Updated: January 3, 2025
In B2B, a strong lead generation strategy might seem like the best way to score new deals, but it’s only the first step in a solid sales strategy. Building consistent, long-term revenue requires a pipeline generation strategy that will generate a steady flow of leads throughout your sales pipeline. But many businesses favor lead generation efforts over a pipeline strategy, which can impact the overall effectiveness of their sales process as well as their close rates.
In this blog, we’ll explain the difference between lead generation and pipeline generation and provide a step-by-step guide with pro tips to help you create an effective pipeline generation strategy.
Lead Generation vs. Pipeline Generation
Lead generation is a top-of-funnel (TOFU) activity typically focused on brand awareness and education. Tactics, which aim to generate interest and feed marketing qualified leads (MQLs) into the funnel, include content marketing, social media marketing, digital ads, SEO and other awareness-building activities. Lead generation efforts end when a lead enters the funnel and becomes an MQL.
“Many businesses treat lead generation as the endgame, but building a pipeline means moving those leads to qualified opportunities. That requires the right strategy, system integration and closed-loop feedback from sales to keep things on track.”
Ryan Gould, COO & Executive Vice President, Client Strategy at Elevation Marketing
According to Gartner research, 84% of businesses face a significant challenge in converting MQLs to SQLs. This is where a pipeline generation strategy comes in.
Pipeline generation focuses on middle-of-funnel (MOFU) efforts designed to guide MQLs down the funnel and convert them to SQLs, or sales-ready opportunities. Pipeline activities include lead nurturing, lead scoring and qualification, segmentation and personalization for highly targeted messaging, and direct sales outreach. Pipeline generation efforts end once the lead is qualified as an SQL and handed off to the sales team.
Create an Effective Pipeline Generation Strategy
To be truly effective, your pipeline generation strategy must be guided by customer data, the right metrics and performance insights. With behavioral insights, demographic information, lead scoring and funnel progression, you can identify high value opportunities and refine your tactics to target the right leads at the right time. This data-driven approach ensures your efforts are strategic, measurable and optimized to drive consistent pipeline growth.
“For B2B businesses, a real commitment to data, personalized engagement and cross-functional collaboration makes all the difference in developing profitable and sustainable pipelines.”
Ryan Gould, COO & Executive Vice President, Client Strategy at Elevation Marketing
Align Sales and Marketing Teams (and Tech)
When sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned, the handoff of leads tends to be disjointed – leads may be passed to the sales team before they’re ready to engage, or the sales team might not have enough context to know what caught the lead’s interest. If technologies aren’t synced, lead scoring data is siloed and important insights are lost in the handoff. This not only affects lead quality – sending over leads that aren’t sales-ready – but also makes it difficult for sales to understand what content leads have engaged with and why they were qualified in the first place. As a result, leads fall through the cracks, both teams end up frustrated and reporting becomes unreliable, making it impossible to see what’s working in the pipeline and where leads are getting stuck.
“Without proper alignment, marketing ends up being more about numbers than impact. The focus should be on strategic campaigns that fill the pipeline with quality leads that matter to the business.”
Ryan Gould, COO & Executive Vice President, Client Strategy at Elevation Marketing
On the flip side, alignment between your sales and marketing teams and their technologies offers numerous benefits, including a speedier conversion process, higher win rates and faster revenue growth. According to a Gartner survey, 42% of business leaders say that sales and marketing alignment is crucial for accelerating the conversion process, and 66% of leaders say establishing a lead qualifying and scoring process is the best way to align sales and marketing teams.
For this reason, one of the first steps of a pipeline generation strategy is to ensure your sales and marketing teams are aligned and working together toward the same goals, sharing data and communicating effectively. It involves:
- Setting shared goals and metrics such as lead-to-SQL conversion rates, time to close or revenue targets to create a sense of joint ownership. Use service level agreements (SLAs) to define responsibilities and response times, ensuring accountability from both teams.
- Defining lead qualification and scoring criteria to determine when a lead becomes an MQL or an SQL, ensuring both teams have a have a clear signal for handoff to sales. This could include demographic and firmographic data to confirm that the lead is an ideal customer and behavioral signals to gauge purchasing intent.
