How to Increase Sales B2B Pipeline in 2026

Your pipeline is crucial to your revenue growth. Once it stalls, it impacts your business negatively. While there are several reasons why a B2B sales pipeline can fail, there are also strategies to curtail this failure.

In this article, you’ll learn how to increase the sales B2B pipeline. We’ll also discuss the stages, tools, and some common key performance indicators to watch for. Let’s get started.

What Is a B2B Sales Pipeline?

A B2B sales pipeline is a visual illustration of the steps your potential customer moves through the sales process, from the initial touch to the closed deal. It’s a structured roadmap that guides your sales team’s workflow to better manage leads and nurture customers across various stages, ultimately increasing opportunities.

Think of the pipeline as a step-by-step path that your sales team must follow to move leads through the sales process and ultimately close more deals. Although the step-by-step path varies per business, a standard B2B sales pipeline can include:

• Prospecting → The potential customers enter the pipeline based on inbound or outbound lead generation tactics.
• Lead qualification → You evaluate prospects based on existing criteria (needs, budget, etc.) to determine their likelihood of conversion. This often includes a discovery call to evaluate fit. Upon qualification, they proceed to the next stage while the sales teams remove the unqualified leads for nurturing.
• Engage leads → You reach out to qualified leads with valuable offers that address their needs.
• Proposal creation → You send a proposal that further demonstrates your product or service’s value and choose your solution.
• Negotiation → You address any questions concerning pricing or contract details that the prospects may have.
• Closing deals → At this stage, both parties agree on pricing, terms and sign the paperwork.
• Retention → The sales team hands off the client to the customer support or account executive for follow-ups and other re-engagement, such as cross-sell or upsell opportunities.
• Request Referrals → A satisfied customer isn’t the end of the deal. You can ask for referrals to win more opportunities.

Sales pipeline stages

With this roadmap, you can prioritize potential clients and optimize each stage of the pipeline for conversion opportunities.

Why Your Sales B2B Pipeline May Be Stalling

If you notice your sales B2B pipeline is stalling, it’s due to one of these reasons:

1. Unqualified leads

If your leads are not matching your ideal customer profile, lack the budget, or have needs different from what your business offers, chances are they are not qualified. No matter what you do, whether you place a call or send an email, they will only waste your time and efforts, slowing down the sales cycle and delaying revenue growth.

2. Lack of consistent outreach

Inconsistent communication, delayed responses to inquiries, or a lack of coordination between sales and marketing teams can contribute to a poor customer experience. That will not only hurt your pipeline but also tarnish your brand’s image, making it difficult to attract and retain potential customers.

3. Poor hand-off between marketing and sales

When your sales and marketing teams aren’t on the same page, leads get inconsistent messages. For instance, your marketing team may mention a specific offer, but your sales reps don’t mention it, getting the prospects confused and prompting them to question the company’s credibility.

As a result, that could erode the trust they have in your brand, causing deals to stall in the pipeline.

Strategies to Increase Your Sales B2B Pipeline

Now that you know why your B2B sales pipeline’s growth stalls, it’s time to improve it. Here are seven proven B2B sales prospecting strategies to increase your pipeline growth.

1. Train your sales team

Your sales team is the powerhouse behind your B2B sales pipeline. Equipping them with the right skills and knowledge allows you to build a repeatable system that drives consistent results. Your sales training program must align with your product, business goals, sales process, and the buyer’s journey.

Here’s how to train your sales team effectively to increase your pipeline:

• Define your sales training goals: Identify what you want to achieve from the training program. Make sure those achievements align with your business goals. Whether it’s to boost pipeline quality or improve close rates, identifying your goals serves as a yardstick for measuring your team’s real impact.

• Identify the skills your team needs to master: Evaluate your team’s current performance and identify areas that need improvement. Obtain direct feedback from reps and managers, review the performance report, or use data from CRM to assess their skills. This will enable your training to focus on areas of struggle and improve existing skills.

• Customize the curriculum: Every salesperson is different. As a result, avoid generic training content. Instead, personalize the training module to fit each rep’s strengths and address their weaknesses. Include a mix of product knowledge, sales skills, and unique methodology to reflect different scenarios your sales team may encounter.

• Include interactive materials and visual learning techniques: Use learning management systems to provide centralized access to training programs, offer personalized content, and track sales progress. These platforms feature role-playing exercises, virtual simulations, and assessments to evaluate your team’s skills.
• Measure and optimize the sales training program: Track key metrics such as time-to-ramp, quota attainment, win rates, and more. Combine performance data with feedback from managers to identify what’s working and areas that need improvement. Continuously refine your training program to align with your business needs.

2. Map out the customer journey

Mapping your customers’ journey helps you to understand how customers interact with your business. You identify bottlenecks and address their needs, allowing you to create a personalized experience for each customer.

That said, the B2B journey covers three stages:

• The awareness stage: The customer discovers they have a problem
• The consideration stage: They compare and explore solutions
• The decision stage: They choose a solution that addresses their needs.

