Book Review “Tactical Pipeline Growth” by Mark McInnes

Winning the outbound sales battle using cadence strategies

Most sales teams in the world meet early in the week to go through numbers and activities. Rarely those meetings energise with practical enablement driven by supportive leaders. No wonder as there are not many sales books supporting the tactical elements.

That’s exactly where “Tactical Pipeline Growth” from Sydney based sales trainer Mark McInnes comes in. Winning the outbound battle for new business takes a different standpoint than those sales gurus proclaiming only inbound sales tactics work these days. Addressing both junior and senior sales professionals, the book offers sales leaders an instrument for the most crucial topic these days: how to fill the pipeline under current circumstances.

Mark McInnes is well known as Australian Social Selling expert and sales coach with relevant experience as sales manager and trainer. I guess he would have loved to have this foundation at hand in his earlier work with sales reps. Serving various sectors from IT, Software, Education, Finance and FMCG enabled Mark to validate his outbound approach.

The focus on the tactical elements sets the scene about the new rules of engagement in the changing sales environment. Beyond the age of the well-researched buyer he also included the current pandemic. Five pillars of effective prospecting help to understand what makes an outreach campaign successful under the given conditions. The heart of the book is the chapter about the cadence — “a series of touches strategically placed across multiple communication channels over a defined period” — added by a 9-week example with required details to apply on concrete situations. Chapters about time management and Social Selling complete this masterpiece for outbound prospecting.

Mark included a range of useful quotes like the short statement “The quality of the message is the message”. His authentic and compliant prospecting approach is supported by “Persuasion should be an art that is always practiced ethically and legally.” In my years as sales manager I often saw low engagement on the top part of the funnel. Mark also addressed the sellers’ mindset with his statement “Prospecting is not something you should be…