Episode 187 | Building a Profit-Generating Pipeline with Leslie Venetz

In this conversation, Leslie shares how trust forms the foundation of every sale—and why sellers must “earn the right” to a buyer’s attention before asking for anything in return. She explains her nine-step proven formula for building a profit-generating pipeline and offers practical ways to shift from product-focused to problem-centered messaging.

We also dig into how AI can support, but not replace, authentic communication, and why great sellers focus on helping customers buy rather than pushing them to be sold. Leslie’s insights on outbound versus inbound sales, multi-channel outreach, and the role of trust make this episode a must-listen for anyone serious about growing revenue the right way.

About Leslie Venetz:

Leslie Venetz is the Founder of The Sales-Led GTM Agency, a sales strategy firm helping organizations build profit-generating pipelines. An award-winning keynote speaker and Top 50 USA Today bestselling author of Profit Generating Pipeline, her insights have been featured in Success Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice in Sales and a pioneer of B2B sales content on TikTok, Leslie’s videos have reached over 100 million views, inspiring a new generation of sales professionals to sell with strategy, authenticity, and purpose. 

Reach Leslie:

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LinkedIn

YouTube

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TikTok

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Transcript

Today I have the pleasure of talking with Leslie Venetz, LinkedIn, top Voice for Sales and the author of the new USA bestselling book, profit Generating Pipeline. Leslie is the founder of the sales led GTM Agency where she helps companies build sales strategies that actually convert. We will talk about her book, what sellers should be focused on right now, and how to create a pipeline that drives real profit.

Leslie, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I feel like that's what everybody wants is a pipeline that drives real profit. Exactly. We want that. We, that's what we want. And that's what you talk about in this book. You already held it up and I'm gonna hold it up to prove that I bought it.

When did this come out? Just recently. Yeah, it did. August five was the publication date, and then I was on pins and needles biting my nails for a week after that to see if I had hit my big goal of making the USA today bestseller list. And it's the top 150 books across all genres. So it's harder for nonfiction books to make it particularly like deep cut outbound sales books.

So it, I wasn't sure if I was gonna make it. When I, when I looked at the list, I started at one 50 thinking if I did make it, I would make it towards the bottom. And I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling and I'm not seeing my name. And Kay, I was just heartbroken. I was already doing the positive self-talk. Like, it's okay, Leslie, you still did something hard, like your book is gonna help people.

And then there it was number 50, all genres number two business book in the entire country. That is really something. What a proud moment that must be. And you know, it's getting easier and easier to write books. You can self-publish books. You can, there are books, books, which is great. It's a credibility builder.

But for you to write a book that's such a standout right out of the box is really a, a feat. And I've read the book and you have so much great information in there. And what I love, like we talked about before we recorded, is all the specifics that you have and people are looking for that. We want to know exactly what to do, not just the high level, 30,000 foot philosophies of sales and you really deliver that.

We're gonna just kind of talk about some things and the conversation might meander, but I will give you a chance, first of all, just to give us a, a brief idea synopsis of what your book is about and your approach. Yeah. So the book is broken into to three parts. The title is, uh, profit Generating Pipeline, A Proven Formula to Earn Trust and Drive Revenue.

And so what you see in part one is a lot of that emphasis on trust and why trust really is the foundation of a healthy sale, a durable sales process. Um, and something I introduced in that concept that we talked about right before we hit record is the idea of earning the right. So it's the mindset I ask people to take into part two of the book where we get into some of that nitty gritty, that nine step proven formula.

And the litmus test of earn the right is before I show up to the sales meeting, before I send this email, what have I done to earn the right to ask for this person's attention? And that's really benched in making sure it's relevant to them, adds value to them. And then in part two, we go through the nine step proven formula to build that profit generating pipeline.

And that's where you're seeing a lot of those very actionable tips. It's backed up with the behavioral psychology and the buyer mindset, the buyer-centric approach. But I really wanted to make sure that folks read the book and afterwards could take pieces, immediately apply them and get benefit.

