Healthy sales pipeline is the pulse of your business—there is no business without it. Driving revenue growth is critical for any business looking to stick around, scale, and succeed.

Your sales funnel is used to measure how you stack up in the market and against your competition—it's what makes your business attractive to potential investors, top talent, and even customers.

Repetitive success helps a company establish itself as a reputable brand. Where does that begin? It all starts with a strong pipeline generation strategy—here’s how you can build one that drives consistent growth and sets your business apart.

The importance of pipeline generation

A strong pipeline and sales funnel keep your sales reps busy, opportunities flowing, and revenue on track.

The Harvard Business Review cites that companies with a formal pipeline management process see a 28% increase in revenue growth. It's certainly clear why: without enough pipeline, it's all too easy to miss your numbers and fall short of business forecasts. This kind of shortfall can lead to cascading challenges, such as budget cuts, reduced investor confidence, and even threats to long-term viability (big yikes). 

How do you ensure the well never dries up? Plain and simple: You need a steady flow of qualified leads to keep your sales funnel growing and reach your sales goals. There are two main ways to generate leads: inbound and outbound sales efforts. In this post, we’ll explain how these work and share how to optimize their ROI to help you reach your targets.

Inbound vs outbound pipeline generation

Pipeline generation has two arms: inbound and outbound. Each has a unique role in a sales strategy and how we connect with prospects.

Inbound pipeline generation

Inbound pipeline generation focuses on attracting potential customers who are actively seeking information, solutions, or products similar to yours. These leads—referred to as "warm leads"—have already shown awareness and interest in your brand. 

They are more likely to be a good fit for your sales strategy.  Your website is king, especially for inbound. Your inbound pipeline starts with attracting visitors to your landing page, blog posts, or other hubs. At this stage, your goal is to connect with prospects by:

• Securing 24/7 website coverage: Ensure no leads are left waiting, and capture leads around the clock. The best way to do this is to lean on technology by using an AI SDR. Never heard of it? Check out Piper. 

• Providing quick and accurate response times: Everyone wants their questions answered quickly and correctly. AI SDRs (like Piper the AI ADR) sit on your website, for example, and remove the barrier of having a conversation to generate leads more quickly.

• Ensuring clear CTAs (Calls to Action): Encourage visitors to move to the next step in the sales funnel.

• Optimizing your website for SEO: Make sure your website ranks well in search engines so potential customers can find you.

• Creating valuable content: Make blogs, white papers, and eBooks that connect with your audience and establish your company as an industry leader.

• Using lead magnets: Offer valuable resources (like guides or checklists) in exchange for contact information to convert website visitors into leads.

• Increasing paid media spend: Drive targeted leads into your funnel through paid advertising on Google, LinkedIn, and other channels.

Making sure your brand is easy to engage with empowers prospects to raise their hand.  Driving inbound leads means consistently putting your brand front and center and providing support quickly. This experience makes ICP prospects more enthusiastic about engaging with your brand.

Website visitors into leads

Once visitors engage with your site—such as downloading a case study, participating in a web chat, or signing up for a webinar—they may become leads.

Qualifying those leads is crucial here. A lead might share their contact details, but not every lead is ready to buy. Marketing and sales teams work together to filter for those who show readiness to buy.

Key tactics include leveraging customer data to segment leads and scoring leads based on their actions, such as repeated website visits or engagement with specific content on your site.

MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)

A lead transitions to an MQL when they demonstrate engagement, which suggests they're a good fit for your business. Each business defines this for itself, but this could look like:

• Reading multiple blog posts on solving a pain point you address

• Clicking on an email campaign or attending a webinar

At this point, marketing teams nurture the relationship further. Handoffs to sales should only occur for high-quality leads to ensure sales and marketing teams are operating in sync.

MQLs to opportunities

When MQLs show higher intent—such as asking questions via live chat, booking a conversation, demo, or requesting pricing—they become sales opportunities. Your inbound SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) are tapped in at this stage.

