How to fill your pipeline

Why Most Businesses Fail to Fill Their Pipeline

If you want your business to succeed, there is one truth that overrides everything else: you must get enough profitable sales. It really is that simple. In my 31 years of working with over 10,000 small businesses, I have seen companies fail for many reasons — cash flow problems, operational issues, poor financial management. But at the root of almost every failure is the same thing: not enough sales coming through the door.

Michael Gerber captured this brilliantly in his book The E-Myth: Why Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It. He identified three core departments in every business — marketing, operations, and finance. Most business owners are experts in operations. They are brilliant at what they do. But they know very little about marketing and sales, and that is where the pipeline runs dry.

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In this live session, I walk you through my complete framework for filling your pipeline — the same system I have used to help clients achieve an average of 45% growth within 12 months. Watch it now:

If you want to know more from me and you want to benefit from nearly 30 years of experience helping thousands of businesses in hundreds of industries all over the world and the time that I've spent learning from the worlds leading masters in the world of sales and marketing, the next step for you is to book a one-to-one meeting with me and you can do so by going to resultsmastery.com thanks very much for listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Hello and welcome. It's great to have you here. Thank you for your time in doing so. My name is Steve Mills. I'm the founder of Results Mastery. I've been helping businesses, small businesses, for over 31 years to grow and to flourish. In that time, I've worked with over 10,000 businesses and helped them to achieve an average of 45% growth within 12 months of being on my program. Now, today I want to talk about your pipeline. I know for a fact that a phenomenal amount of businesses go bust within the first five years. And you'll talk to accountants and they'll tell you it's because of things like cash flow and not managing the financial side. And that's definitely, you know, a viable reason why businesses fail. I think Michael Gerber hit the nail on the head in his book, The E Myth, Why Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, which I strongly recommend you go and buy if you've not bought that. He says that there are three departments in every business, no matter what the industry. They are marketing, operations, and finance. So that's managing the money, doing the work, and then selling the stuff, sales and marketing. And his belief is that most people go into business because they're experts operationally and they love doing that type of work. So if I'm a I don't know, a tennis coach and I set up my own tennis coach in business, I'm really good as a tennis coach, but I don't know very much about finance and financial management. And I know even less about marketing and sales because I'm a tennis coach. Why would I know about that? And that's the reason why businesses fail. And that doesn't obviously just happen with tennis coach. It happens if you've got a garage, if you've got a restaurant, if you've got a hairdressing salon, if you're a coach, a consultant, a trainer, an accountant. You would think you'd be good at the financial side if you've got one of those. But you get but you get the drift, uh, you get what I mean, I'm sure. So, you know, if that's the case, then um, you know, why why do businesses fail? Well, as I said, there's a whole variety of reasons, but in my 31 years of experience, uh, all I can tell you is this if you get enough profitable sales into your business, you're gonna succeed. And if you don't, you won't. It's as simple as that. You've got to get sales, you've got to become good or better at converting leads and into sales. Sorry, I'll say that again. You've got to be become good or better at acquiring leads and then turning them into sales and business. So today we're gonna talk about filling that pipeline. Filling the pipeline now on the wall behind me, let me just get that right. I've got it right. That's unusual the first time. You'll see it says better. I'm just trying to move here, better, more, and new. Let me talk about that because this is a really powerful but very simple to understand concept. The first one is better, and this is really where I start and work with people. When I work with businesses, they tell me that they're doing this or that, and I tell them, right, okay, so how much are you spending on that? And they'll either say, Well, we're spending this amount of money or we're spending this amount of time, or sometimes it's both. I say, Okay, so what's the return on investment that you're getting? Often they don't know, to be absolutely honest with you. But if they do know, it's often nowhere near where it could be. Because I can tell you now that all marketing works, but it doesn't work all the time. In fact, it doesn't even work most of the time. Uh, why is that? Well, it's due to expertise, you know. Any fool can stick an advert on uh YouTube, um, but most of