Your Weak Pipeline Is A Disciple Issue | Donald C. Kelly - 2027

Three appointments a week. Twelve a month. If you want a consistent pipeline, you have to know exactly what it takes to get there. The problem is that most reps don't stop prospecting because they don't know how. They stop because meetings, active deals, and everything else on their calendar slowly take over. A few missed prospecting sessions turn into a weak pipeline, and then the scramble begins. In this solo episode, I break down the discipline framework I coach sales reps to use: set a specific goal, work backward from the number, protect the time needed to hit it, and create accountability around the activity. Once you know your numbers, you can stop guessing whether your pipeline will be full next month and start building toward it. Why Busy Reps Still End Up With Empty Pipelines Most reps who fall off on prospecting aren't too busy, they have a discipline problem. The common pattern is a quick sprint, a day or two of hard prospecting, then tapering off once meetings and existing opportunities take over. Fixing that starts with three things: a clear goal, a real plan, and accountability. Set a Clear, Specific Goal Start with a real number, not a vague intention. If the goal is three appointments a week, that's twelve a month. Work backward from that number to see what it actually produces. If thirty percent of those appointments convert and the average deal size is ten thousand dollars, that goal turns into real revenue you can calculate. This has to come from prospecting specifically, not from marketing leads or referrals, since those sources aren't predictable enough to plan around. Build a Real Plan Around the Numbers Once the goal is set, break it into the actual outreach required to hit it. Twelve appointments might take 150 meaningful outreach activities across LinkedIn, phone calls, and email. Spread that number across the week and it turns into a simple daily target, for example twenty outreach activities a day over five days. The plan only works if those activities are aimed at the right people. This isn't random outreach. It's outreach to an ICP with a real trigger and a problem the rep can actually solve. Block the Time and Protect It Like a Client Meeting Set aside dedicated prospecting time on the calendar every day, and treat it as sacred, not something that gets bumped for anything less than a real emergency. Vary the time of day across the week, since calling the same people at the same time every day just means catching them at their busiest moment more often than not. Putting it on the calendar is what keeps prospecting from quietly disappearing once the day fills up with meetings and existing deals. Track Every Activity As You Do It Physically tracking each activity, even something as simple as a tally on paper, turns prospecting into a game instead of a chore. Watching the count climb toward the daily target builds momentum, because hitting that number becomes the signal that the appointment is on its way. There's a psychological win here too. Even on a day when the outcome hasn't shown up yet, finishing the activity gives a real sense of accomplishment, which matters in a job that includes a lot of rejection. Add Accountability On Top of the Plan A goal and a plan aren't enough on their own. There has to be a return and report, some way the rep has to answer for whether the work got done. This can be as simple as a one-on-one check-in or a message in a group chat confirming the day's activities are complete. Giving a rep the latitude to manage their own day works best when it's paired with a clear expectation that they report back on it. Pearson's Law: What Gets Measured Improves Pearson's Law says that when performance is measured, performance improves. When it's measured and reported to someone else, the improvement happens even faster. None of this requires reaching out to people randomly. It means knowing your numbers, knowing your KPIs, and running the same plan every single day. Do this consistently, and there's no version of this where a rep doesn't build the pipeline they need. This is what separates top sellers from everyone else. "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of performance increases dramatically." — Donald C. Kelly Resources Grab the Sales Evangelist Sales Planner on Amazon to help you set your goals, plan your activities, and stay accountable. https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Evangelist-Planner-Donald-Kelly/dp/B09NKWMX2PKeep track of your sales activity and boost your results with the Prospect Pro sales tool. https://prospectpro.io/Step up your sales game with Sales Mastermind. Get accountability, stay motivated, and tackle the blockers keeping you from hitting your goals. https://thesalesevangelist.com/sales-mastermind/Visit Blue Mango Studios for help creating podcast production content. https://bluemangostudios.com/Join our LinkedIn cohort and learn to prospect the right way. https://thesalesevangelist.com/linkedin-prospecting-course/ Sponsorship Offers This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot. With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation. Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/UCMfjZbX. Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey http://thesalesevangelist.com/survey. https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/lc5yAa8P We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-evangelist/id788738885, Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3RoZXNhbGVzZXZhbmdlbGlzdC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5kaXI3Pj2AhVKcjABHW5PDVwQ9sEGegQIARAC, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-sales-evangelist-sales-trainingspeakingbusiness-marketingdonald, or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1NjzsFjQwVrgboUfDvbzd5?si=LdQOJDc1T-WBPMxr1h3RsA. Audio provided by Free SFX, https://freesfx.co.uk/ Soundstripe https://soundstripe.com/, and Bensound http://www.bensound.com/. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

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  In order for us to get the outcome, we have to do the input. And for many of us as sales professionals, prospecting is one of those input activities that doesn't necessarily always tick the box as an exciting task to do. But I'm going to talk to you today of how you can make sure you have the discipline so that you can do the things you need to now, so you can enjoy the outcome or results later on. Check it out.

