Pipeline generation: challenges & strategies for 2025 & beyond

What is pipeline generation?

Pipeline generation is the process of identifying, nurturing, and qualifying new sales opportunities to build a robust pipeline of leads who are interested in buying your products or services. 

The practice of lead generation is mission-critical for sales teams as it ensures a steady flow of prospects moving through the sales funnel — which increases the chances reps crush their revenue goals.

By combining several strategies — like prospecting, outbound outreach, and inbound lead qualification — sales teams can actively build a pipeline that supports long-term business growth and sales success.

At a high level, pipeline generation can help an organization:

• Maintain a steady flow of potential revenue by ensuring new leads are consistently entering the sales funnel, supporting both short and long-term sales targets.
• Increases sales team efficiency by allowing reps to focus their energy on well-qualified leads, reducing time spent on unqualified prospects and the overall time to close.
• Improve forecasting accuracy with a more predictable pipeline, making it easier for sales leaders to set realistic targets and allocate resources effectively.
• Strengthen market position by consistently reaching new prospects and engaging a wider but targeted audience, keeping the organization top of mind for future buyers.
• Enhance customer insights by analyzing lead behavior and preferences, helping sales teams personalize outreach and improve the overall sales experience.

Pipeline generation vs. lead generation: What’s the difference?

While pipeline generation and lead generation are similar, there are some important nuances between the two. 

Lead generation is the initial stage of the sales journey, focused on attracting potential marketing leads and gathering contact data to build a database of prospects you can then begin trying to convert. This is done through various tactics — like content marketing, email sign-ups, social selling, and events. 

Pipeline generation, on the other hand, is the process of designing and overseeing each step that potential prospects experience, from their first contact through to their final purchase decision. It focuses on the full sales process from nurturing and qualifying leads to closing the deal and handing them over to the customer success team. 

While lead generating is all about gaining someone’s interest and capturing attention, pipeline generation is about building a steady sales pipeline that successfully moves sales opportunities down the funnel.

Pipeline generation challenges in 2025

In today’s tricky business climate, teams face several challenges when it comes to pipeline generation. In this section, we examine three key obstacles sales teams are navigating in this entirely new sales environment to supercharge their pipeline generation strategy.

1. Market downturn

In 2023, 99% of business leaders agreed that their organizations were going to tighten up their purses to weather economic uncertainty. Many companies are more cost-conscious than ever before — which can make it harder for sales teams to secure buy-in for new solutions or upsells with current providers. 

We’re seeing more and more sales teams get buy-in from the team and users of a product but getting pushback from the final decision makers and budget holders. 

By focusing on strengthening relationships with existing clients through a land and expand strategy, highlighting ROI and potential cost savings, and positioning solutions as essential to the prospect’s success, sales teams can continue to win new business in this challenging economic environment. 

2. Poor sales, marketing, and product alignment

When sales, marketing, and product teams are misaligned, an effective pipeline generation strategy is that much harder to execute. When these teams work in silos, it often results in miscommunication and mismatched goals, leading to inconsistent messaging and wasted resources. For example, sales might be targeting a different persona than marketing while product might be focusing on features that don’t really move the needle. This disjointed approach can confuse would-be customers and reduce the impact of each team’s efforts.

By establishing regular cross-functional team meetings, sales leaders can ensure that all stakeholders are aligned on personas, messaging, product features customers want, and revenue targets. At the same time, sharing metrics that all teams can track — like lead quality and customer feedback — can help everyone stay on the same page with shared goals.

3. Old methods & strategies no longer work

Just a few years ago, companies could rely on tried-and-true pipeline generation methods like  cold calling, SEO, and webinars. However, as buyer behaviors continue to evolve and AI takes center stage, older pipeline generation methods have become less effective, and getting someone to click on your website or answer their phone is harder than ever. 

With digital transformation resulting in more complex, multi-channel engagements, it’s more important than ever for reps to reach prospects on the right channels with the right messaging at the right time.

To overcome this challenge, teams need to adopt data-driven approaches and leverage advanced technology — like automation tools and AI-driven insights.

