The New Playbook for Pipeline Generation is Emerging
The New Playbook for Pipeline Generation is Emerging
14 Predictions for 2024
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Today’s post is longer than usual.
Feel free to skim the sections that pique your curiosity.
Or, settle in and read the whole thing. For the full reading experience, listen to this Tycho album while using your imagination to read “from” this quiet, beachside cafe:
It’s been a busy time in tech lately!
Elon announced payments on X. Carta gets into drama sharing investor information internally to sales reps (then sells that business… basically, admitting guilt). BTC hit a 2-year all-time high off the news that a BTC spot ETF will pass soon (oh, and the SEC’s X account was hacked and “announced” the news), then eventually actually being approved. The price is back down, guess it was still a “sell the news” event… but I’m bullish long-term (NFA).
•••
My last post kicked off the year with a (predictably spicy) piece titled: The "Predictable Revenue" Playbook is Dead; RIP (2011-2023). Here’s the TLDR of that post -
What doesn’t work anymore:
- Hiring a big team of SDRs
- Buying a ton of tools, and
- Letting them “spray and pray” a bunch of cold outbound emails in hopes that the numbers pan out and they can book meetings for their counterparts (the AE Team).
So, in today’s post, I will try to outline what I think will be the new playbook — “Come with solutions, not problems,” as one of my managers used to tell me.
The old playbook is dead dying. And I want to figure out the next playbook that will emerge and replace it over time.
This new playbook is emerging in front of our eyes, in real-time. Much of it has yet to be created or discovered. So I am heading West to discover this new world. Join me.
The New Playbook for Pipeline Generation is Emerging
My personal career goal for 2024 is to find the best ways to scale GTM—specifically, Pipeline Generation—with technology, instead of just “more bodies.”
I want to find the infrastructure (technologies) that will be the rails that the new Pipeline Generation playbook runs on.
The B2B SaaS industry is at an inflection point right now. Most GTM Leaders and founders realize the old GTM playbook doesn’t work anymore. But we don’t yet know what will replace it.
There are 14 areas that I’m following closely, that I think will play a big(ger) role in the new pipe gen playbook.
But, I also think a lot of the playbook is yet to be discovered, or created. I hope to figure it out alongside the smartest GTM Operators I know.
Alright, let’s get into these 14 areas I’m keeping tabs on.
1. Personalization at scale
I told my wife I was writing this and she said “What’s GTM again?”
Then I asked, “How do you think sales and marketing will improve this year?”
She gave two phenomenal answers tbh. First, without hesitation, she said: “Cold email isn’t going to work” (no joke). And then she said: “Ads need to get better.”
I’ll talk about cold email in number two, below.
Here’s what she meant about the ads - basically, personalization at scale, across all channels (looking at you ABM fam).
We recently bought a new record player. And my wife set it up (praise be). She’s been getting ads for record players because she searched on Google/YouTube for tutorials to set it up. Pretty annoying that we still get ads post-purchase. Instead, these companies should know this and send ads to try and upsell speakers!
In 2024, Gen AI will finally unlock true “personalization at scale” in a way that we’ve talked about, and imagined, for a decade plus now.
I sure hope so, as a consumer. And so does my wife. This goes for B2C and B2B.
2. Cold email dies (again)
“I’ve been right about predicting the death of cold email 10 of the last 2 times.”
-A LinkedInfluencer
But for real. Cold email is dying. We all know it. Even my wife knows it, and she doesn’t even know what GTM means.
I wrote about it ad nauseam in my last post (see here: The "Predictable Revenue" Playbook is Dead; RIP (2011-2023)). So I won’t go into more detail here. I’ll just say these two things:
Cold email fundamentals will remain in place, and anything that comes next will be built only on the back of those fundamentals (such as ICP, Key Buyer Personas, Messaging, Overcoming Objections, etc.). So if you’re someone who knows their way around outbound, that’s going to help you a lot in the future.
Signal-based selling will replace “cold” email with “warm” outbound. I wrote more about that here: "Signal-based prospecting" is the future.
3. PLG / Product-led sales makes a comeback
PLG is out of vogue today, compared to 2021.
As a founder who has been building in the space for the last two years, I think it’s a really tough category to build a software company. But, as a GTM motion - it’s underrated right now.
My bet: companies leaning into PLG (and dialing in a product-led sales motion) will be rewarded handsomely in 2025 and will sew the (PLG) seeds they planted in 2024.
It’s very simple. “Try before you buy” is here to stay.
Buyers are used to this now.
On the consumer side, it’s never been easier to return something on Amazon, or even a mattress (!) if you don’t like it. Software is no different. People want to try something and make sure it’s helpful to their daily workflow before pulling out their credit card.
PLG ≠ no salespeople. In fact, the best PLG companies still use sales to assist in the buying process. And this motion is magic when operationalized and enabled correctly.
