Your first pipeline

Most new reps inherit nothing, or inherit a list of accounts that previous reps have already worked and abandoned. This section is how you build from zero.

3.1 Territory analysis

Before you write a single email, answer four questions in writing. What is my patch, exactly? Get the boundary written down — territory disputes are the most common avoidable conflict in a first sales year. How many accounts are in it? A number, not "loads": a patch of 140 addressable organisations is a fundamentally different job from one of 14,000. Which of them already know us? Customers, past opportunities, closed-lost, dead inbound, event scans — warm ground, and nearly always under-worked. And what's the trigger pattern? From the closed-won analysis: what was happening just before they engaged — new leadership, funding, a failed inspection, a regulatory deadline, a system at end-of-life? Triggers are how you decide who to contact this week rather than eventually.

3.2 The first 50-account list

Fifty is the right number: enough to be a real territory, few enough to research properly. Build it by tier.

• Tier A (10–15) — fit plus a live trigger. They match the closed-won pattern and something has recently changed. Deep research, multi-threaded: three named contacts, a problem hypothesis, a reason to be contacting them now.
• Tier B (20–25) — fit, no visible trigger. A good sequence, light personalisation, re-reviewed quarterly, because Tier B becomes Tier A the moment a trigger fires.
• Tier C (10–15) — plausible but unproven. Adjacent sub-sectors, wrong size, unusual shape. Low-effort touches, whose real job is testing whether your ICP is too narrow.

Record five fields per Tier A account and no more: the organisation, three named people, the hypothesised problem, the trigger, and your source. Research beyond five fields is procrastination wearing a lab coat.

3.3 The first sequences

Don't build twelve sequences. Build one sequence per persona, three personas maximum, and run them properly for six weeks before judging anything. A defensible first structure runs nine touches over 15–18 working days: day 1, an email under 90 words (one line of relevance from the trigger, one line of hypothesis about the problem, one question) plus a call; day 3, call with a voicemail naming the trigger; day 4, a LinkedIn connection with a one-line note; day 6, email with a proof point — a customer like them, a number, a published result; day 8, call; day 11, email taking a different angle on the same problem; day 14, call; day 17, a short "closing the loop" email, no guilt, easy to reply to.

Rules that matter more than the structure: same problem, different angles — not the same email reworded; one question per email; every touch sendable to a person you respect. And run the sequence to completion: new reps abandon at touch three and conclude that outbound doesn't work.

3.4 The maths of turning activity into pipeline

This is the section to reread whenever you panic. Work your own numbers; the example uses realistic placeholders for a UK health-tech AE seat.

Assumptions. Fully ramped annual quota £400,000 new ARR; average deal £40,000, so 10 deals a year at full quota; win rate from qualified opportunity 25%, so 40 qualified opportunities; first meeting to qualified opportunity 40%, so 100 first meetings a year, about 8–9 a month; average cycle from first meeting to signature 5 months; year-one ramped quota 50% of full — £200,000, or 5 deals.

What that implies. Five deals need 20 qualified opportunities, which need 50 first meetings. On a five-month cycle, any deal closing inside year one had its first meeting by roughly month seven — so the entire year-one number is decided by the meetings you book in months two to seven: 50 first meetings in six working months, from a standing start, while still learning.

What that means for day 90. Months 1–3 realistically produce 12–18 first meetings as you find your feet; 5–7 of those become qualified opportunities, or £200,000–£280,000 of pipeline at £40k each. Closed revenue in the same window: plausibly, and correctly, zero.

That is the whole point. £250,000 of qualified pipeline and £0 closed at day 90 is a good ramp on these numbers. £0 pipeline and £0 closed is a crisis — and the two look identical to a panicking rep watching only the revenue line.

Do this arithmetic in week two with your own numbers and ask your manager to correct it. That one conversation gets you the real conversion rates, demonstrates commercial thinking, and converts ninety days of anxiety into a target you can hit.

3.5 The fastest honest sources of early pipeline

Cold outbound is the slowest route to a first meeting and the most necessary long-term habit. While it compounds, work these:

• Closed-lost from the last 18 months — people who evaluated you and chose otherwise, whose circumstances have since changed. The loss reason is in the CRM; open with it.
• Dormant inbound — enquiries never properly followed up. Every CRM has hundreds.
• Champion job-changes — someone who liked your product at their last employer is the warmest lead in existence.
• White space in existing accounts — other departments, sites, trusts in the same group. Ask CS who else internally has the same problem.
• Events in your patch — one well-worked regional conference beats three national ones you wander around. Pre-book meetings; don't hope.
• Referrals, asked for specifically ("who else do you know running the same problem?"), never generically.

