One of the biggest struggles agencies and producers face is maintaining a healthy pipeline. If you aren't getting in front of prospects, you'll never write the new business you need. Every agency and producer has a different definition of what this looks like, depending on their conversion and close ratios, as well as the average size of opportunity they pursue. In general, a healthy pipeline is one that would ensure the producer or agency hits their sales goal.

Prospecting versus marketing

There are two ways to put opportunities in your pipeline—prospecting and marketing. Prospecting activities are things you can do to put opportunities in the pipeline today. Marketing activities are things that will put prospects in your pipeline tomorrow.

Prospecting may include cold calling/emailing, requesting referrals/introductions and networking. At its most basic definition, prospecting activities are when you are engaged in one-on-one, personal interaction during which you ask for an opportunity to have a sales conversation.

Marketing, on the other hand, may include your website, social media presence, writing opportunities, speaking engagements, email campaigns, webinars/seminars, and some types of networking.

Where prospecting consists of a direct request for a sales conversation, marketing is about creating an interest in the potential prospect to ask you to have that sales conversation. At the very least, marketing warms readers up for when they become a target of your prospecting.

It's like a magic 8-ball

The key is to know how to allocate your time between prospecting and marketing. Often, this is a moving target.

Your current pipeline will tell you everything you need to know. It is the closest thing you have to a personal fortune-teller that will show you how much new business you are going to be writing, or not, in the foreseeable future.

Indirectly, it will tell you exactly how to spend your time and how to turn bleak predictions more positive; it will tell you what to do to maintain a financially lucrative forecast.

You must find the discipline to block out the appropriate amount of time for your fill-the-pipeline activities. Start by asking yourself how many hours a week you need to commit:

If you work a 50-hour week and you need to spend 75 percent of your time in overall sales activities, you have 37.5 hours of available sales-related time.
Deduct the number of hours your scheduled sales presentations are going to require each week. Let's assume, on average, you need 25 percent of your time for those presentations (including preparation) or 12.5 hours.
You then have 25 hours to allocate between prospecting and marketing.
If your pipeline is dry, perhaps you spend 75 percent of those hours on prospecting and 25 percent on marketing.
If your pipeline is already healthy, flip those percentages around.

These are activities you have to do on a weekly, if not daily, basis. There is no higher priority for you than ensuring the health of your pipeline. And, when something is a priority, you must plan for it, schedule it and execute with discipline.

Make this the year you up your new business game. But that has to start by upping your pipeline game.

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To prospect or market? That is the question

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