If there is one piece of content you consume on this topic, it should be Elena Verna’s interview with Lenny: Why product-led growth is the future | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Surveymonkey). (They also did a part two several months later: The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna).
4. Automation
It’s right happening in front of our eyes.
A new role will emerge that is some combination of SDR Outbound Ops, Growth and SDR rep, that will produce the pipeline that an SDR Team previously was doing.
Below is an excerpt from Jacob Tuwiner’s recent piece: Outbound Sales Automation is the Future: How to 10x Your Pipeline with AI.
Today, you should be able to scale your best sales rep’s playbook to generate your full pipeline—with just one person and minimal tech budget.
How? Outbound sales automation. The rise of democratized data, web scraping, low code, and AI has unlocked a new era for sales.
Savvy companies are already generating more pipeline than you—powered by just one skilled outbound sales automation wizard.
My bet here is simple: the future unicorns and decacorns won’t scale by hiring hundreds of SDRs to generate pipeline for the AE Team.
Instead, they’ll hire 1-2 technical (ops-savvy) former operators, who can combine strategy and execution to operationalize experimentation.
In other words, one person doing "outbound ops" will replace entire SDR teams this year.
This new motion frees up reps’ time to do the things that automation (bots) cannot do. Things like multi-threading, doing deeper discovery, taking calls, meeting IRL, building internal case studies to equip buyers to sell internally, etc. If you like those types of things, get good at them. Bots aren’t coming for your job, don’t worry.
And if you like tech and automation, now is a great time to lean in there and learn these new skills. That’s what I’m doing. :)
5. The rise of the 10x rep
I don’t mean this as hyperbole.
This is not for every company. Again, this is not for every segment (eg: doesn’t work for high-end Enterprise markets where relationship-selling to Executives is critical).
Apollo.io is doing this internally (one person is booking over 1,000 meetings a quarter).
Tomasz Tonguz, the legendary investor and thinker/writer, just published a post on this topic: The 10x Salesperson.
With AI, we will start to see sales outliers who meaningfully outperform & break quota expectations.
There’s a nonlinear productivity gain … AI enables salespeople to parallelize their work : software can research 10 different prospects simultaneously, rather than just 1 for a human.Salespeople who leverage that parallelization will book 10x more. They will break quota plans as outliers, drive meaningful change within their organizations, & improve the overall efficiency of their business.
6. Warm intros through your network(s)
“Your network is your net worth.”
Why go into a prospective company cold, if you have a warm path in, instead?
Tools like Cabal, The Swarm, Connect the Dots and others are leading the charge here. They’re basically like LinkedIn Team Link, but on steroids.
To have the greatest surface area (people in your network) who are willing to make introductions for you, see #7 and 8, below…
7. Community flywheel
Micro-communities for very specific niches will become super important in the future. This includes Media entities (eg: Outreach buying SalesHacker, HubSpot buying The Hustle, Stripe buying IndieHackers, etc.). But will span far beyond just brands.
Individuals like Dave Gerhardt are showing that you don’t have to be a company to drive value around a community. Lenny with his Slack community. Wes Bush with ProductLed. Etc.
And a quick reminder, a community is very different than an audience. Here’s the best distinction I’ve seen:
8. Influencers in B2B
B2B follows B2C by about ten years.
We’ve seen the rise of B2C influencers. Every niche has someone on Instagram, YouTube, etc who is “influencing” our purchasing decisions. Next, it’s going to happen in B2B.
Kieran (CMO of Zapier) talked about this in his post “B2B is going to have its creator moment.”
Here’s a recent example with Alex Lieberman and HubSpot:
And don’t overlook using niche influencers, who are Super Connectors, to get Warm Intros into your target accounts (see #6, above).
You see other companies like Apollo.io, Aligned, and others running this playbook.
Here’s the best summary of it for early-stage founders considering deploying this playbook: How to set up a modern advisory program. TLDR:
9. Founder brand
I call this “building trust at scale.”
LinkedIn will continue to be the leading platform here. It still has a lot of room to run.
Follow Adam Robinson to see this playbook being executed, perfectly.
Substack and blogs will continue to proliferate. And, I’ll take the contrarian side here, but I think we see X have a massive breakout year in 2024. Elon has hinted at creating a YouTube killer. Having shows like Tucker and All-In display what is possible on the platform. Mr. Beast published a video onto X for the first time last week. Paying creators will inevitably drive more creators to choose X as a place to publish their thoughts.
It’s all about going direct to your audience.
As a founder, I’ve felt this first-hand, just by posting what I’m learning on LinkedIn (and curating information that I’m finding helpful). I can’t count the number of times someone joined a first call with me and started with “I’ve been following you for a long time on LinkedIn.” It’s an incredibly powerful way to start a sales call. Pre-built trust. It feels like a cheat code or a shortcut. And I’m all for shortcuts. :)
Another benefit is that by building a brand publicly, you attract like-minded people, and people who share interesting information/content with you. It’s like a “personal inbound machine” of opportunities.
