multiple discovery calls are going to need to happen. The demo might be six calls from now because you have to gather all these people up. It’s really like coaxing people out of their please-leave-me-alone shell.” 

Tune into the webinar for more actionable B2B sales play insights!

Just because activity might be slower than normal doesn’t mean sales teams should sit back twiddling their thumbs and waiting for summer to end so they can resume their efforts. 

Instead, use the downtime as an opportunity to enhance your outbound sequences, execute new sales plays, and even optimize your LinkedIn profile.

Since you’re reading these words, you’re obviously interested in learning more about what you can do to win more business during the summer slump. While this post should give you a good idea of some of the tactics discussed in the webinar, it’s just a sneak preview of the action-packed discussion.

To learn more about pipeline-generating sales plays you can use during the slowest times of the year, watch the webinar in full above.