Hiring a salesperson did not fix your pipeline because a hire cannot fill a pipe that is dry, referral-only, or stuck in your head. Predictable Profits fixes the order: build demand first, which we call Setup, then the close you already win, then the hire. Start with what to do when revenue is unpredictable, then create demand without referrals and leave founder-led sales without losing close rates.
What we learned running our own pipeline
You hired a salesperson who never closed like you do. You still open the pipeline on Monday and can’t say where the next three clients are coming from. Your best deals still close because you’re in the room, and referrals are still the engine.
A new hire can’t change that, because the hire was brought in to close deals nobody was creating.
Our own pipeline taught me this. We ran research-study outbound campaigns and invited the people we wanted as clients to an interview about their expertise and the problems they face. On those campaigns, we averaged 1-4 calls a day.
176 qualified sales calls came from our research interviews. That is why I start with demand.
Why a good salesperson won’t prospect for you
A-players want to close. A strong salesperson wants to work deals, and creating those deals from nothing is a different job. Prospecting is the part they put off.
So when you drop a good hire into a dry pipe, they either leave or spend their days prospecting badly. You hired a closer and handed them a shovel.
Maybe your Monday pipeline check shows the same stalled deals from three weeks ago. If so, your hire is doing what any closer does when nothing new comes in. They polish the deals already on the board.
Your buyer stopped walking a straight line
Buyers are researchers now. They spend a long time researching before they talk to anyone.
For about a hundred years, the sales funnel assumed a straight line from awareness to purchase. The idea goes back to the late 1800s, when ad men taught attention, interest, desire and action. The funnel picture came in 1924, in William W. Townsend’s book Bond Salesmanship. Marketing filled the top, and sales caught whatever fell out the bottom.
Forrester found that the average B2B buying decision took 27 interactions in 2021, up from 17 in 2019. Buyers gather more information than they used to, and they move through it in whatever order suits them.
I think AI assistants now build the short list before a human ever talks to you. A buyer asks an assistant who can solve their problem, and the assistant answers from what it can find published about the companies that do. If your company doesn’t show up there, you’re off the list, and your salesperson never hears about the deal.
Why Setup comes before the hire
Setup, Sales, Scale is the framework I built for this. Setup asks whether you build demand on purpose, so the right buyers find you. Sales asks whether those buyers convert without you carrying every deal. Scale asks whether you can grow through your team, processes and data.
A founder who owns a branding agency told me how his sales calls used to go. He used to get on the phone with prospects and go back and forth with them. Deals took multiple calls with decision makers, and his sales cycles lasted forever. Now his Setup is so strong that the prospects he gets on the phone with have already decided they want to do business with him. They only need to ask a few clarifying questions before moving forward.
Good Setup means a prospect arrives ready, so the call is about qualifying them, not convincing them. When the pipe is dry, the gap is in Setup. A salesperson works in Sales and can’t fix Setup from that seat.
Here is one client’s result, in her case study’s words. Debra Boggs, CEO of D&S Executive Career Management, is a Predictable Profits client. As told in her case study: “In the past year alone, the company has captured more than 600 new leads.”
The salesperson you hired was set up for the old straight line. As buyers do more of their own research, I see marketing and sales coming together into one business development department. That team gets you into the research and turns the right conversations into clients.
What a predictable pipeline looks like
To me, a predictable, scalable pipeline means booked appointments every day. We run multiple opportunities to fill the sales pipeline within The Conversion Pathway of the Predictable Profits Growth Roadmap. A market research campaign is one of them. The others are Triple Win JV Partnerships, Signature Workshop, 2-Call Sales System, and LinkedIn Sell by Chat.
The target I recommend for your pipeline is at least 2-3 appointments a day.
Pick the people you want as clients. Invite them to an interview about their expertise and their problems. You are asking to learn, so the invitation lands differently than a pitch would. Some of those interviews become qualified sales calls when the fit is there.
An intern or offshore help can run the campaign. So can AI team members, with a human owner.
My son Branson is a college sophomore. A few days after launching one of our research campaigns, he set 3 appointments in one day. His first message asked founders if they’d be interviewed for a research report. Nobody got pitched.
Your closer’s hours go to the calls the campaign produces.
Keep the booking and the closing with different people. When one person tries to do both, the booking stops the moment the closing gets busy, and you’re back to a lumpy month.
What to check this week
- Can you name where your next three deals are coming from, by source, without guessing?
- Do you own at least one demand source that does not depend on referrals?
- Is your close written down well enough that someone else could run it?
- Did you step out of the deals after the hire, or are you still on every call that counts?
- Is someone other than the closer booking conversations every day?
If the answer to the first two is no, start there.
When the hire was the problem
Sometimes the person is the wrong fit for your buyer or your market. That happens, and Setup does not explain every miss.
Our way has a cost too. Fixing Setup first is slower than replacing a rep. Our approach also asks you to stay involved while the close is pulled out of your head and written down. A founder who hired someone to get out of the deals doesn’t want to hear that.
I’d still spend that time before I’d risk a second failed hire.
What not to do next
Don’t fire and rehire as your first move. If the pipe is dry, the next person walks into the same conditions, and you lose another quarter finding that out.
Don’t buy a lead-gen vendor to fill the calendar either. A calendar full of calls that go nowhere feels like progress on Monday and looks like wasted closer time by Friday.
Start with the demand floor your hire was supposed to stand on. If you want a second set of eyes on where your pipeline breaks, book a Business Growth Stack Session. In 60 minutes, senior coach Joe Beecroft maps your pipeline on your real numbers and shows you what to fix first. No fee.
FAQ
Why didn’t hiring a salesperson fix my pipeline?
A salesperson is hired to close, and your pipe needed demand first. A strong closer dropped into a dry pipe tends to leave or spend the day prospecting. Fix Setup before you judge the hire.
What should I fix first if I already hired and the pipe is still lumpy?
Fix Setup first. Put an owned demand source in place, such as a research interview campaign run by someone other than your closer, so conversations get booked every day.
When does a sales hire start to work?
When there is demand to work. Once conversations are booked daily and your close is written down so someone else can run it, a good closer has what they need.
Related: Setup, Sales, Scale
- Setup: What to do when revenue is unpredictable
- Setup: Create demand without referrals
- Setup: Build predictable revenue without relying on referrals
- Sales: Get out of founder-led sales without losing your close rate
- Sales: Move from founder-led sales to a sales team
- Sales: Hiring a sales manager
- Scale: Stop being the bottleneck in your business
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