There’s an adage within the business industry: watch the cash. This statement rang true when my spouse and I were in the middle of a house renovation. Do you know what it feels like to sit in a half finished home with all the money gone from your bank account and credit cards maxed out? It’s not fun.

But I would argue that there’s another thing that leaders need to watch that’s just as important as the cash: the pipeline. Without the pipeline, you have no cash, no revenue, no impact. You have no business.

What is a pipeline?

A pipeline is a visual way of tracking customers or stakeholders from first awareness to a final action. During this journey, customers will progress through several stages. It is your job to help guide them through this process.

Salespeople often use this term to guide a customer from awareness of their company or product to final purchase.

I’m not a salesperson. Why do I care about pipelines?

Every leader has a pipeline:

• A manager has a pipeline of potential new hires

• A community organization has a pipeline of new members

• An executive team has a pipeline of potential leaders

• A business owner has a pipeline of new clients

Managing a pipeline is a lot of work.

Let me be real with you. Managing a pipeline is a lot of work. During a recent conversation with my spouse who’s a real estate agent, I listened to him complain about how he’s too old for the chasing. “When do you get to the point where you’re not chasing?” I replied, “Never.” The “chasing” never stops. You hope you get so large that you can hire someone else to do it for you.

Most of my readers aren’t at the level yet. So how do you, as a leader, make time to maintain your pipeline?

1. Budget Your Time

While planning to start my own consulting business, I used a back of the napkin formula to gauge how much I should make per hour. Let’s say I want to make $100,000 per year. I take that number and multiply by 1.15 to account for payroll taxes and insurance. Then I divide that number by 48 week (4 weeks for vacation). Then, and here’s the part that matters: I divide that number again by 30 hours per week.

$100,000 per year * (1.15) / (48 weeks per year) / (30 hours per week) = $79.86 per hour

Why do I divide by 30 hours per week and not 40 hours? Is it because I’m lazy and feel like I should work less? No. Those 30 hours represent my billable hours, the time that I actually spend producing revenue. I devote the other 10 hours to the pipeline.

It’s a good rule of thumb to assume that 20–30% of your time should go to pipeline maintenance.

2. Strategize for all elements of the pipeline

Maintaining a pipeline is a multifaceted effort. Because this is not a marketing course, I’m going to give you an overview of what it is. There are five stages to a customer journey; each describes the place that a customer is at. Your goal is to move a customer through the five stages until they get to your last action. Each stage requires a unique set of strategies.

1. Awareness

During the awareness stage, the customer first hears about your organization or your offering. Strategies to get customers to be aware are:

• Running ads

• Posting job descriptions

• Partnering with relevant organizations

• Encouraging recommendations from current stakeholders

2. Interest

During the interest stage, customers want to learn more about how you can solve their needs. They see you as a potential solution to their problem. To help customers get to this point, you can:

• Create relevant blog posts

• Display your value proposition on your website or other material

• Create enticing descriptions of your offerings

3. Desire

Customers know you are one option for them, but they need a little more to prove that you are the best option to meet their needs. You need to set yourself apart from the competition. Make sure you consider all options as competition. For example, you’re not just competing with other organizations, but the customer’s option of going on their own or creating their own solution. Some strategies to help your customer along this journey are:

• Creating an enticing interview process

• Directly comparing yourself to your competitors

• Offering a free sample of your offering or member benefits

4. Action

Finally, you want the customer to be ready to commit. They accept the job offer, or sign up for a membership, or agree to be a part of your program. Your entire goal for this stage is to make this process as simple as possible.

• Lower the barrier to entry through an entry-level promotion

• Send several reminders of your call-to-action

• Offer a deal they can’t refuse

3. Create a system

Now that you have your strategy for all elements of your pipeline, the best thing for you to do is to create a system around it. How often will you accomplish each of your strategies? How will you measure its success? It’s best to build a schedule to help you plan your work..

Or a dashboard to keep track of the fruit of your efforts.

Retention rates

• Viewers — 100%

• Job Applications — 40%

• First Interview — 20%

• On-Site Interview — 10%

• Offer — 5%

By keeping track of the metrics, you can understand which parts of the pipeline you need to optimize. Why is it that only 40% of the users who view our job posting actually apply for the position?

4. Be consistent

Creating the plan is one thing. Implementing the plan is another thing entirely. They say it takes 21 days to build a habit. Take to heart and know that you will need to force yourself to get through the first couple of weeks before this habit becomes easier. Here are a couple of tricks to make it easier:

• Plan something to do every day at the same time each day

• Set a reminder on your phone for the time you have to do it and a reminder a couple of hours in the future to ensure that you did

• Leave a calendar in a highly visible location where you can check off completion of your task. Make a game out of keeping the chain of check marks unbroken.

5. Outsource what you can

And if you find that there’s a piece of your system that slows you down way too much, outsource it. Here’s the equation: divide the impact that this task has by the time you take to do it. The tasks that give you the lowest scores are the ones that you should consider first for outsourcing. You gain no extra points from doing it all yourself; remember that.

Pipeline maintenance never ends

Maintaining the pipeline is a never-ending task, so make sure that you are creating a system that is sustainable for you and your team.

Now it’s your turn. What are some strategies that you have used to maintain your pipeline? Leave your answers in the comments.