Extra Extra is a newsletter about the tactics and mindsets that drive early startup sales. I’ve helped dozens of startups get results like a 50x in repeatable revenue and a 400% lift in sales calls per week.
The thing about your pipeline problems
Published 25 days ago • 4 min read
I spend a lot of time unpacking the mental barriers that keep founders from hitting their revenue goals.
Most sales blockers affect founders who struggle to sell. They might get nervous on sales calls, or are waiting for their product to be perfect. But I’ve noticed one obstacle that affects founders who are already selling hard.
These founders tell themselves:
"I just have a pipeline problem."
They attribute slow growth to tactical problems with their sales funnel:
"I just need more leads."
"All I need to do is book more calls."
"I just need to get better at closing."
“I just need to create more urgency."
If this sounds familiar, you might be viewing your sales challenges as a simple mechanical or tactical issue with your pipeline.
Now, I’m not saying it’s no big deal if you’re not booking calls. That’s important to rectify. But that’s rarely the real issue.
There’s usually a deeper issue that’s actually causing revenue stagnation: it’s that you’re selling as if you’re late-stage when you’re still early.
When you sell at a later stage – particularly after you’ve found product-market fit – you’re working with a proven sales playbook. You know which buyers have the problem you solve, what messaging resonates with them, and how they typically move through your sales process. Your playbook exists because you've validated it through repeated wins.
When you’re selling at this stage, you can pin revenue troubles on pipeline mechanics.
You can analyze each step of the playbook and how it’s performing. Maybe it’s a top-of-funnel issue and we need to flow more qualified buyers that fit our ICP into the pipeline. Maybe it’s a bottom-of-funnel problem, and your sales team needs training.
But when you're early stage, these aren't your circumstances.
You don’t know where the true demand for your solution is quite yet. You have a hypothesis, but it’s not proven.
You might understand the market, but you haven’t yet identified which pocket of the market has deep and repeatable demand for your product. If you did, you would be “post-playbook:” doing deals with the same buyer type with a high close rate.
So before you chalk up your sales challenges to just needing more leads or some other tactical issue, make sure you don’t have these two deeper issues first:
1. You might be selling to too many different buyers.
If you’re selling to multiple buyers, you may fill your pipeline, but you’ve created a slew of more dangerous problems instead:
You’ll be selling too many different stories, because every different buyer type has a different need that you must deeply understand and meet
You’ll struggle to sift through the conflicting feedback and insights
Your sales process will be inefficient as it tries to balance all these different buyer types
You’ll end up feeling scattered instead of focused
Ultimately, all of these challenges significantly delay your time to building out a reliable playbook. (More about selling to too many buyers here.)
2. You might have happy ears.
If deals are stalling after the first or second call and you’re struggling to move the deal forward, you don’t need to create more urgency. You need to hear the "no" they were trying to express.
If they weren’t that into your solution, they may still ask for a one-pager, a pricing sheet, a trial. They may offer compliments. But if they went dark afterward, they were just not that into your solution. They had something more important to focus on.
Call me Justin Long, 'cause that prospect is just not that into you.
Put that prospect on a nurture sequence and move forward assuming they won't buy.
No amount of urgency can manifest their interest.
It’s not possible to make someone want something if they don’t want it.
Our only option is to identify what kind of buyer regularly wants our solution (who has a self-driven, urgent need to solve this problem), and to sell in a focused way to that buyer type.
The more we do that, the more we can identify the unspoken nos, and the more time and energy we can focus on right-fit buyers. This is what builds out a repeatable sales playbook.
You may have issues with your pipeline, but booking more meetings or finding more leads isn’t the full answer. You need to:
Get lots of leads into your pipeline and book lots of meetings
Run a tight, exploratory, and curious sales process that tests a clear hypothesis with them about what you believe they have demand for
Invite prospects to tell you whether they do or do not want your solution, and why
Keep refining and testing your hypothesis until you start to hone in on a repeatable playbook
Don’t stick a bandaid on your pipeline if your sales strategy needs more holistic treatment. Make sure you’re selling in an early-stage fashion before you attribute issues solely to your pipeline.
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This is Extra Extra, a newsletter about the tactics and mindsets that drive early sales. I’m Caroline Fay, an exited social impact founder who’s spent my career launching and selling new products. I help non-traditional tech founders build sustainable, recurring revenue.
Written by Caroline Fay, exited tech founder and recovering sales hater.
Extra Extra is a newsletter about the tactics and mindsets that drive early startup sales. I’ve helped dozens of startups get results like a 50x in repeatable revenue and a 400% lift in sales calls per week.