Your job is to simplify touchpoints across each stage with relevant content. This approach will not only build trust and drive more engagement but also shorten the sales cycle. With that, you forge a stronger relationship and ultimately, drive conversions. Below is a quick overview of the relevant content you can provide for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

3. Use automation to speed up efforts

A manual approach to increasing B2B sales pipelines will waste time, result in errors, and drastically reduce productivity. That’s why you must employ automation tools to speed up your sales efforts.

From lead prospecting platforms to AI outreach tools, CRMs, and workflow automations, these tools help to streamline your sales processes, ensuring you work more efficiently. Here is a glimpse into some of the automation tools we utilize at ColdIQ for various sales processes.

• Sales prospecting → LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Ocean.io, and Expandi
• Data enrichment → Clay, Full Enrich, and Prospeo
• Sales engagement → Lemlist, Woodpecker, and Reply.io
• Email warmup and deliverability → Lemwarm and Instantly
• CRMs → HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive
• Workflow automation → Make, n8n, and Zapier

The idea isn’t to replace your sales reps with these tools. Instead, it’s to combine automation with a human touch to create a satisfying experience for your prospects.

4. Focus on qualified leads

While you may feel the urge to consider every lead that enters your sales cycle, giving them all equal attention will leave you exhausted and yield no returns. The truth is not all leads are created equal.

So, rather than focusing on unqualified leads that waste time and resources, you want to double down on the ones who are more likely to convert. Here are some ways to qualify leads:

• Check if the lead fits your ideal customer profile (ICP).
• Watch out for intent signals that indicate their interest in buying. It could be hiring trends, website visits, office relocation or expansion, funding news, and more.
• Monitor visitors’ activities engaging with your brand across your sites, events, ads, and more. For instance, consider RB2B or Warmly for web visitor identification.
• Score leads algorithmically based on behavior such as repeat visits, content downloads, and more.

By qualifying leads regularly, your sales team can fill your pipeline with quality leads, enabling them to close deals more quickly.

5. Offer value to prospects

Being “salesy” at the early stage of a customer’s journey may send them off. They aren’t ready to purchase. They only want to focus on potential solutions. Pitching them too soon can indicate a red flag. So, what do you do instead? Provide value upfront. Here’s how to do that

• Offer educational content like blog posts, guides, and tools that address their needs and offer solutions.
• Provide case studies and client testimonials to build trust and credibility.
• Give discounts and free trials for first-time users.
• Create a community forum where people can ask questions and share insights regarding your solution.

The goal is to nurture your audience before selling to them. Focus on their needs and provide helpful solutions that demonstrate your commitment to having a strong relationship with them, rather than just selling.

6. Follow up on prospects

Even if your prospects have shown interest, that doesn’t mean you’ve closed deals. What you need to do instead is to follow up on them. According to Brevet, 80% of sales require 5 follow-ups after the initial meeting.

However, 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up. Persistence is the key to maximizing replies from your prospects. Aside from this, leverage multiple channels to expand your reach. LinkedIn DMs, emails, or calls. The goal is to stay connected with prospects.

7. Measure and optimize sales performance

Finally, analyze your pipeline metrics to prevent you from throwing darts in the dark. After all, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Utilize sales tracking tools to measure key metrics, including average sales cycle length, overall pipeline velocity, time to close, win-loss rate, and more.

This data helps you understand what works best and indicates areas of improvement. Once you’ve identified your weak areas, adjust your strategy to address them and create a significant impact over time.

Tools to Help You Scale Pipeline Growth

There are many tools on the market that you can use to scale pipeline growth. Here are five sales prospecting tools that we use at ColdIQ to accelerate pipeline growth. But before we dive into the details, here is a quick snapshot of the tools.

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Source: LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the hub of all professionals from across the globe. You can identify all key decision-makers within the platform, filter the results based on your pre-defined criteria, and engage effectively.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s features

• Lead IQ: To collect and summarize key insights about leads
• Key decision-maker alerts: Provide real-time alerts to engage with key decision-makers
• CRM integrations: Seamlessly integrates with third-party platforms for easy data transfer and enhanced workflow.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s pricing

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator’s pricing plan starts at $99 per month.

2. Expandi.io

Source: Expandi

Expandi.io is an ideal automation tool for your LinkedIn outreach efforts. You can automatically extract prospects’ data to connect with them, enhance your outreach strategy with connection requests and messages, and track your campaign’s performance. Expandi also offers safety measures during automation so that your LinkedIn account won’t get blacklisted.

Expandi’s features

• LinkedIn lead generation: You can find qualified leads
• LinkedIn outreach: You can send more than 300 connection requests weekly.
• Personalization features: LinkedIn messages resonate better with your prospects.

Expandi’s pricing

Expandi offers a 7-day free trial, but its pricing plan starts at $99 per month.

3. Common Room

Source: Common Room

If you want to receive intent signals that show your prospect’s intent to buy, Common Room is the perfect choice. Job changes, website visits, and product-focused signals. Common Room gets them, so you can reach prospects at the right time.