them do, and it doesn't work, you know. Uh anybody can go on to I hear people all the time tell them, Oh, yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I say, Oh, really? How's that working for you? Oh, yeah, it's really good. I say, Well, how much business have you won in the last year? Business, what do you mean, sales? Oh no, no, we've not won any sales, but we're posting on there every day. Well, something's wrong. Something, you know, why is it that other people make hundreds of thousands, even millions of pounds from LinkedIn, and yet most of the people don't? It's lack of a system, lack of a strategy, lack of a way of doing it. Well, it's not actually a lack of it, it's just that the system that you're using ain't working. Uh, so you need a new one or a different one. So this is where the better bit comes in. If you've doing marketing and you need to do that marketing better, then what do you need to do? Well, I can't tell you because I don't know what it is that you're doing, but I can give you a couple of examples. Uh, I'm gonna use the example of of a website because that's often the hub of a business's marketing. It's the central. You know, I use social media to drive traffic, I use email to drive traffic, I'm doing paid advertising on Google or Facebook or whatever to get traffic to my website. Uh, I'm doing, I'm going to networking events and saying, you know, if you want to know more, go to my website, which is results hyphenmastery.com, and so on and so forth. So, you know, this idea of the website being really, really important is um, you know, a fundamental part of being a successful business. I was talking to one of my clients this morning actually, and uh uh he was saying that he'd been doing some advertising on on LinkedIn, and uh he'd spent, you know, not a fortune, but a few hundred pounds, and it hadn't worked. And I said, well, the thing is, if you've if you've spent money because it's pay per click, in other words, you've paid every time somebody's gone there, the advert's done its job. The problem is the website, it's not the advert, the advert's got the clicks. It's it people have looked at the advert and thought, hmm, that's interesting. Let me click this button, and he's been charged a small amount of money for that click. They've gone to the website and thought, no, this is not what I want, because they've not inquired, he hadn't got any leads. So, why is that? Well, it could be a variety of reasons, it could be a poor headline, that's a really big one. You know, yes, I see headlines on websites like About Us or Our Services. Nobody could give a rat's ass about you or me. All they care about is what we can do for them. So the headline becomes the advert for the advert, or in this case, the advert for the web page. So that's where I tend to start. We then look at the words on there. Are they as well written as they could be? Have they been professionally crafted? Have they been improved? Have they been um you know worked on so that they're as effective as possible? Uh the chances are no, is the answer. What about the subheads? Are they as important as the headline? No, but they're nearly as an input as important. So we need to look at the subheads as well. What about video? What do you mean video? It's a website. Well, if it's not got a video on it, it's almost certainly not converting anywhere near to the potential that it could be converting. So why not add a video? Uh, what about pictures, use of pictures? You know, uh what sort of pictures have we got? Pictures of buildings, pictures of men, pictures of women, young people, old people. What is it we're trying to uh gain within our brand? Who is it we're targeting? If you've got pictures of young women on your website and you're targeting retired people, that might not work. I know that sounds crazy, but you know, it's surprising what some people do. Um, so get the pictures right. What about um testimonials? How important are they? Well, I think they're really, really important. Having people, you know, you could tell me how great you are all day, and I think, well, he would say that he or she's trying to you know win business from me. Uh, but if you've got other people telling you how great you are, uh that's much more powerful for me, anyway. And I think that makes total sense. So having testimonials on there, and then here's a really big one really big mistake that I see a lot. The call to action is either not on there. Uh, you'd be surprised how many web pages I visit where there's no call to action, or if it is on there, it's right down at the bottom where nobody ever goes, and therefore nobody ever sees it. You know, why do people do that? I really don't know. So, uh uh what I'd suggest with that is putting a call to act. Some people are gonna go to the website and go, yeah, I want this. This is great. Well, what do I do? Oh, I click that button there. Okay, what does that do? Well, I can book an online meeting uh straight away on Zoom. That's brilliant. We don't have to mess around with this Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, which is it gonna be? You can just book a meeting, and uh that's really, really powerful. So there's just a variety of things, and that that applies to everything. You