SDRs are critical in furthering relationships, addressing objections, and qualifying prospects as decision-makers with purchasing power. Tactics to move leads forward include:

• Timely, accurate, and hyper-personalized follow-ups that genuinely hit the mark—because, let’s face it, people prefer doing business with those they trust and enjoy

• Sharing a targeted case study or success story that's relevant to their pains or interests

• Focusing on leads who have shown prior interest as opposed to those who have not

Now, let's look at inbound’s fraternal twin: outbound pipeline generation.

Outbound pipeline generation

Unlike inbound pipeline generation, outbound pipeline generation takes a proactive approach to finding and converting leads. Outbound tactics are effective for B2B companies aiming to engage high-value accounts.

Outbound pipeline generation involves BDRs (Business Development Representatives) reaching out to targeted accounts that may have never heard of your business or may not have necessarily indicated strong buying intent (yet).

Typically, outbound BDRs initiate these conversations with prospects to create brand awareness and foster relationships with potential decision-makers so that their business stays at the top of their minds when the time comes to shop around.

Here’s a closer look at each stage of the outbound motion.

Identifying account strategy

The outbound journey starts with identifying and engaging the right accounts, and success hinges on precision, personalization, and attention to detail. Clearly defined Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs) and pain points tailored to each persona are essential to ensuring your BDRs focus their efforts where they matter most.

These are built out using company firmographics, buyer behavior, market fit, industries, job titles, and more. This type of customer mapping ensures your outreach perfectly aligns with your ideal customers—those who will gain the greatest value and achieve the most success with your product.

So once we know who the outbound BDRs are targeting, how do they capture leads?

Getting responses

Once accounts are identified, a BDRs next focus is to capture interest. Outbound BDRs face a unique challenge compared to their inbound SDR counterparts. While inbound SDRs work with warm leads already showing interest, outbound BDRs must play the long game.

To succeed, outbound BDRs must ensure their touchpoints cut through the noise. Prospects are constantly bombarded with outbound calls and emails that are often ignored. Every individual’s workday—and the challenges they face—varies, which means their pain points are uniquely personal. The outbound BDR’s role is to craft messages that amplify the most compelling value-add of your product for each prospect.

Outbound outreach should be hyper-personalized and compelling at this stage, designed to connect with prospects and initiate meaningful conversations. It’s all about taking control and going after the customers they have identified as a great fit.

We have probably all gotten that random phone call (or ten) that starts with, "Hey Joe, I'm Chad. I saw your profile on LinkedIn and wanted to reach out. Did I catch you at a bad time?"

Cold calls like these are just one of many outbound pipeline generation methods outbound BDRs use to generate awareness and start these conversations. 

To stand out at this early stage of the sales cycle, outbound BDRs do best when they also:

• Improve targeting and outreach: Data enrichment tools allow BDRs to research accounts and prospects to identify the highest-potential accounts. Paired with outreach tools that automate email sends and phone dialing, these tools keep outreach personalized and efficient.

• Increase outreach volumes: Making more calls, sending more emails, and using LinkedIn to engage prospects makes the outreach harder to avoid or ignore.

• Use multi-channel outreach: Engaging prospects across different channels—email, phone, LinkedIn, direct mail—improves response rates and establishes the rep as persistent and intentional.

• Effective messaging and objection handling: Crafting engaging pitches and practicing objection handling keeps your prospects engaged and captures trust that the BDR is a reliable messenger.

• Incorporating Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and events: Focusing on high-value accounts and combining this with event-based engagement, such as webinars, conferences, or networking events, to build relationships establishes your brand as a trusted partner.

These outbound BDR tactics help sustain brand awareness, keep your business in mind, and motivate action by reaching the right person at the right time with captivating solutions. What happens when an inbound or outbound rep gets a meeting on the books?

Opportunities to qualified pipeline

Securing a meeting signals a shift from interest to intent to buy. In this stage, reps establish rapport and loop in an AE if needed. This is the time to demonstrate expertise and decipher whether the prospect is a good fit. 