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  Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly, the Sales Evangelist. And I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. On this episode, I'm going to talk about discipline, but specifically around prospecting. One of the things that I get from sales leaders and sales rep, how can I have my sales rep consistently build pipeline? Well, pipeline building activity requires you to do stuff every single day, at least for the most part, and the outcome will come from it. What I do find oftentimes is that the sales rep will do some prospecting, do a big split blitz or sprint for a while, maybe a couple of days, perhaps even a week, and then they taper off because they have meetings and opportunities that they're working with now, and they don't consistently do it.

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  I don't think this is more so you're getting so busy that you can't do the activity. It's the fact that you have a discipline issue, that you have a bigger problem at hand. And I'm going to give you three things that I usually like to coach sales reps on that can help them. It also helps me, and I know it will definitely help you. If this is your first time listening to our podcast, please subscribe, and I'll make sure to notify you every time we drop a new piece of content. If you've been listening for a while, you love the show, please, I ask you to tell one other person about it so they can find benefit from it just as well as you have been. So let's dive in and check this one out real quick. The first piece I want to cover is around this concept that's, it's very, it's a super easy and often overlooked one, and it is simply coming up with a clear goal. I know that may sound very basic, but the goal that I'm talking about,

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  if you're prospecting, it's three appointments per week that you're trying to book, right? So if that's the case, 12 appointments per month, that is the goal. Hands down, what we're trying to get accomplished, 12 appointments per week. You may have done the math already, and you saw that if you convert 30% of those appointments, that give you what you need for your goals. So let's say, I'm going to do simple numbers here. Let's just say you were able to convert three of those into an opportunity, and your average deal size is $10,000. That's not bad, right? $30,000 in business that you're getting. But the only way you're going to get those people is by adding from prospecting, not counting what marketing gives you, not counting from referrals that you get from your partners. Those are oftentimes not predictable, but there means why, a means at the top of the funnel, right?

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  Bringing people in or into the pipeline. However, you can't predict that exactly. So we are going to go with the things that we have control over. And that's the first part. Set a clear goal of what you're trying to do.

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  The second thing that I tell a sales rep is a plan towards that goal. So what this might look like, the plan for us, maybe go back to that 12 appointments that we're trying to get. I know that I must do, let's say, I'm making this up, but just go. Let's say it's for the three appointments per week. That's going to be, let's say, 150 outreach activities. This is going to be from my LinkedIn, from my phone calls, from my emails, 150 meaningful outreach activity to my ICP with the pain that we can solve for them. And those are, we're trying to just find people that are in market or open to it at this point. So now you have 150 activities. Now, this is where the fun part begins. Daily, make a plan of how many of you, how many are you going to do?

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  So 150, and you might say, you know, for, we can do for kicks and giggles here. Let's say it's 100, and we are trying to do it over five days. Then it's not that difficult to see what we need to do if we're going to be doing 100 over five days. That's 20 meaningful outreach activities that we need to do every single day. Now, yours is probably going to be more, but I'm just using simple math here. So what can I do? Every day, I'm going to set apart the time. So go back to this idea of the plan. I'm going to set apart a time when I'm going to prospect. And we talked about this multiple times on different podcast episodes. I might block off in the morning, or in the evening, or afternoon. I'm going to block off prospecting time. I'm going to change it up on a days base, so I'm not doing the same call, the same people, the same time every single day. Perhaps they're going to be busy at those times.

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  So I want to mix it up throughout my day. Maybe I call in the morning today, and then in the afternoon, and I call the late afternoon, and then in the late morning, and so forth. And I give a variety of different options throughout the week. When I put it on my calendar at that specific time, I know it's sacred time, and I can't disrupt that with anything else. I can't switch out my prospecting, unless there's a really big emergency, or if there's a client that I, you know, that only can meet at that point. Like, it has to be something that is going to be, it's pretty significant. Otherwise, everything else can be switched around or moved around it, so I can make sure I'm doing my prospecting at that given day, at that given time, that I just allotted. The next piece is then to ticker. And I know this one sounds really silly, but I use a pencil sometimes, and I have my planner.