know, I used it for uh my example with a website, it's the same thing with networking. What how do you look? What do you say when you stand up and do your one minute? What is it you say? Are there ways of improving that? Uh work out, you know, when you stand up and do the one-minute presentation at a typical breakfast networking event, how many people come up to you afterwards and make an inquiry? How many? Because if you like most, then the answer's none or very few. Okay, so there's something wrong with that talk, that one-minute presentation. That's one thing uh that you need to work on your you know, your presentation about who you are. Okay, what about on the phone? When you pick up the phone, you make phone calls every day. Could you become better at that? Could you become better at overcoming objections? Could you become better at turning those phone calls into meetings or those meetings into sales? Absolutely. So, better is the number one thing that you need to do when you start to grow your business, and that's what I specialize in helping people to achieve. The next one is more. So once you got good at it, let's do more of it. Why wouldn't you do that? You know, I again using paid advertising as an example. I had one client who's doing Facebook advertising, spending a hundred pounds per month, yeah, per month on Facebook. And I said, right, let's get an understanding of the the uh we were on better mode, so let's get an understanding of what's working and what's not. What what could we do better? And anyway, we got it better, and we got it so that every pound he spent, he got 12 pounds back, right? So if he spent 100 pounds, he got 1200 back. So we said, what do you would should you do? He said, I said, well, do more. So we increased it to 300 pounds, then to a thousand pounds, then to five thousand pounds. In the end, we got him up to 30,000 pounds per month in Facebook advertising. And he said to me, What do you think we ought to do now? I said, Now I think we ought to spend 60,000. What do you think? Remembering that for every pound he spent, he got 12 back. How often would you like to do that? As often as possible. Um, in addition to that, we then said, right, what else could we do? What could we do new that we're not already doing? Because if you limit, imagine this you're running a business, you spending, I don't know, I'll use 50 to make my addition easy. You're spending 50 grand a month on paid advertising on Facebook. That's creating half a million pounds worth of business. No, it's not 600,000 pounds worth of business. Can't even get that right, Steve. Uh 600,000 pounds worth of business, and then Facebook ban your advertising without telling you why or whether you've done anything wrong or whatever. They just close you down, costing you 600,000 pounds a month. That's why we need new. We shouldn't be just relying on one form of marketing. Yes, we should be focusing on one form of marketing each to make sure we get it better and better and better, and then do more of it, but then we need to introduce new income streams. So if we're not doing uh YouTube advertising, perhaps we could do that. If we're not really, we haven't really got a referral marketing plan in place, then we could do that, and so on and so forth. So I I hope you get that. I hope you um you know understand what I it is I'm talking about and uh how uh you know how effective this is in terms of growing a business. I've been doing this for 31 years, and I can tell you that if you follow the better, more and new process with someone like me, hopefully me, but someone like me who's got the experience to help you do better, to work out when it's important to do more, and to advise you on some new strategies that you can use to grow your business even more. And uh, as I've said to you, I get an average of 45% growth with within 12 months if you sign up to my program. So if you want to find out just an exploratory meeting with me, uh you can see scrolling along the bottom there is a link to my website, results mastery.com. If you want to book a meeting with me, go there, click on one of the gold buttons, uh, get that meeting set up, and we can talk about you, your business, and where we might be able to go together uh with it. Thanks ever so much for listening, and I look forward to speaking to you next time on my uh results mastery stream. By the way, uh out of interest, um, this is streamed uh over um YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook. Uh, it's also on iTunes, it's on Amazon Music, it's on Spotify, and about 30 other locations. Uh, when I finished it, I'm gonna upload it into my website as a blog post uh and a video. This I'm live, uh, this is not a recording. Well, it will be if you're listening to it after uh what is it? Uh 1247 on Wednesday, the 1st of July 2026. So if you're not listening to it right now, it will be a recording. But I do these live in order to try to help people. I do three per week on uh Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, all at 12.30. So um, you know, jump on any of them and uh thanks ever so much again. So don't forget to book that meeting, results hyphenmastery.com, and I look forward to speaking to you on a one to one basis on Zoom very soon. Thanks again, speak soon.