You do that. I, I wanna go over a couple terms just in case you listening. Don't know, uh, you have decided really to focus on the tofu. I love that all caps top of funnel. So what does that mean and, and how do you approach that? It's, yeah. I love that you say that because I came up in more traditional sales jobs and then I transitioned to SaaS sales or tech sales later in my career.

And what I realized straight away is that these folks love an acronym, love, like a silly phrase for stuff. And so one of the things they do to describe the full sales process is break it into tofu, mofu, and bofu. It's a bottom funnel. Top, middle, and bottom. Yeah, that's right. Bottom is like when we're negotiating deals, middle is the actual, buying process.

And then top of funnel up. For me, I define it as everything that comes from deciding who we are going to reach out to figuring out what we are going to say to them, where we're gonna say it, how we're gonna say it through to the discovery meeting. Because I really do feel like that first sales meeting that we have with our prospect is the opportunity to transition from selling to them, to them being bought in.

And it becomes a buying process instead of a sales process at that critical juncture. So it's from who are we gonna talk to, to how can we show up to that first meeting prepared to earn the rate to their business. The who do you talk to part I wanted, I want to delve into that a little bit. Yeah. But I have to interject a story that people listening to the podcast have probably heard before or read my book.

But we don't like to be sold to. We want to buy. Nobody goes to their friends and say, look at the boat that, that this guy sold me or this gal sold me. Look at the car. The dealer sold me. We say we bought it. And years ago, uh, I have a three, a niece, 3-year-old, she's 26 I think now. And when she was three, my mom would babysit her once a week.

And one time, her name is Shauna. My mom said, Shauna, you need to pick up your toys. We're gonna go to the grocery store. And Shauna kind of crossed her arms and she said, I don't like to be tell. And I love that story with our 3-year-old grammar. We don't like to be selled. We want to be the one in the driver's seat and buying.

So I, I really love that philosophy. Sales could be helping the customer get what they want. Salespeople often fall into the trap of, oh, our thing is so great. And so let's go back to how do you help customers or your clients define who they should target at the top of the funnel? Oh yeah. And I do love that like there's a reason that some cliches really stick and the people love to buy, but hate to be sold to one.

It's true. It's there. I love that Call out. Um, the way that I help folks decide who they should be reaching out to is by k kind of shaking up maybe a traditional approach. And so often we are told that we need to pick off ICP off single ideal customer profile. I push back on that a little bit because it's been my experience, my expertise, that none of us have one single ideal customer.

We have multiple buckets of ideal customers, and they're ideal for different reasons, both in terms of the value that we can offer them and also their ideal in terms of how they can, like, what, you know, challenges that they want to overcome or what opportunities they want to seize that make them a good fit for that, product or service that we're offering.

So the first thing that we look at is you don't have one ideal customer. You have different buckets of folks that are ideal for different and unique reasons. So let's figure out what those reasons are because until you know why somebody is ideal, it's going to be very hard to figure out how to talk to them in a way that gets them excited and wants to consider buying from you.

Great point because yes, if you break your, what we call your moose, your ideal customer, uh, we call that your moose. And we talk. The analogy is that if you were hunting moose, you'd be wasting time if you hunted all these other animals in the forest. But the fact is maybe you do want one or two or three of the animals in the forest, but it's all about your messaging.

Just like you said, if you pick one and address them, then you can really talk to them and speak to them specifically about their needs. Yeah. When you, you identify these these moose, your ideal prospect that you want to approach, and so how do you get started with reaching out to them? Yeah. So maybe to steal your analogy often when I start working with clients and I ask what their ICP is in that context, they would be like forest animals.

Exactly. And you're like, right, and you're like, that's not an ICP. And so we'll say, okay the group that we are going to focus on today is just that hunting for the moose. So let's figure out what we know about moose, right? What do they eat? What hours are they a week? When are they asleep? Are they pack animals?

What, like, what do we know? What do we know about them? And what we're trying to figure out is what's most important? Like what are the jobs to be done by the moose? Because that's the only way that we can then figure out how to write sales copy that's relevant to them. And what I see folks do wrong, the, the mistake that is often made is that we write very product focused sales copy.