Lead qualification uncovers if an account aligns with your sales strategy and has genuine potential to convert into a buyer.

At this stage, businesses typically use a vetting system like or similar to BANT to assess whether an account is ready to enter a sales cycle:

• Budget: Has the lead indicated that they either already have a similar software at a comparable cost or have the budget to buy?

• Authority: Have all decision makers with buying authority within the account been identified and brought into the conversation?

• Need: Is there a defined use case, urgent need, or critical driver that creates a compelling reason for the prospect to buy?

• Timeline: Is the prospect looking to buy within the appropriate timeframe defined by your business, or are they just casually scoping what's out there?

After a successful meeting or discovery call where a lead has checked off the BANT boxes or similar criteria, they move further down the sales funnel. This is a lead-to-opportunity conversion, otherwise known as a sales-qualified lead.

At this point, an account executive takes over communication from the inbound or outbound rep, where the potential to close business becomes real.

Sales reps and other internal parties continue to work the deal and collaborate on a path to purchase for the prospect. They keep momentum strong in the sales cycle until they finally cross the finish line to transition the prospect into a customer.

Closed-won business

The final stage converts an opportunity into a paying customer (cha-ching, you did it!). Here, the new customer should receive a seamless onboarding experience and quickly begin to see the ROI from your solution.

As is apparent, considerable time and people power go into making a deal happen both on inbound and outbound teams. The best way to increase the velocity of your deals is to streamline and automate wherever possible. 

Modernizing inbound and outbound

You need to balance pipeline generation with conversion optimization to hit your sales goals. Generating more leads at the top of the funnel is great, but you also need to ensure that those leads move through the funnel efficiently and have a positive experience along the way. 

Leaning on technology whenever possible is the easiest and most cost-effective way to improve your inbound and outbound motions. A modern approach to tackling the workload is simple: delegate the work to AI. For inbound motions, AI SDRs like Qualified's Piper are easily able to:

• Qualify leads effectively: AI SDRs are trained on clear qualification criteria and ensure leads meet those standards before passing them on (and continue nurturing them if they do not).

• Leverage social proof: They also use customer testimonials and case studies to build trust and increase acceptance rates.

• Perfect objection handling: Training AI SDRs how to quickly and effectively handle objections takes a fraction of the time that it takes a human rep, making prospects more likely to agree to a meeting.

• Personalize follow-ups: AI SDRs automate bespoke personalized follow-ups and engage leads based on their specific needs, interests, and behaviors.

AI-powered technology like Qualified’s own copilot also supports outbound BDRs by:

• Streamlining research: Qualified’s copilot provides instant insights on target accounts, including firmographics, key decision-makers, and recent activities, enabling BDRs to craft hyper-personalized outreach.

• Enhancing efficiency: By automating time-consuming tasks like lead enrichment, email drafting, and follow-ups, BDRs can focus on high-value interactions.

• Uncovering new opportunities: AI identifies hidden patterns and accounts that might otherwise go unnoticed, expanding the potential pipeline.

• Reducing response time: Suggest immediate replies to prospect inquiries, ensuring quick and effective communication that builds trust.

By integrating AI-driven solutions like Qualified's Copilot and/or Piper into your sales process, you’re not just keeping up with the competition—you’re setting a new standard. 

Future-proof your pipeline generation strategy

Let’s just admit it: marketing automation tools for email and lead scoring are great, but they still leave sales and marketing teams to do heavy lifting. 

AI SDRs and AI-powered copilots take on repetitive and time-consuming tasks so that humans can reallocate their time and efforts to the deals and engagements that drive the most revenue.

Upgrading your meeting tech stack makes transformative inbound and outbound strategies readily available and paves the way to untapped ROI and unparalleled growth opportunities.

For inbound and outbound teams alike, AI-powered copilots and SDRs empower your teams to work smarter, build stronger connections, and accelerate the path to revenue. 

The future of sales isn’t just about working harder—it’s about incorporating AI to achieve more with less.

Is your pipeline generation engine due for an upgrade? Get to know Piper the AI SDR here