For example, with a generative AI writing tool, it’s possible to write personalized emails leveraging previous interactions and preferences in just a few clicks, creating an experience that’s more likely to resonate with buyers. With 94% of B2B buyers researching products online before making a purchasing decision, teams can also create targeted content designed to attract high-quality leads, driving prospect interest organically on and off their owned channels.

What’s more, teams should also experiment with new methods of pipeline generation — like social selling, video content, and optimizing your website content for Google’s AI overlay. 

How to improve pipeline generation (pipeline generation strategies in 2025)

Improving pipeline generation is a top priority for sales leads and teams looking to drive consistent revenue and hit their targets. In today’s business landscape, generating leads isn’t enough; teams need to be able to identify high-quality prospects, figure out the best channels to engage potential customers, and nurture leads to close effectively. 

If you’re wondering how to generate pipeline, you’re in the right place. While there is no silver bullet to pipeline generation, there are definitely things your team can evaluate, improve, and optimize. Whether you’re an enterprise business finding it harder than ever to generate pipeline or a brand new startup trying to create a pipeline generation strategy for the first time, these tips and strategies can help.

Make sure your ICP is actually your ICP 

You might have started out the year thinking that your target customer is a certain size or type of business. But is that really your ideal customer?

Improving pipeline generation starts with making sure you nail your ideal customer profile (ICP). 

Oftentimes, businesses think their customers look like one thing only to realize through sales and marketing efforts that they’re resonating with an entirely different market. When you understand which types of businesses are most likely to be interested in what you’re selling, it becomes that much easier to find pipeline.

To do this, take a look at your biggest customers and most active users (which may be different!) and try to understand what similarities they share, and maybe more importantly, along the problems they’re trying to solve with your product. 

If you’re a newer company, without the internal data to make these kinds of decisions, rather than trying to hard sell your products, ask for feedback from your team’s network and if they are interested in the solution, give them the product free for a certain period of time in exchange for their honest evaluation. 

Ensure lead scoring is accurate

Accurate lead scoring helps your team prioritize high-potential prospects, making the sales process more efficient while boosting conversion rates. Proper lead scoring can also ensure that the right leads are going to the right reps; an enterprise sales executive understands how to close those types of deals and can proactively address enterprise-related concerns like data privacy and scalability upfront. 

To ensure accuracy in lead scoring, teams can use a combination of demographic, behavioral, and engagement data, continuously refining criteria as buyer behavior evolves. Your B2B contact data provider should be able to provide this data whether you’re using outbound strategies or appending information to marketing qualified leads. 

While you’re at it, audit your lead scoring model regularly and incorporate feedback from both sales and marketing teams to keep pace with shifting patterns. Just like reviewing and refining your ICP, doing the same for lead scoring models ensures you’re staying on top of changing trends.

When you’re able to score leads accurately, pipeline generation becomes smoother and more productive — making it that much easier to reach business goals.

Understand buying signals

The better you understand buying signals — behaviors that indicate a prospect is ready to make a purchase — the easier it is to improve the entire pipeline generation process. 

By catching these hints — which include frequent website visits, repeat engagement with content, following you on social media, or signing up for a free trial  — your team can step in at the right time, increasing the chances of identifying in-market buyers. 

You can track buying signals through tools like RB2B, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, HubSpot, and LeadIQ. The key is having the infrastructure in place to track buying signals, setting up automations to alert your sales team, and analyzing what the biggest buying signals are for previous customers so you can be ready to strike when prospects show genuine interest.

Create a repeatable sales process

Consistent pipeline generation is much easier when you have a repeatable sales process in place because it helps your team follow a proven path from lead to close. With a structured approach, everyone knows the steps needed to qualify, nurture, and convert leads, making it easier to scale efforts and track progress. 

If you’re a new company, start by outlining clear steps — like initial contact, follow-up, presentation, and closing — then refine them based on what works best. By doing so, each team member can rely on a process that’s been tested, improving efficiency and making it easier to forecast results.

If you have an existing robust sales process that may have worked in the past, chances are there are opportunities to optimize based on feedback from both won and lost deals.