Because the only thing that we know well is our product and our company. So that's what we talk about. But by taking the time to say, Hey, I don't want all forest animals. I only want the moose. And because I know I want the moose, I'm gonna take some time to really figure out what's most important, what's most relevant to the moose.

Now I can have a level of confidence in the way I am writing problem centric messaging, just because I have a, a depth of understanding and I can give people a quick audit to do if they're thinking, huh, do I write product centric or do I write problem centric sales messaging. And the audit is to go through your copy and see how often you are using i, we and our, and then see how often you are using you, yours, they, them.

What you're looking for roughly is a one to three ratio, meaning that you wanna be talking about your clients, or you wanna be talking about the person that you're reaching out to three times for every one time you are talking about yourself. So it's gonna really push you to eliminate language like we sell, we do our company.

I am. I noticed because frankly, you have not earned the right to ask that stranger you're reaching out to, to give a heck about you or your company or your product, yet. That's a great exercise and you don't know how many emails I've gone through and changed, figured out creatively how to not say I or we.

It's, it's really difficult sometimes. It's as far as defining your moose, I'm curious, we didn't really talk about this, but you mentioned it in the book, ai, how helpful has that been to identify moose and their problems, the challenges they're facing have? Do you recommend using AI for that? Yes. And maybe yes, but, okay.

Um, yeah, AI is incredible tool. I think that it is usually used wrong, and so it ends up like making more work for people later on. Or if they just kind of end up putting out slop, but they do it at a higher volume and it feels like they're. If they're taking action, it feels like they're making progress, but really they aren't.

A few of my favorite ways to use it one is to surface patterns. And so if you can use AI because you have been really diligent about your CRM hygiene, about, you know, putting all of your data into your CRM and tracking, which by the way, I'm just gonna say a customer relationship manager, you need one of those.

It helps you keep track of all your customers, the information about them, the follow ups. I'm guessing, you know, listening, but you never know. You never know. And it is like, depending on where people are at in their business, a lot of people might be still keeping this type of information in an Excel document.

Mm-hmm. I am a huge fan and advocate of investing in A CRM. Like some of them are free to get started because they are, they are built to house your client information in a way that helps you. Better identify who to reach out to, when to reach out to them. It helps that you have better conversations. But even if that information lists all resides in an Excel document, being able to plug that into AI and ask AI for trends.

And so you might be asking it questions like, which industry has the shortest sales cycle? Which industry closes at the highest price point? What job title that I sell to meets with me most quickly or converts most? You know, most often, what industry has the highest renewal rate? So a great way to use AI to start figuring out and who an ideal customer pocket might be is surfacing some of those trends so that you can figure out, hey, like this person buys really, really quickly because they have urgent needs.

This is why it's urgent. So now I understand what's important to them, and I can create messaging around it.

I think a way that people use it wrong is to just write sales copy. And that happens for two reasons. One is that they don't often do the moose exercise first, and so they're having a write sales copy that's that very product, very kind of selfish, self-centered sales copy. So even if the copy is being written within like best practice parameters, it's not gonna work because you are saying the wrong things.

And I, I think the other reason that some of that AI sales copy does not work is that it all sounds the same. Like they're all pulling from the same language learning models. They're all predicting in the same way. So you just get really generic sounding copy. So even if it is relevant, it just, ugh, like, it just seems like a bit of slop, like it's all game changer and synergy.

And that's gold. I'd be careful if I have a piece of gold for every time AI said That's gold. Yes. Great question. That's a game. Yes. So be very careful to use AI to actually write sales copy, but I think it's an incredible tool to help you do the research or surface the research that allows you to start under like let's say that you sell to financial advisors, but you've never been a financial advisor.

You can use AI to ask questions about what's most important to them. Like when is their usual fiscal year, or what kind of goals do they have? What challenges you can start asking AI questions to get to know your customer better. And that's great. That's a great way to use it. I have an example of that just happened yesterday.

I decided, I told you we, I live in Seattle. The Seattle Mariners have never been to the World Series. Seattle is in a frenzy. To add to that, we have a player, Cal Rowley, who hit 60 home runs during the regular season. Seventh person, seventh player, to ever do that in baseball. So very cool. Right? So I, there's one more thing that's, I talked about branding, UNC Copyable branding because Cal Rally is called the Big Dumper.