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  You could check out our sales planner. We have a link down below. You can find it on Amazon, but we have a sales planner. And literally, I will tick the activity. So I did the phone call, one, two, phone calls, ticket, three phone calls, ticket, four phone calls. But this allows for me to be able to truly make it a game. I'm doing my plan. And what I tend to find, if I'm really measuring that plan, so if I know I need to do 20 outreach activity, I know by the time I get to that 20, I'm going to have that appointment that I need today, right? So that pushes me to get to that end result, because I know it'll lead to it. Now, it's not blind, just saying if I do the activity, it will come. I'm doing a prescribed activity based on an ICP that I know has some of those trigger, based on the last episodes we talked about.

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  They have something relevant that I could address and help them with at this point. So this becomes a real high potential, not just throwing something in the dark, making calls to random people. Now, my approach is way more refined, way more focused. And if I do this appropriately, I know by the end, I'm going to get those appointments. Tick. This also does something psychologically to us where we feel a sense of accomplishment, even if we gotten, haven't gotten to the outcome yet of getting the pipeline built. We do have the outcome of completing a task. And that, that is in itself so magnificently powerful to the mind of a salesperson, because sales is so psychological. You're doing a lot of, you're getting a lot of rejection. You're going through a lot of hard stuff to get to the end outcome of help our clients

• 9:36Speaker 00

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• 11:44Speaker 00

  Now, the third thing that I want to tell you about is accountability. This one is often overlooked. So as a sales leader and as working with sales reps and working with companies, one of the things that I try to do is help my sellers to have a certain level of, I would say, of agency, of their ability to make choices on their own. And I give them an opportunity to be able to understand the correct principles, so to speak, so that they can guide themselves and govern themselves. But there's a level of accountability that's important. Giving them that latitude and giving them direction, giving them the playbook and understanding principles. There must be a return and report. There must be this accountability. And this is where the one-on-one comes, or in a group setting. So sales reps can then respond in a group chat.

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  Hey, did my activities for today? Was able to focus on my outreach? This level of accountability opportunity that they have to come back and reply or report back to someone helps. If I'm coaching an individual sales rep, I give them that task. Send me a message on Slack at the end of the day that you're, end of your, completed your task. You're going to do it 11 o'clock. I must see it something by at noon, when you, you know, end of that hour block that you're going to prospect. I want to get, give me a notification that you did it. This, again, add to the idea of the sense of the fact that they have a plan, they have a clear goal, but they have accountability back behind that, makes it so much that they have to do it. Pearson's Law says, when performance is measured, performance is improved. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of performance increase drastically or dramatically.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  If you want your sales to improve, if you want pipeline dramatically to improve by the end of like the, a month, you do this every single day. If I'm going to do my prospecting, you know your numbers, of course. I'm not telling you just go reach out to 100 people randomly, but know your numbers, know your KPIs, and you can do that consistently. You have a plan, you set it every single day. I mean, every day you're following a plan, you're plowing through, and you're doing, making sure it's people that are your ICP and that are relevant and that have those triggers. And then you have accountability. There's absolutely no way you can't have the pipeline that you deserve. These are some of the fundamental things that you must continue to do. So I don't want to hear any crap that I'm too busy, I can't do it. I'm going to tell you that you're just robbing your future self if you do that. You have to do it right now.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  You can reward your future self that Donald, at the end of the quarter, that's being successful, that hidden president club, rather than just giving us this, you know, doing the basic right now or sporadic right now and hoping that somehow you'll get the pipeline later on. You got to take ownership. Nobody's going to give you anything. You got to take it. And that is what I see separating the top sellers from the others. And that gives you discipline, and that's going to help you to be able to really hit your goals. So hopefully that answers that question around, you know, how can I make sure that I'm consistently building pipeline and not having the, you know, not having the consistency that you deserve, or, you know, you're losing momentum or drive. Do this, and you will see that it'll help. Suck it up, even when it's tough.

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  Just still do the activity, do the process, stay true to it, and you'll see a great, great result. If you want to check out my sales planner to get some more tips and tools and ideas how you can, for your planning and being accountable, you can find details about it in the show notes. You can find it on Amazon. It's the Sales Evangelist Sales Planner. Listen, I want you to thrive, I want you to succeed. But most importantly, I want you to raise your level of thinking. I want you to go out and do big things. See you on the next one.

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  The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSC Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is DeSahn Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Kristi Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galberith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia. And I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly.

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