Pipeline generation days can be excellent team building opportunities for sales teams. It can leave a gap in the presales calendar though, or force the team to work on a task they don't have much training on. How should presales team members help on these days ?
At first thought, presales don't do much with pipeline generation. The main purpose of presales is to help convert pipeline to business, so why get involved at all?
In fact presales teams get their own customer/prospect contacts, and can get a lot out of doing some proactive work at building up business with this technical audience. I'd call this the technical pipeline generation.
Actions that could be useful on these days:
- Make a newsletter to send out to the technical pipeline audience - recent product launches, announcements, features, demos or videos that this audience should relate to
- Check back with participants on POVs or Trials - are they getting what they want out of those activities
- Create thought leadership pieces from recent customer discussions to help the sales team with content.
- Go through some objection handling work to help the sales team have better conversations.
One other option of course - why not take a set of the contacts for the calling day, sort the list and look for more technical titles on the list, and have a go at talking with these people. It might seem hard at first and a low hit rate initially (compared with well qualified sales calls anyway) but as an occasional exercise this could help develop strong skills in the team, and generate some additional pipeline to follow up on.
Does your team get involved in call-out days? Tell me how it works for you!