- Integrating technologies, including your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, marketing automation platforms, lead scoring and tracking tools. This streamlines the flow of data in real time and enhances visibility for both teams, ensuring sales can see a lead’s full journey and marketing can track lead status through the pipeline.
- Measuring, analyzing and adjusting based on key performance metrics, such as MQL to SQL conversion rates, pipeline velocity and close rates. With this data, you can identify strengths and areas for improvement, optimizing your strategies, lead scoring and pipeline generation processes accordingly.
Pro tip: Establish regular communication and feedback loops with your sales and marketing teams to discuss lead quality, pipeline status and any disconnects in the lead handoff process. This helps teams learn which tactics are most effective and continuously refine the process.
Identify Your Target Audience
To effectively nurture leads, you must understand who they are and what they do and do not want. This information allows you to speak directly, ensuring they feel heard and helping you build a connection with them.
- Use research and data, including demographic and behavioral data, and feedback from customer surveys, customer service and sales conversations. This information will help you address common preferences, challenges, objections and questions during the buying process.
- Develop personas for key decision-makers in each customer segment, including information like demographics, firmographics, technographics (if relevant), pain points, goals and preferences. Stay focused on decision-driving factors; details such as family size, hobbies and pets aren’t necessary (unless they are actually relevant to the product or service being offered).
Pro tip: Define your target audience by using first-party data from your CRM and information about your client’s key decision-makers from LinkedIn or ZoomInfo. Take it a step further and look at common characteristics of your top customers to gain insights about your ideal customer.
Develop Your Content Strategy
To support your pipeline generation efforts, you need a strong content strategy that includes:
- A brand positioning statement and messaging that clearly communicates the value you deliver to your different audience segments throughout each stage of the funnel. Your messaging will be the foundation of your marketing content and sales conversations, helping to further align your sales and marketing teams and ensure consistency in how you communicate with leads throughout the sales pipeline.
- Content assets, such as blog posts, videos, white papers, case studies and other informational pieces that address different audience segments and stages of the journey. The process of developing or collecting assets for your pipeline generation strategy should be intentional. This means crafting pieces that strategically align to your customer needs and preferences as they move through the pipeline.
- A channel distribution plan that identifies the most effective channels (e.g., email, social media, targeted ads, webinars) and optimal timing (e.g., time of day, day of week, frequency and intervals) for reaching each persona. A well-defined plan ensures content reaches leads where and when they’re most active, nurturing them through the pipeline with relevant, timely information.
Pro tip: Use a content map to outline which pieces of content are best suited to each persona at each stage of the buying journey, identifying key touchpoints and channels to ensure the right information reaches the right audience at the right time. It also keeps the sales team informed about which information leads have already received, reducing redundancy and enhancing conversations.
Implement Personalized Lead Nurturing Strategies
Lead nurturing can increase sales opportunities by 20%. Companies that excel at lead nurturing can generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost. (Source: Forrester)
70% of B2B marketers say a strong lead nurturing strategy generates warmer, higher-quality SQLs. (Source: DemandGen)
Only 35% of businesses have a lead nurturing strategy. (Source: SellersCommerce)
Today’s B2B buying journey is self-driven, with buyers in control of the process. They conduct research, compare options and make purchasing decisions on their own. This means you must be present at every step of the journey to provide information and assistance. Failure to do so risks losing potential customers to competitors who are more engaged in the process.
Lead nurturing helps you develop connections with leads, ensuring your brand stays top-of-mind throughout the buying journey. It involves providing them with relevant information, answering their questions and addressing their concerns. The goal is to build trust, position your company as a credible source of information and solutions, close deals and establish long-term relationships.
Personalized lead nurturing connects with leads in a way that speaks to their unique needs, interests and stage in the buying journey Research from McKinsey & Company shows that 71% of today’s customers expect a personalized approach, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t see it. Meeting those expectations means leveraging user data – behavior, preferences and past interactions – to make sure your communication feels timely and relevant. Personalization doesn’t just meet their expectations; it helps build stronger connections, keeps them engaged and boosts the chance they’ll choose your brand.
