Every company is looking for more pipeline, because it solves almost all problems for a growing business. You can have a low deal win rate or even a churn problem — more pipeline can make up for these. Even with great win rates and great NDR, more pipeline means faster growth.
How can you maximize pipeline? Unless your business is primarily inbound or product-led, the answer is simple: making your outbound function as productive and efficient as possible.
At Actively AI, we are fortunate to work with and speak with the fastest growing, most sophisticated GTM teams across SaaS. These companies are 'living in the future' and always questioning how they can do things better.
One common pattern we've seen emerge: Ops teams and sales/SDR managers are 'shadowing' their BDRs + AEs and understanding how they spend their 40 hours a week.
Findings
We talked to ~60 organizations, ranging from Series B to Fortune 500, about this question… here are the averages across those answers (broken down into an 8 hour workday):
Account Research + Contact Prospecting : 2 hours
Calling: 1.75 hours
Drafting Outreach Emails: 1.5 hours
Prospect Research: 1.5 hours
Team/Manager Meeting: ~30 mins
Admin (Scheduling Meetings, CRM Notes): ~30 mins
This analysis has formed the basis by which GTM teams are prioritizing both internal RevOps efforts and external tool evaluation. As the Global Director of Sales Development of a Fortune 500 company with 150 SDRs put it, "Any time not spent calling or doing hyper-personalized multi-channel outreach is a waste of time. Plain and simple. Unfortunately, that means the majority of my SDRs day is a waste of time but we have a very clear roadmap on how to change that."
We highly recommend every organization spend a few days doing this exercise to understand core bottlenecks to their pipe-gen machine! If you find that account research, email drafting, and finding contacts is adding up to take >3 hours, we might know a solution that could help.