Common Room’s features

• Buying signals: Let you seize the right sales opportunities at the right time.
• AI agent: Automate pipeline play.

Common Room’s pricing

Common Room’s pricing starts at $1,000 per month.

4. Clay

Source: Clay

Clay stands out for its waterfall enrichment feature that makes sure your prospect’s contact information is valid. With access to over 130 data sources, you can find valid email addresses and phone numbers at scale.

On top of this, you can find targeted leads and score them all within the platform. Clay is also renowned for its vast integrations, allowing salespeople to streamline their workflow.

Clay’s features

• Waterfall enrichment: Let you find valid email addresses and phone numbers.
• Intent signals: Enable you to find leads with a high likelihood of conversion
• Native integration: Seamlessly connects with numerous third-party platforms.

Clay’s pricing

Clay’s pricing plan starts at $149 per month.

5. Lemlist

Source: Lemlist

Our final option on the list is Lemlist. The all-in-one solution combines prospecting, data enrichment, and outreach features in one platform. In other words, you can find leads, enrich them with verified contact information, and send messages at scale. Lemlist also has a dedicated tool for email warmup and deliverability, making sure your emails land in the spam.

Lemlist’s features

• Lead database: Allows you to find qualified leads
• Data enrichment: Let you find valid email addresses and phone numbers.
• Powerful outreach automation feature: Enables you to send personalized emails at scale.
• Multichannel prospecting: Lets you expand your reach.
• Email warmup and deliverability: Ensures your cold emails land in the prospect’s inbox, not spam.

Lemlist’s pricing

Lemlist offers a free plan, but its paid plan starts at $69 per month.

ColdIQ’s Role in Scaling Your Pipeline

ColdIQ is renowned for its brilliant approach to outbound lead generation. Our concern isn’t just about generating leads once and calling it a day. Instead, we build a scalable outbound engine that drives consistent results for your pipeline. This section further explores ColdIQ’s role in scaling this pipeline.

1. Done-for-you email setup

We set up your email-sending infrastructure by using the right tools (e.g., Lemlist and Instantly) to create a multichannel workflow, create multiple domains, and configure technical records.

In other words, we follow a strict SOP for setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to ensure they are properly configured, and each domain is assigned its own dedicated workspace or tenant.

2. Smart ICP targeting

Targeting ICP varies by business: company size, industry-specific needs, and overall business goals. We ask the right questions about your ICP to gain insights into their specific needs and pain points. This approach enables us to target the right people with the right message.

3. Warmup + sending volume control

We spoke to Aman Sajid, Senior GTM engineer at ColdIQ, about ColdIQ’s warmup and sending volume control. He explains, “We use multiple registrars instead of relying on just one, to spread risk. We also limit to 2 or max 3 inboxes per domain to protect reputation.”

About the tools used for warmup and controlling sending volume, Aman adds, “Instantly's Premium Warmup Pool has worked best so far. We also use Google Postmaster, GlockApps, and MXToolbox for monitoring and reputation checks.”

How Design Pickles doubled its demo bookings with ColdIQ (case study)

Design Pickles, a creative service platform, struggled with high customer acquisition costs and relied heavily on paid ads. Besides, they had a small GTM team that implemented manual processes, which slowed down revenue growth.

Upon partnering with ColdIQ, their sales process changed. They gained tactical advice and used AI and automation tools to speed up efforts. Within two weeks, 58 leads flooded their sales pipeline, accelerating their revenue growth.

Measuring and Analyzing Your B2B Sales Pipeline

As mentioned earlier, you can’t improve what you can't measure. Here, we discuss some key performance indicators (KPIs) to track when measuring and analyzing your B2B sales pipeline.

• Win rate: This is the percentage of closed deals when compared to the total number of opportunities.
• Sales cycle length: This is the average time it takes to close a deal, from the initial contact to final sales.
• Sales velocity: This measures how leads move quickly through the sales pipeline.
• Average deal size: This is the average revenue generated per closed deal.
• Conversion: This is the percentage of leads that moved from one stage of the pipeline to another.

Conclusion

Scaling your B2B sales pipeline can be a whole lot of tasks, but if done right, you reap the benefits. From a consistent flow of quality leads to generating revenue growth, its benefits are endless. Here is a quick recap of some actions you can implement to increase your B2B sales pipeline.

• Train your sales team by equipping them with the right skills and knowledge.
• Map out customers’ journeys to understand how they interact with your business.
• Use automation tools to speed up your sales efforts.
• Filter out unqualified leads and focus on the most promising ones.
• Offer value to prospects.
• Follow up on prospects to stay on top of their minds.
• Measure and optimize sales performance.

If all these seem like a lot for you or perhaps you have a hard time navigating through it all, we recommend partnering with ColdIQ. Our sales experts combine AI sales tools and hands-on experience to optimize these processes, flooding your business with high-quality sales opportunities. Book a call with us today!