The Pipeline Is Slowing. Now What?
On Thursday we hosted our first ever ‘public’ Revenue Room, a closed-door conversation with founder CEOs, revenue leaders and senior operators from across B2B, B2B2C, B2C.
The question was simple: pipeline feels harder to build, deals are taking longer, and the revenue coming out the back end is less predictable. What are we actually doing about it?
Here’s what the room had to say.
The big themes that came out of Session 01:
- ICP discipline is everything right now. One leader shared how their team analysed 1,800 closed-won and closed-lost deals over 2.5 years, used AI and Gartner data to rebuild their ICP tiers from scratch, and saw win rates and deal velocity jump significantly. The takeaway? If it’s outside your ICP leave it, pass it back, and put all your energy where you actually win.
- Close-lost is an underused goldmine. A go-to-market veteran ran a play targeting 900 close-lost contacts over LinkedIn, using screenshots of the product in action as proof the gap had been closed. Five weeks. Six new deals. Lowest ticket: £25K. Sometimes the best pipeline is the one you already built.
- GEO is the new SEO — and it’s already producing results. Two people on the call shared that they’d received their largest-ever inbound leads directly from ChatGPT and LLM-powered search. One of those leads came from the founder of BrewDog. The consensus: brands that train agents to understand who they are and what they solve will win the next era of inbound. Those that don’t will become invisible.
- Outreach fatigue is real, and getting worse. AI-powered email has flooded every inbox. Cold calling is harder. The room agreed: undifferentiated outbound is dying. What’s replacing it? Signal-based outreach, intent data, community-led engagement, and deeply personalised messaging rooted in research, not automation.
- Your existing customers are your most valuable pipeline. One contributor cited Fullcast’s 2026 benchmark: over 52% of new revenue came from existing customers. And yet, in many businesses, 72% of the customer base has only one product. The land-and-expand play isn’t a nice-to-have anymore, it’s the primary growth lever.
- Trust is the new moat. The conversation kept circling back to one thing: trust. Affiliates are losing traffic. Spam is eroding brand equity. LLMs are rewarding brands that show up with clarity and consistency. The businesses that win from here are the ones genuinely acting in their customers’ interest, not gaming the system.
What’s next?
We’ll be running The Revenue Room as an ongoing series. Each session will go deeper on a specific revenue lever, from founder-led selling to account expansion to GEO-led GTM.
I’m also launching a WhatsApp group and Slack channel so the conversation continues between sessions.
If you’d like to have a private conversation about any of the topics raised here, then I’m easy to reach, just DM me, or grab a time from Calendly here
🎥 Watch the full recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DIK3mSe5d07wN2WDRrP6izO3HNVUlyDf/view?usp=sharing
Simon Watson | Founder – R&B Consulting Group – Linkedin