10. Partner selling aka “nearbound”
There will be a lot more noise in the market in the coming years, due to the amount of voices, data, more platforms, ai-generated content, etc. A great strategy to break through this noise is to align yourself with a partner — another software or service that your prospect is already using, trusts, and loves. This makes the buying, implementation and adoption process much easier for all parties involved.
I think we’ll even see “bundled” solutions in the future, pre-packaged and pre-negotiated, sold together.
Crossbeam is a platform that is leading the charge around partner selling.
11. Signal-based prospecting
This is probably my biggest bet, personally.
I wrote about this topic recently, in this post: “Signal-based prospecting" is the future.
Here are some examples of signals (based on this LI post):
product usage
job change data
old deal that should be resurrected
new/relevant technologies detected
website visitor who didn't fill out a form
engaged with thought leadership on social media
previous customer/champion just joined a target account
a new path in, detected for a warm intro
co-selling opportunity with a partner
engaged with marketing material
here are ~200 other signals from Becc Holland
Here’s another way to think about signal-base prospecting:
At any given time, only about 5% of your ICP is in the market for your software.
Your goal is to figure out how to get 100% of that 5%, at any given point in time.
This is not an exercise that should be done once a year, like an annual ICP exercise. Instead, this is an ongoing process. It’s never-ending. Ever-evolving. And always running.
Signal-based selling is the process of:
Identifying what “signals” matter to indicate who is in the market for your product
Setting up systems to scan for these signals, at scale (eg: automation / autonomous agents), across your entire ICP
Plays to automatically reach out to this list of leads, or to pass them to your sales team
12. Growth teams doing outbound at scale
Ramp, Rippling, and a few others are already doing this.
It’s not for everyone. You need a reeeeally big TAM. These companies basically have an infinite TAM.
I think about this motion as something more effective than a classic marketing email campaign sent via Marketo, but less effective than a highly trained SDR doing manual outreach. It’s much cheaper than an SDR Team (reps, tools, managers, attrition, etc.). And it’s not even either/or. This motion can, and should, run alongside a traditional SDR Team.
Growth teams doing outbound helps nurture companies who may not be in the market, yet. It is a playground for experimentation. And it can augment efforts in markets where it doesn’t make sense to have a highly-trained SDR Team (eg: SMB).
This motion blurs with the “outbound ops” role I talk about, above. New tools will pop up and become *the* tool for this new role to use.
13. Consolidation szn continues through all of 2024
Teams who simplify their GTM stack will win.
GTM technologies that expand their offering will win.
I think the future is one where most of the value accrues to a few large players, and then there is a long tail of companies that are point-solutions that never break $25mm in revenue (and that’s okay! …assuming they didn’t raise VC).
You can get pretty damn far with HubSpot + Apollo + LinkedIn Sales Nav. That’s where I’d start if I were setting up a GTM team with less than 5 sales reps, or founder-selling.
Let’s see who of the “Big 6” expands out the fastest while keeping quality high (and a dash of innovation, hopefully); see: Consolidation szn (The race is on...) | 6 sales tech unicorns chasing after the elusive "one-stop-shop".
14. 80% of AI use cases are yet to be created or discovered
This is why I started The Signal.
“Call summaries” are not the killer use case for Gen AI. The obvious use cases already exist: email recaps, 10K summaries, writing copilots, etc.
However, I believe that the vast majority of Gen AI use cases are yet to be created or discovered. I think in 2026, we’ll look back and laugh at how simplistically we viewed Gen Ai.
My goal is to help find, curate, test, create, and discover the best ways to use Gen AI within the prospecting playbook.
Eric Nowoslawski and Florin Tatulea are two people who are sharing tactical AI use cases (legit tactical, not “influencer” nonsense trying to drive webinar signups). Go scroll through their latest feeds and you’ll see what I mean. I’m following them closely, to stay on the bleeding edge this year.
→ Here are some other people to follow on LinkedIn.
If you are using Gen Ai today in pipeline generation, or see a post on social using it uniquely, please tag me or send it my way.
Other links worth exploring
20VC with Harry and Jason Lemkin (“What happens to early-stage venture markets?” was my favorite section)
Rick Rubin’s podcast, Tetragrammaton, with Marc Andreessen (I’ve been going down a deeeep Rick Rubin rabbit hole, devouring his book and every interview I can find on YouTube — this man is a creative genius, and legendary human)
All-In did a 2023 recap episode and a 2024 predictions episode (Both were good, but the recap ep was particularly interesting to listen back to)
Memberships are the new internet community. (Thread on X, by Greg Insenberg. TLDR below.)
See you next time,
B.
Bravo, Brendan! Awesome list!