When good salespeople lack pipeline, the cause is almost always structural. Closing and prospecting are different jobs, and most firms never build a function that owns the second one. The fix is a dedicated sales development team with its own targets, qualification standard and management.
Senior salespeople are paid to close and will always choose a live deal over a cold call. Asking them to self-generate is asking them to do the work they are least rewarded for. Meanwhile nobody has defined who the firm should be approaching, with what message, and what counts as a qualified conversation.
We build the function that owns opportunity creation: target account selection, messaging, outreach cadence, the qualification standard, the handover to sales, and the reporting that shows whether it is working. We recruit the team and manage it until it holds its number.
Natasha Coetzee has built this function from a standing start three times, including a team that created £2m of contract value in pipeline with tier one accounts from nothing.
The Commercial Diagnostic shows where opportunity is lost and what it would take to fix.
See the Commercial DiagnosticPartly. Account executives should work their own accounts and referrals. They should not be your only source of new opportunity, because prospecting will always lose to live deals when time is short.
It depends on deal size and sales capacity. A common starting point is one sales development representative to every two or three account executives, adjusted once real conversion data exists.
In the short term, often yes. Outsourced teams rarely learn your market deeply, and the knowledge leaves when the contract ends. An in-house function costs more to set up and compounds in value.
Thirty minutes, no slides. You describe the problem, we tell you whether it is one we fix. If it is not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.