Driving Outbound Success: Pipe Gen Tuesdays
Driving Outbound Success: Pipe Gen Tuesdays
6Sense's Rallying Program to Make Outbound More Effective and Get More Revenue
A few weeks back at the Pavillion CMO conference in New York, I heard Latane Conant, Chief Revenue Officer, formerly Chief Marketing Officer of 6Sense, present on their “Pipe Gen Tuesdays” program. Prospecting is HARD. It’s full of dial tones, unanswered emails, and rejections. I know it viscerally since I was a young sales rep once. But raw and repeated effort often converts to a real pipeline - and sometimes even more valuable pipeline, as outbound lets you target your ideal customers versus relying on random inbound. In high-functioning sales organizations, both the Sales Development Reps and the Account Executives are outbound prospecting. Even warm leads take prospecting effort as sales reps attempt to reach more contacts at the account to drive better close rates or reach the right revenue approver. But it’s hard to get everyone to do it. Why?
“How can we make this more fun,” is a life mantra of Latane’s that I deeply admire and that she invokes regularly. To make prospecting easier and more fun, she and her team put together a program called “Pipe Gen Tuesdays,” where the whole company actively participates in pipe gen creation. The marketing team tees up programs, content, and plays ahead of each Tuesday to give the reps strategy, training, and materials. The sales team also picks and develops a new play each week. Executives, marketing, analytics, the whole company actively outbound to drive pipe generation. The full company effort creates an energy, focus, and comraderie that has helped them achieve higher win rates for outbound than inboud - an amazing feat.
While the main action happens on Tuesdays, making it happen and continuing to drive pipeline is really an all-week effort. “‘Pipe Gen All Week’ just isn’t as catchy as PG Tuesdays,” I heard Latane say.
Here’s a sneak peek at their weekly support schedule in the sales org:
How they do it
6Sense has a pretty rigorous focus on making Pipe Gen Tuesdays successful:
Prime the Pump: They provide emails, templates, scripts, trainings, calls to action across emails, Slacks, and meetings to get everyone ready to know how to outbound effectively that week and to whom. They prep everyone across the company with details of how to use their own 6Senses intent signals, account knowledge and data insights to craft better, more effective outreach.
High Energy: They have fun aspects peppered throughout from funny hats on prep calls to energetic, funny celebrations across channels. The focus of so many people creates the energy. It’s a real PROGRAM, not just a thing you have to do regularly.
Company-Wide: We’ve already covered this, but their wide participation and focus across the company means you can’t hide, escape from it, or try to do something else that day.
Accountability: They have guidelines for activities, engagement, and outcomes where they set goals and check in regularly. They ran an experiment to see if carrot (SPIFF/incentives) or stick (meeting with your manager and VP for underperforming) worked better… And stick won. The threat of an accountability meeting on why you missed and what you need to do better resulted in 55% more opportunities the first week and 74% more opportunities the second week:
Follow Along
One of the PG Tuesday efforts of Latane herself appears to be a mini-podcast called Pipe Gen Tuesdays, where she and their head of Sales Mac Conn break down some of their plays and approaches. It’s got some nice bit-size suggestions.
As a young sales rep I cold-called prospects and as a young public relations manager I cold-called editors; I viscerally know how gut-wrenching outbound can be - the energy you need to build up, the discipline you need to keep going. It’s so easy to distract yourself with something easier (and less impactful). I love this program because the sense of focus, preparation, and camaraderie that 6Sense has built helps everyone overcome one of the hardest but most important aspects of corporate success. Without finding leads, you don’t find revenue.
*I am not receiving compensation of any kind for this post. Many of my advisory clients are customers of 6Sense, so I follow them closely. I participate in some of their online and in-person community events.
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Current and past clients include Miro, 1Password, Bill.com, Sprout Social, Active Campaign, Weights & Biases, Chronosphere, Appfire, Matillion, Tackle.io and others. She helps operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.