There’s a big difference in sales between what looks productive and what actually drives pipeline.
High call volume. Tons of emails. Busy calendars.
It checks the box on activity, but doesn’t always move the needle.
What does drive pipeline?
→ Prioritizing the right accounts
→ Anchoring outreach in real business initiatives (10Ks, news, growth signals)
→ Reaching the right personas from the start
→ Positioning your solution where there’s actual need, not just noise
Activity ≠ effectiveness.
The goal isn’t to do more, it’s to do what matters.
Start where you want to finish.
That’s how you build real pipeline.
And sales, there's a big difference between what actually dries pipeline and what just looks productive. So the actual quality verse just activity. Let's take for example, what looks productive might be a high call volume, high number of emails sent. From a metric standpoint, yes, it's more outbound motions. But for driving quality efforts towards our targeted accounts, that's going to be a prioritizing the right account outreach. It's gonna be targeting accounts based on real initiatives that you found. Maybe through 10K reports are media publications getting in contact with those who really benefit from the solution. If you're selling martech, reach out to marketing teams, for example, making sure that they actually are decision makers so you don't have to continue to climb up the pipeline. Start where you're going to be finishing. And it's just important that you don't get the two confused because that's where there's going to be a big discrepancy of actual effectiveness in your sales role. So don't get it confused.
