Most sellers with a thin pipeline assume they picked the wrong channel. Ray met a full-cycle seller at an MSP whose calendar said otherwise — prospecting blocks, time boxed, six or seven channels running, real effort going in and nothing coming back. Every one of those channels works: Ray has 65 people cold calling and the data behind it, he drove $3M in sales from LinkedIn organically as a consultant, and canvassing and networking both produce given the right room and the right playbook. What he breaks down here is what happens when you split your prospecting time across all of them at once — you never reach the volume where momentum starts, and you never stay long enough to understand how a channel actually compounds. This is for founders and full-cycle sellers who are doing the work, watching the same channels produce for other people, and can't figure out why the results won't show up.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Why a full prospecting calendar can still produce an empty pipeline
• The difference between working a channel and dabbling across six of them
• How volume and mastery feed each other — and why you can't skip either
• What Ray learned about LinkedIn only after doing enough of it to see how content, DMs, profile views and Sales Navigator connect
• Why picking the channel you're best at beats picking the one that looks most promising

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Welcome to The Ray J. Green Show, your destination for tips on sales, strategy, and self-mastery from an operator, not a guru.

About Ray:

→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.

→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.

→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com

→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.

→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com

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YouTube | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

Every single thing that this guy was doing to build pipeline works. Every channel he was using — and he was investing a fair amount of time into it — and he still has no pipeline.

He's a full-cycle seller at an MSP I was talking to last week. We're coaching him. He's got a few leads that come in from marketing and inbound, but most of what he's got to sell, he's got to go create himself. And right now his pipeline is really lean.

So he said, "Hey, what do you recommend?"

And I said, "Well, first let's check. Which channels are you using? Walk me through."

He's doing some LinkedIn. He's doing some canvassing. He's doing some cold calling. He's going to some networking events. All in all, he's got six or seven channels he's using.

So I said, "Let me see your calendar." Channel first — and are you investing enough effort?

And his calendar is full. He's got prospecting blocks on his calendar. He's got it time boxed. He's going, he's doing the stuff, he's putting in the work. And he's not getting anything back.

So I said, "Look, man. Everything on your calendar technically works. LinkedIn is great for lead gen. Canvassing works — getting out there, meeting people. Networking, as long as you're in the right room and you run the right playbook and know how to actually convert, works really well. Cold calling — we've got 65 people calling, we do fractional sales management, and I've got overwhelming data that cold calling works to build pipeline too."

They all work. The problem is you're doing a little bit of all of them. You're dabbling.

And that basically means two things.

The first is you're not getting enough volume on any one of them. You canvass for a couple of hours, then you write a LinkedIn post and don't do anything there for another week. Or you send one or two DMs, you make eight phone calls, you send a couple of emails. You just spread yourself across all of it. You never do enough of any one of those things to get real traction.

You don't have to make a thousand calls a day, especially if you're doing business development as a full-cycle seller. But if you're not investing the volume, you're not going to get the qualitative side of that either. You're not going to get the reps and the feel for it. You're not going to build momentum. You're not going to get in the zone and get any good at it — where you actually start to hear and learn that channel.

That's kind of the second piece too: you never master that channel. It takes a long time to master a channel.

Take LinkedIn, for example. You're not going to write a LinkedIn post and get inundated with leads. You're not going to send one DM and get a booking. You've got to learn how these things work.

On LinkedIn, you've got content and algorithm work tied into your DMs. If you're messaging somebody, your content is going to show up on their feed and their content is going to show up on yours. And then if you engage with that content, they're more likely to look at your profile. Then you've got the who-viewed-your-profile piece, and how that attaches to Sales Navigator.

All these things are connected. Which means the better you understand them, and the better you've learned that technique and that channel, the more you master it, the more leverage you can get on it. Because I can now say, "Oh, okay, I get it — all these things work together." So my one hour, or two hours, or four hours of LinkedIn time is going to get more and more valuable the more I understand how it works.

But I've got to go deeper on that channel, which requires the volume.

So you've got to have the volume. You've got to have focused volume. And you've got to have enough to master that channel. Then you create real leverage, and the time you put in on that thing works. You get more out of your time.

The only reason I learned that was from a long time of trial and error on my part. "Oh, I didn't realize that's how that worked. I didn't realize that's how that worked." And so I started learning these things.

As a consultant, I drove $3 million in sales from LinkedIn organically — but only because I learned it. And learning it required the volume, and the volume required the focus.

So what I told him was: pick one. Pick one of these channels. Any one of them. Pick the one you're best at. Pick the one you like the most. Maybe there's one that's both — because you're going to be doing a lot of it.

And then give that your whole prospecting block. Not part of it, and not spread across everything. Give that your prospecting block.

Volume. Master it. Start to make it work. And then you've got enough to actually learn that channel and create the leverage you really want on your time. That's where you're going to start to see more results with the same amount of time going in.

So if you're lean on pipeline, and you feel like you're spinning your wheels, and you're working on channels that you see work for other people, and you're on this prospecting flywheel and just not able to get the actual results — maybe it's because your time is split.

So pick a channel, master it, double down.

Adios.