Field note

The cruellest feature of a ramp is that effort and results are separated by a full sales cycle: the weeks when you are working hardest and worst produce nothing visible, and by the time results arrive you are working on something else. Two protections. Keep a written log of inputs — meetings booked, opportunities created — because at day 45 they are the only honest evidence anything is happening. And name the lag to your manager in month one, in the language of their own cycle data. Managers who understand it hold their nerve with you; a manager who won't accept their own company's arithmetic has told you something important about the seat.

4. Days 31–60: contribute

Month one bought you the right to an opinion. Month two is where you start using it in front of customers, with the stabilisers coming off one at a time.

4.1 Your first solo discovery calls

The mechanics are Module 04. What's new is doing it alone, on your own name, with a real buyer who has better things to do.

Before the call — a fifteen-minute written plan: the trigger and hypothesis (why do I believe this organisation has this problem?), the three questions I most need answered, the specific next step I'll ask for, and one line on who else must be involved if this is real.

During the call, three disciplines above all. Frame it in the first ninety seconds — purpose, time, agenda, permission; almost every bad discovery call is bad by minute two. Do not demo: the urge to prove yourself with the product is overwhelming in month two and always wrong, so if they push, negotiate — "happy to, can I ask three questions first so I show you the relevant part?" And close for a specific, dated next step; "I'll send some information" is not one.

After the call — ten minutes, non-negotiable: CRM notes while it's fresh, the recap email with what you heard and what was agreed, and your own recording scored against the Section 2.5 checklist. Reps who review their own calls in month two ramp visibly faster than reps who wait to be reviewed.

4.2 The first demo you lead

Rehearse out loud twice, once to a colleague — silent rehearsal does not work. Open with a playback, not a feature: "Last time you told me X, Y and Z mattered most; I've built today around those — anything changed?" Show less than you know: two or three capabilities mapped to what they said, checking in every few minutes ("is that how your team would actually use it?"), because coverage is the amateur's instinct and tailoring wins. Plan for failure — screenshots ready for when the sandbox breaks, and a stock line: "Let me not fight this; here's the same thing as an image and I'll send a working link this afternoon." Recovering calmly from a technical failure builds more trust than a flawless demo. And park rabbit holes in writing: "I'd rather give you a precise answer than a quick one — I'll come back by Thursday." Then come back by Thursday.

4.3 Asking for help without looking weak

New reps under-ask because they think questions signal incompetence. Managers read unasked questions as the problem: a rep who quietly gets a deal wrong for six weeks is far more expensive than one who asks a good question on day three. What separates a strong ask from a weak one is structure — four lines: context (one sentence), what I've tried (evidence you did the work first), the specific ask (a decision, an introduction, ten minutes), and my recommendation if nobody replies.

"The clinical lead at Trust X has gone quiet since the demo three weeks ago. I've followed up twice, once with the outcomes data she asked for, and I've tried her deputy. My read is she's lost internal sponsorship rather than interest. I'd like ten minutes to sanity-check that before I write it down to best case. If you agree, my plan is to go back once with a genuinely useful reason to reconnect and then park it for a quarter."

That is not a rep asking to be rescued. It is a rep showing judgement and inviting correction — which is exactly what coachability looks like from the other side of the desk.

Ask across the whole company, not only your manager: solutions engineers for technical depth, customer success for what implementation really involves, marketing for content and events, finance for how deals get papered, the top rep for a fifteen-minute deal review. Most people say yes to a specific request from a new colleague, once.

4.4 The milestone: one deal you drive end to end

By day 60 you want one opportunity that is unambiguously yours — sourced, discovered and demoed by you, with a next step you set. Ideally not the biggest in your pipeline; a medium, uncomplicated deal is a better first vehicle.

Its purpose is diagnostic: owning a full sequence reveals which stage you are weak at in a way no amount of shadowing does. Most new reps discover one of four things — they under-qualify and fill pipeline with deals that were never real; they discover well but position badly; they position well but close weakly; or they run good calls and terrible follow-up. Each has a different fix, and you cannot know which is yours until you have run the whole thing once. Ask your manager to review it at each stage rather than at the end — the review is the point.

Voice from the field

"Secure early wins. Early wins build your credibility and create momentum."
— Michael D. Watkins, The First 90 Days

An early win in a long-cycle sales seat is rarely a closed deal. It is a meeting nobody else could get, a stalled account reopened, a competitor's customer agreeing to a first conversation, a piece of research the whole team starts using. Look for the win that is available to you at your stage — and make sure your manager knows it happened, once, without fanfare.