Having numerous leads is good, right? Not necessarily. Having many unqualified leads can actually lead to your sales team feeling overwhelmed. What you want is a robust pipeline full of qualified leads who are likely to convert into paying customers.

Scaling the Pipeline Without Losing Proposal Quality

As business leaders, it may be tempting to ignore the problem and assume it’ll resolve itself as deals come in and new staff are hired. Unfortunately, geography and timing mean the right staff aren’t available when you need them. Unless you’re about to pitch on the biggest and most important contract in the next decade, there’s a lag of at least two years between deciding you need more skilled staff and having personnel at an appropriate level. For the vast majority of tenders, your reality is that a valued external partner, such as New Zealand tender writing services, will be your best resource.

The external partner advantage applies equally to companies who can justify and afford their own dedicated in-house bid team. While those teams should be resourced to handle the vast bulk of the company’s proposal work, they are not in-house writers for your lateral expansion plans. They’re not emergency overflow staff when a particularly juicy piece of work comes up that you can’t afford to miss. They are not going to be excited by the incremental improvement you need to make to this deadline proposal.

Companies who otherwise have strong internal bid capabilities are also real beneficiaries of external partners. These businesses are likely winning their share of work, while consistently losing contracts that they should have won. For them, the additional perspective, capacity, and access to new ideas can be game changing.

Reactive Growth is a Revenue Ceiling

If you think your main source of new business is previous customers recommending you to others, or people hearing about your work through the grapevine, that’s not a pipeline. It’s hoping for the phone to ring. Referrals are a wonderful thing, but they’re outside of your control and they’re prospective clients who are looking at your past performance, not your future potential.

Proactive prospecting means identifying sectors and actual clients who you would like to work with, who are likely to have a need at some stage, and who haven’t gone to the market with that need yet. For those of us who transact business in industrial, construction, infrastructure, or government-adjacent markets, we know that customers go to market on some regular cyclical basis. It’s not perfect but they often attempt to establish a cycle of every three years, every five years, and so on. Large organizations, by their nature, usually publish their intentions in advance of their fiscal year. They will continue to accept submissions for the entirety of their fiscal year but the idea is that they expect prospective suppliers to know when their window is and get their submission in before that window closes.

Pre-Bid Strategy is Where Real Pipeline Work Happens

The companies that secure most of the official agreements are not necessarily the best on paper. They are the ones who have already established a presence.

A pre-bid strategy implies creating ties before any type of commercial tender is launched. It requires attending and participating in industry events, becoming known by procurement contacts, co-creating and participating in conversations that influence how a client organization conceptualizes their needs. When the Request for Proposal (RFP) eventually arrives, a supplier who has already had several productive discussions with the buying team has a competitive edge that no other proposal can compete with.

This does not mean acting opportunistically. It means undertaking legitimate business development work in the early stages, so that when the tender process formally starts, you don’t have to start from scratch.

Build a Qualification Filter, Not a Conversion Funnel

Overloading a pipeline is one of the fastest ways to destroy it. You only have so many bids you can work on at once based on the level of effort and resourcing required to make them successful. Additionally, new opportunities come up all the time. If the fad is to chase opportunities without a conscious decision to stop working on low-value or unattainable ones, you will accomplish the same thing: chasing every shiny ball that comes your way only leads to burnout.

The best way to avoid an overburdened pipeline is simply not to let it happen. Qualify early, and qualify hard. Your organization should have published, measurable go/no-go criteria, and never take positive answers for granted. Requalify at the first real data point you get that wouldn’t have passed the initial qualification process.

Client Retention Belongs Inside Your Pipeline Strategy

Winning new contracts costs more than securing renewals. A solid pipeline should take this into account. In this regard, planning your pipeline strategy with retention in mind combines both efforts for optimal results.