How to sit in a sales pipeline meeting

A guide to breaking into the sales team

The collaboration between a sales and marketing team is a huge part of any marketer’s role. If the sales team sees you as a resource that actually brings value to their work, you’ll have a much better work experience than if the sales team sees you as “well what does the marketing team even do?”

I’ve written before about how I have built relationships with sales teams in the past, you can check out that issue here (TL;DR, prove your value and work in service of them).

Today I’m being more specific, focusing on why you should sit in the sales pipeline meetings, and what to do when you’re in there. Not all sales teams run this meeting the same way, but they definitely all run some sort of pipeline meeting. It could be a one on one style meeting between a salesperson and their manager, or it could be a big group meeting. Either way, you will need to explicitly ask the person who runs the meeting to invite you, and you’ll need to sell your presence as another value add to the overall sales team. 

So why should you sit in a pipeline meeting?

You may already be running sales-marketing alignment meetings, or catch ups, or feedback sessions - whatever you call them. Often I find that salespeople don’t bring up the juicy feedback you’re really looking for in these sessions, for a variety of reasons, but the main reason is they see it as a “marketing” meeting and so they try and bring up “marketing” feedback.

In pipeline meetings though, they tend to get a lot more ‘in the weeds’ of who their current prospects are, where they’re getting stuck with them, and details on the conversations they’re having. This is the kind of feedback you need to hear in order to assist the sales team in pushing the leads you gave them further down the funnel (and hopefully through to closed won). 

If the manager challenges you as to why you should sit in these meetings, tell them;

• Having a better understanding of where in the sales funnel the team is having the most resistance enables you to better support them through assets, cuddle club, lead generation, etc

• Listening in to the details of what prospects are saying (both positive feedback and their objections) allows you to tailor any persona-driven work, or create new assets/training to assist with these conversations

• Overall, getting more detail impacts everything from top of funnel (TOFU) lead generation activities like what ads you’re running and where, to bottom of funnel (BOFU) activities such as final incentives to get a sale over the line

What to do in a pipeline meeting

Your first few sessions, you should just listen and absorb. Every pipeline meeting will be run differently, so you need to get a feel for it. 

The meeting could look like “tell me how much you’re going to close this month” or it could look like a really constructive workshop with action points at the end. 

Once you’ve got a feel for them, you can start identifying obstacles the sales team is facing that the marketing team could potentially alleviate or solve completely. You’ll find these obstacles by asking a lot of questions (but always remember you’re a guest and you’re not running the meeting!)

Your questions should aim to dig past the surface complaint/symptom and get to the cause of the problem. For example, let’s say the salesperson is getting ghosted by a lot of promising prospects where talks up until this point were going well. Rather than saying “people just aren’t answering the phone”, ask if these leads have something in common; are they all coming from the same ad set? The same channel? Were they part of a cohort of leads that came in at the same time? You can then go back to whatever it is they have in common and either diagnose the problem, or write a note not to consider that experiment or ad or channel an immediate success.  

Here’s a short list of great questions to ask in a general context:

1. Where in the funnel are you facing the most objections?

2. Is this where you usually face objections, or is this unusual/specific to this client/period of time?

3. What have they told you they’re going to think about more? Do you feel like you’ve given them sufficient information or do you wish you had something more to pick the conversation back up?

4. What topic(s) do you find you get the most questions about?

5. How’s the quality/volume of leads at the moment? (can also be specific as to what qualifiers you use for MQLs e.g. job title or company industry)

6. Is your hunch something you’ve confirmed with the prospect or it’s assumed? Have you tried confirming it? 

Post meeting action points

From here, I’ve always found a follow up email/Slack/Teams message to go down well, as long as you reference their feedback. E.g. “I remember you said the prospect was interested in ABC, we have a blog on that topic that could be a good excuse to contact them again <link here>”. Sales people don’t memorise company blogs, so often it might be the first time they’ve heard of it (or maybe they knew about it but forgot). 

You can also offer to update an older blog, or even edit it to be specifically geared towards the prospect (e.g. changing the images in the blog to show their industry or persona, adding call out quotes that will really speak to that specific customer, etc.)

Aside from blogs, you can also remind them of videos, press, brochures, white papers, any sort of collateral that already exists. You should avoid jumping to offering to make something from scratch for them, custom content isn’t a scalable strategy and isn’t sustainable on your workload either. 

Only make something new when you can see a clear gap in your assets that will come in handy for a significant amount of time or customers. 

As you attend pipeline meetings, always check in with yourself and ask what questions you could be asking but just haven’t thought of yet. The questions should be specific to your overall objectives and also to how you define things like a marketing qualified or sales qualified lead (MQL/SQL). 

You might even find that you get more out of the sales run meetings than you do out of the marketing run ones, and you can reduce the frequency of the marketing lead ones. 

Just remember: Let the pipeline meeting manager run the meeting! Ask questions but don’t take over the meeting.