Because leads can enter the funnel at any stage of their journey based on their awareness and readiness, it’s essential to have a lead nurturing strategy to engage them at every point. This includes:
- Lead segmentation based on shared characteristics, behaviors and intent
- Automated workflows to send timely emails or other messages, including engaging via text, browser notifications, chatbots and social media responses
- Lead scoring to track engagement and readiness
- Multichannel outreach to engage leads across email, social media and retargeting ads
Pro tip: Incorporate progressive profiling by using forms or interactive content to collect deeper insights about your leads as they move through the pipeline. By diving deeper into specific challenges, priorities or decision-making criteria, you can refine your messaging and content even further and make each touchpoint increasingly relevant and impactful.
Measure Performance
To gauge the success of your pipeline generation activities, you’ll need to track metrics that reflect how effectively leads move through the funnel and convert into sales opportunities. Here are a few key metrics for measuring performance:
- MQL to SQL conversion rate measures the percentage of MQLs that qualify as SQLs and helps you understand the effectiveness of your lead nurturing and qualification efforts.
- Pipeline velocity tells you how quickly leads from the beginning of the pipeline end up closing, providing insight into how efficiently your pipeline converts leads into revenue.
- Cost per SQL, calculated by dividing the total cost of pipeline generation by the number of SQLs, helps you evaluate return on pipeline generation.
- Engagement metrics, such as email open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), downloads and event attendance, indicate how well your outreach resonates.
- Sales accepted leads (SALs) tracks how many SQLs your sales team accepts as viable opportunities and reflects the alignment between your sales and marketing teams.
- Win rate measures the percentage of SQLs that convert into customers and helps identify the effectiveness of your pipeline generation strategy in producing sales-ready opportunities.
Pro tip: Track your pipeline acceleration rate, which measures how quickly leads move through stages of the funnel and assesses changes over time. This granular metric helps you identify bottlenecks in specific parts of the funnel and evaluate the impact of your fine-tuning efforts. For example, an improvement in your MQL to SQL acceleration rate may indicate that new nurturing campaigns are speeding up the lead qualification process.
Analyze and Optimize
The key to improving your pipeline performance strategy is to analyze your metrics and identifying areas for refinement. This is an iterative and continuous process that can shorten your sales cycle, boost conversion rates, increase win rates and ultimately drive revenue growth. It can include:
- Segmenting your metrics by industry, persona, channel or campaign to identify patterns and areas for improvement
- Analyzing stage duration and drop-offs to identify areas where your lead nurturing is insufficient or messaging is misaligned and adjusting your strategy
- Leveraging attribution models to understand which channels and touchpoints contribute most to your pipeline generation success
- Reviewing lead scoring criteria to ensure it aligns with buyer behaviors and accurately reflects sales readiness
- Implementing predictive analytics tools to identify high-value leads and prioritize nurturing and outreach efforts for those most likely to convert
Pro tip: Monitor your pipeline health to ensure a steady flow of leads enter and progress through the funnel. This means analyzing your pipeline balance to ensure an adequate number of leads versus the pace at which they advance. A top-heavy pipeline suggests issues with nurturing and qualification, while a bottom-heavy pipeline indicates a risk of running out of future opportunities. To ensure adequate pipeline coverage, the total value of your opportunities should typically exceed your sales target by a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1.
Partner With a Data-Driven Sales and Marketing Agency
To ensure your MQLs move through the pipeline efficiently and convert to MQLs, you must have a pipeline generation strategy that is backed by data and supported by an aligned team, as well as a content strategy, personalized lead nurturing and consistent monitoring. This approach drives conversions and ensures your pipeline is primed for sustained revenue growth.
If you’re struggling to maintain a healthy pipeline, we’re here to help. With over 25 years of expertise in B2B sales and marketing, Elevation Marketing can help you navigate the complexities of pipeline generation. Our tailored approach ensures your pipeline generation efforts are driven by strategy and fueled by insights that enhance your success.
Contact us to see how we can help you drive measurable results.