Optimize your website & all relevant channels

Prospects likely already have a first impression of your company’s brand before they ever visit your website. They likely heard of your company through social media, seeing an ad, or looking at a competitor’s solution. 

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When they finally visit your website, or click from reading a blog they found from a Google search to your actual site, you have to ensure that the content aligns with their expectations of what your company is and what problems your products solve. 

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When your site is user-friendly and messaging is consistent across channels, it’s easier for potential clients to find relevant information and take action. On the other hand, when your digital properties aren’t telling a cohesive story, prospects can get confused and turned off. 

To improve pipeline generation, start by ensuring your website loads quickly, is optimized for mobile, and features clear calls to action. Regularly update your owned channels to make sure they’re what your audience is looking for and engage on social media in ways that resonate with your target customers. 

Produce relevant content (not just blog posts!)

At its core, sales is all about building trustworthy relationships. An easy way for an organization to do that is by creating a steady stream of relevant content that keeps prospects and current customers engaged. 

While blog posts are great, they’re not likely to close a deal and win trust (although they can definitely lose it if they aren’t top-tier value-add content!). 

To round out your content strategy, create ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, webinars, videos, and case studies, and have a robust social media strategy. While you’re at it, try to secure some invitations to speak at relevant events and podcasts — and maybe even have your founder consider launching a podcast or series of their own. 

Each format serves a unique purpose, catering to different stages in the buyer’s journey. 

While webinars are great for real-time engagement, ebooks are better suited for in-depth and actionable insights. While a podcast might be great for someone to listen to whenever they’re traveling, an infographic is the perfect medium for sharing statistics and other important data in a visually compelling manner. Each type of content has its strengths.

By experimenting with content types, you can connect with your audience on their terms in the format they’re most comfortable with, increasing the chances they’ll ultimately turn into leads and move further down the pipeline. 

And while we know you’re like a sales leader or sales team member, without marketing, you can’t generate the trust needed in today’s buying market. Make sure your sales team is using all of the content that marketing produces throughout the buying process!

Go where your audience already is

Instead of expecting your audience to go out of their way to find you, go to where they are active, engaged, and most receptive to learning about what you’re selling.

To do this, start by researching where your target audience spends time — whether it’s on specific social media platforms, industry conferences, or existing but tangential companies. Rather than sponsoring the event or paying to post ads, develop a more robust strategy for these channels. 

By engaging in these places, you can meet prospects in their comfortable environment and better understand their needs. This approach can make it easier to build genuine connections, which could drive more leads into your pipeline.

Collaborate with others

Collaborating with other businesses, industry influencers, and even clients enables you to tap into new networks and build credibility with more people — which could help you improve pipeline generation.

You might decide to co-host a webinar with a client or pop into a podcast your audience cares about as a guest. For example, Salesforce and HubSpot are go-to places for marketers to read content while Twilio or GitHub are go-to places for engineers to learn. 

Getting featured on a trusted company’s blog or hosting a webinar with them can help develop trust as the prospect already has trust in them and by working with them, it validates your company in their mind!

Either way, these collaborations introduce you to new audiences who already trust the partner — making it easier to generate interest and strengthen your top-of-funnel pipeline-building efforts.

How LeadIQ can help with pipeline generation

If you’re looking to accelerate your pipeline generation capabilities in today’s competitive landscape, LeadIQ can save the day (and we’re not just saying that because you’re on our website!). 

Our purpose-built sales prospecting software is designed to help reps and account executives prospect efficiently by equipping them with accurate, verified data that is automatically enriched and always at their fingertips. 

We recently redesigned our product packaging into our Prospecting Hub and our Data Hub — both designed to help sales teams from top to bottom. 

You can request a demo or you can get started with our free Chrome extension or our innovative tool Scribe that enables reps to generate personalized emails with ease. LeadIQ Scribe was voted the best AI sales tool of the year in 2023 by the Tenbound user community. 

To see how LeadIQ helps real-world companies improve their pipeline generation efforts, check out this case study: How LeadIQ Boosted LivePerson’s Pipeline Generation and Simplified its Prospecting Workflow.