And when I asked my husband, what the heck, the big dumper, he said, yeah, it's because he has a big butt. I think. Is it really? Is he okay with that? And so then I found out, you know how teams will have bobblehead doll. For big players. For the famous players. Yeah. Yeah. So every team does that. They created a doll with not only his blessing, but he said, I've been telling them to do this.

It's a bobble butt doll. The, I'm serious. The butt is on a spring and here's Cal Raleigh citing the behind of this bobble doll. Bobblehead doll. But it's a bobble, but okay. That's the backstory. I wrote a hundred percent Human a, an email blast, like a blog about that scenario. I added other personal details, like I thought my husband, husband would have a heart attack during this 15 inning game.

I told ai, quite a few of the details and I said, Hey, write this up as a blog. It was terrible. It had all the AI patterns that I can so easily spot the th the little short sentences and the language, like you said the gold or crush it or whatever. And so then I put mine in pro. I hope I'm not going too long with this story, but I put the one I wrote in and I said, can you see the difference?

And it was fascinating to see AI's analysis and it said, you know what? You've added so many things that AI is just not able to do, and it really had a fascinating analysis. You're right. Content cannot be written by AI or you will be able to tell, you can start with ai. I love starting there, although sometimes it kinda gets even more confusing, but yes, I agree.

AI's great for research and even finding out someone's pain points like you said, because that's what you have to address. But AI for content, I just had to throw out that example because it was so clear, uh, that AI content is becoming more and more obvious and as our whole brand is UNC Copyable.

That's copyable so great. It's deeply copyable and it's, it is great for research. It is great for ideating. It is great for rough drafts. The idea, and I, I think like people miss this, is that AI isn't a thinking brain. It's a language learn. It's a predictive model. And so it is just predicting based on what everybody else has said and everything else, that it's collated what it thinks will be said next, and it thinks it'll be said next because that's what the average person thinks.

So if you wanna create a very average copy that's very ignorable, then like sure AI all day. I don't think that you would be listening to this podcast right now if you did not want to create a brand, create sales copy, create maybe some inbound attention because you were saying something that was very memorable and very meaningful.

I mentioned this before we recorded. Can you just really briefly go through what outbound marketing versus inbound marketing, or I don't know if you refer it to it also as outbound sales versus inbound sales. But what is the difference? Yeah. So inbound is going to be somebody that is proactively reaching out to you, asking to learn more about your company.

Outbound is you identifying who you wanna reach out to and then contacting them directly. One of the things that I love to do with my clients, and it's been like a staple of my career success, is blurring the lines a little bit between what has historically been considered inbound, which is demand generation and outbound, which is lead generation.

And so an example of that, if you're running a small business might be that you are sending out emails and you are maybe making calls over the phone, but maybe you're also doing some doorstepping, but you're combining that with going to live events and sending direct mail. And so the live events in the direct mail.

That's generally been considered more of a like marketing centric, a demand generation activity, whereas the, like picking up the phone and cold calling or door stepping or sending emails has historically been considered a, like a lead generation activity. So I like, I think it's kind of fun to blur the line between inbound and outbound, but then I also put traditional marketing, like advertising in its own category, and I think it's the difference of helping people understand how they should feel about your product.

Then inbound is telling people, Hey, this is why you should like, consider reaching out to me. If you already know you have a problem, you're committed to solving the problem and you're actively looking for a solution, and outbound is, you may not even realize you have a problem. Let me help you educate.

Let me help you get educated on it. Or maybe, you know, you have a problem, but you're not sure what solutions exist or you are not sure that you're not aware of my company as being a problem solver. So like, I, I don't know. I think they've, there's multiple layers to it. Exactly. And, and sometimes it is advertising to me is awareness.

And I'm not big on that because a lot of times it is just awareness. Un unless it's really focused. Let's skip because we are zipping through the time as I knew we would. Let's talk about cold calling and because everyone, not everyone, people generally hate cold calling. I have not, you know, historically been one of those people because the expectations on cold calling are so low that if you get someone to connect with you cold calling it, it's great.

