You either love to talk about your pipeline or you hate it. If you love it, you know that you have a good-looking pipeline.

You know that you can use your persuasive, talking, selling skills to spin a great tale about all the opportunities within it. You can dazzle your manager or anyone who wants to know.

There is so much hope in your pipeline that they might as well get the trophy and plaques ready, book the flight for the President’s Club trip.

Facing the Truth

If you hate talking about your pipeline it’s because you know the truth. There is not enough in it to hit your numbers. It’s possible you expect that a meeting where your manager pulls you once they fully understand the anemia of your future sales revenue and they will hand you a box for your stuff.

By the way, just because someone is okay talking about their pipeline doesn’t mean it’s actually a healthy one. They are just a skilled Spin Artist. If they used their ability to sell their manager on how much potential their pipeline has (when it doesn’t), and why they are working hard and smart and are better than everyone else on the team (when the numbers don’t agree), and instead used all that ability and focus on selling their prospects – they wouldn’t need to have meetings to explain their pipeline.

Here are the two fundamental truths about a sales pipeline:

1. What you have now is a result of 60-90 days ago (depending on your sales process/cycle/etc.)
2. You cannot control results

Your pipeline is like a garden. I was watching a video that YouTube put in my recommended category and for some reason, I was curious so I watched it (and of course, it totally messed with my algorithm of recommendations) – on how much food this guy in England could grow in 1 year in a backyard garden.

The part that is important for this is that the fastest growing vegetables he planted (potatoes) took about 100 days to yield results he could harvest. More than three months with no food or results to show for his effort. All he could do was get the ground ready, plant the potato starters, water, nurture, protect from pests, and wait in faith that it would work out.

And that was the quickest thing in the garden to yield results. What he had after 100 days was the result of what he started on day 1 and did in faith for the next 99 days.

What Have You Planted in Your Pipeline?

That is the same with your sales pipeline. You get things ready – your sales process, flow, and skills. You learn how to sell your product. Hopefully, you learn H2H sales as well. Then you or marketing plants the seeds – prospects. You reach out to them, make contact, and move them forward in conversations. You fight off pests and predators (objections, competition, etc.). You hope. You pray that there will be a result.

When I go through a team’s pipeline today, I can usually project back 60 to 90 days and make some educated guesses about activity levels that led to what is being seen now in the pipeline garden.

The key – the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today. The best time to care about building an amazing sales pipeline was 90+ days ago. The second best time is today. Just keep in mind that you can plant your garden as hard as you want today but be prepared to still wait two to three months to see the results.

And please don’t try to force it. As Warren Buffet says about investing, but it’s true about sales pipelines and gardens – you can’t make a baby in one month.

What Can You Control?

Part two of your pipeline awareness is that you cannot control results. You can only control activities and actions. Skills and abilities.

And let’s save some time and imagine you are not disputing this principle (some people try to argue that they can control results…and it makes me laugh….easy question to shift your paradigm: When was the last time you controlled your prospect to become a customer?)

The Need for Results

Here is the issue – we need results. Your sales pipeline is full of results. The stages are results of someone moving from the previous stage. The end result – the closed deal…the signed agreement, the payment, the ringing of the bell…is just that – a result of everything that has had to occur to get to that point. But you cannot control it.

Just like my new YouTube gardener friend – he had to wait 100 days to see the first potatoes he could harvest. And most of them were so

small. He spent hours building the garden, spent money on soil, spent countless hours tending to the garden. He could control his actions and activities, and his skills (he did lots of research since he had never done this before). He could influence and affect the results. But he couldn’t control them.

The purpose of his video and experiment was to see how much food he could grow in one year. The final count of everything he

harvested: $64. After a year of effort. After spending more than that on soil, seeds, wood to build the garden, and tools.

Luckily he could monetize the video, and he learned a lot about gardening (which could help during the apocalypse). But no matter what he did he couldn’t control the results. He had plants that died, veggies that never sprouted, an invasion of slugs. He couldn’t control results.

What Should You Do?

So, what should you do if you need a healthy pipeline, that takes 60 to 90 days to grow, and you can’t actually control what happens? Put in so much effort that there is no doubt your pipeline garden will be full enough. Do way more than you think you need to.

Every. Single. Day.

Put in the effort.

Make the calls, send the emails, have the meetings, work on your skills, get better at being a better sales professional, make more calls, network more, research more. And do it all in faith.

Faith that putting in the effort today, planting seeds today, will yield something in a few months.

Conclusion

And if you are worried about your job now – then have an honest conversation with your manager. Tell them what you realized. Tell them what you will do – what effort, actions, activities you will commit to for 90 days. Have them hold you accountable.

They will appreciate it and want to support you (because truthfully…firing you and replacing you with a new person means they have to train that person and then wait for them to fill a pipeline…which will take longer).

Now – stop reading blog articles and get back to massive, pipeline building action!