Now, there are ways to get really creative and target people and make a bigger splash with your outreach that will work. But what if you've got a lot of people, like you said, you're, you're sending emails, you've got to be concerned about your message. What would you, offer for that scenario?

Uh, a couple of things that I would say for cold calling. One is make sure that you have a script for your cold call. You don't have to have a script for the entire length of the call, although I do think you should have some pre-planned questions and be clear about the goals, but you need to absolutely make sure that you have that first, like 30 to 62nd scripted.

Because if you are not getting to the point and you are not leading with relevance, if you're humming and hawing, you're wasting your time. They're going to either hang up on you or just tune out. So that is the most important thing to start with.

Okay. .

Yeah. And then the second thing I would say for cold calling is that if you are just calling down a list with no real purpose, and if you are calling down a list and you aren't also sending emails or direct mail, like you are not utilizing other channels it's gonna be a bit of a wasted effort.

Like, cold calling has to be part of a bigger strategic play. You have to be cold calling people with a specific purpose in mind, and then that cannot be the only touchpoint. You also need to be on social, in person, on email. You did, uh, emphasize multichannel, which is absolutely the best way to go. We talked even about, you talked in your book about the statistics between just emailing, just calling versus doing both together.

Man, it's a, a big powerful difference, isn't it? Oh, when you get up to doing three channel outreach, it's like a hundred times better connect and better conversion rates. The difference is like, it's, it's kind of mind boggling. And here's what I always tell people because I'll, I'll often get pushback from folks that say, well, I prefer LinkedIn, or I prefer email.

It is not about you. It's not about what you prefer, it's about what your prospect prefers. And the reason that, the sort of connect rates are exponential once you get to three plus channels, is that you're maximizing the opportunity for your prospect to communicate with you on their preferred channel.

That's such a big deal in sales. It comes down to sales calls when we have to try so hard to listen. Uh, I, I remember in your book you talked about objections and that's still not the time to just talk, talk, talk. It's a time to con, con continue. That's what I'm trying to say. Time to continue the conversation.

You know my feeling, I'm sure yours too, is if you get an objection, then you know what they're thinking instead of just, no, we don't wanna do that. You have nowhere to go. So I like that. So many parts of your book. I'm gonna hold it up. Uh, you probably listening, but you might be watching on YouTube.

So here is the book, a very striking color. It's black with some big gold arrows pointing up and. The title again is Profit Generating Pipeline, A proven formula to earn trust and drive revenue. To me, trust is a deal breaker. The saying no like and trust maybe you're not liked, uh, which isn't that hard to do, to be liked when you ask and are interested in the other person.

But, uh, and we also add, remember in our book, our branding book, UNC Copyable You. But I have to agree that trust is the one thing you absolutely have to have. And trust encompasses a lot of things. And you talk about all of these in this book. I highly recommend that you get this book. We've already told you about the cred it has, uh, even since August.

Right now it is only October, although it's always amazing how time flies. But, uh, I recommend this book and I really appreciate you. Leslie. Do you have any closing thoughts on our conversation before we say goodbye? No. I'm like, I'm so appreciative of this. If people wanna pick up the book, the best place to do that is sales led gtm.com/book because I have a step two.

And so if they go in the step two, there's some freebies and then we can stay in touch and I can get, like, I, um, have been hosting events. I may be coming to Seattle next year, Seattle and Denver at like the top of my list for launch parties in, uh, 2026. Or I guess it'll be post-launch. It'll be just be celebration of the book parties at that point.

But I think maybe my, what I would leave people with is that often as business owners, um, we can get into our heads about selling because we are selling ourselves or something we created, and that's very emotional. But at the end of the day, what we are passionate about is helping people. If you remember to keep that drive to help and underlie that with curiosity, with trust at the core like you are, don't worry about being like a gross sales pressure person.

That's not something that you're gonna bring to the table because what you're bringing to the table is passion and a want to help. Always great reminder to keep that top of mind because we forget it. And that's why people need Leslie. They need you and your book, and they need me to help constantly remind them of the importance of that.

So on that note, Leslie I so appreciate you being on the podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you.