Most sales reps entering a new territory do the same thing: they pull up the playbook from their last job and start running plays. It feels productive. It isn’t. The companies, the buyers, the triggers, and the dynamics are different – and the results reflect that. Any new market entry has to start with an conversation on how to build B2B sales pipeline.
Jake Ragkousis knows this firsthand. As National Sales Director at Ready Media Group, he left REA – one of Australia’s best-resourced sales organizations – at the height of COVID to compete against two blue-chip incumbents with a fraction of the brand recognition and budget. Ricky Pearl has built pipeline from scratch for hundreds of companies entering APAC markets, many without a proven product, a recognized brand, or any existing relationships in market.
In a recent Firmable webinar, both sat down with me to talk through exactly what it takes to build a B2B sales pipeline from nothing. Here, I capture the core frameworks, the specific mistakes to avoid, and the practical steps that actually move the number.
Key takeaways
- The pain exists before your brand does. Focus on finding prospects exhibiting the symptoms of the problem your product solves, not on building awareness first.
- Your list is your strategy. A well-constructed, hypothesis-driven ICP list practically writes its own message. If you need to think hard about the messaging, the list isn’t specific enough.
- Layer signals, not just firmographics. ICP definition that stops at industry, size, and title is incomplete. The strongest lists layer in trigger events, hiring signals, and behavioral indicators.
- The phone is still the fastest feedback loop. Email gives you yeses. Calls give you nos – and nos are what let you refine your targeting faster.
- Productive procrastination kills early pipeline. Spending weeks perfecting a list before making a call is a delay tactic, not a strategy. Good-enough data plus action beats perfect data plus inaction.
- Do more unscalable things. Curated lunches, invite-only events, and personal outreach consistently outperform high-volume automated sequences for building real pipeline.
The market doesn’t know you exist. And that’s fine.
The starting point for new market pipeline is the problem, not the product.
When Ricky Pearl began building outbound programs for companies entering APAC, the ones without brand recognition assumed this was the core obstacle. It isn’t. In most B2B segments – outside enterprise – buyers aren’t filtering by brand. They’re filtering by whether the product solves a problem they currently have.
“You’re not looking for people who recognize you. What you’re looking for is that pain in the wild – where can I find people that have the problem and are exhibiting the symptoms of the problem that my product was created to solve?”
This reframe matters because it changes where you spend your first 90 days. Instead of investing in brand-building activities – thought leadership, sponsored content, conference presence – you spend that time building lists of people who are already experiencing the problem and are in a position to act on a solution. The brand can come later. Pipeline has to come first.
Jake Ragkousis took the same approach at Ready Media. He didn’t try to build name recognition before building revenue. He identified the gap in how commercial property listings were matched to buyers – a gap created by an advertising model that had been copy-pasted from print classifieds into an online format without being fundamentally rethought – and then went directly to the agents and developers who were already frustrated by that gap.
Where most teams get it wrong
The biggest pipeline mistake is conflating a full calendar with a working ICP.
Ricky Pearl described a pattern he has seen across dozens of go-to-market programs: a company builds a list, runs outbound, and books discovery calls. The reps are busy. The CRM looks healthy. Then quarter end arrives and almost nothing has closed. The root cause is almost always the same – the ICP was defined loosely, the list wasn’t specific enough, and the team was booking meetings with people who were interested but not qualified.
“You’ve got to be testing and measuring your ICP all the way through to revenue. And you’ll know – really – all the way through to retention and expansion.”
A secondary failure mode is what Pearl calls productive procrastination.
Productive procrastination
Productive procrastination is the act of using preparation tasks – list building, research, CRM setup, sequence writing – as a substitute for making the first call. It feels like progress. It isn’t.
The logic that justifies it is seductive: if I research my list for longer, my outreach will be better, my connect rate will improve, and I’ll waste less time on unqualified prospects. Pearl’s version of this logic runs to its conclusion: “Why don’t you research them for a month, and then you never have to pick up the phone.”
The problem is that data gathered before a call is always less valuable than information gathered on one. The call is the research. Getting systems right so you have the key context in front of you when you dial is valuable. Delaying the dial until the system is perfect is not.
The third common failure – and one Jake Ragkousis experienced directly when building the Ready Media team – is hiring for relationships without screening for the BDM mindset. He brought over experienced reps from REA who had existing market relationships, which gave Ready Media immediate traction. But some of those reps were optimized for account management rather than new business development. In a startup, those are fundamentally different jobs.
“With us it wasn’t like that. You had to think on your feet quickly and you had to problem solve and you had to do everything that a startup usually does.”
How to build a list that writes its own message
A well-built ICP list doesn’t need clever messaging: the specificity of the list does the work.
Ricky Pearl’s approach to TAM-to-list conversion is built on layering. The process starts broad and narrows through a sequence of hypothesis-driven filters, each one reducing the population and increasing the precision of the outreach.
He gave a worked example from Pointer’s outsourced SDR business. Start with the broadest relevant population: companies that might consider outsourcing SDR services. Then layer in:
- Companies currently hiring their first SDR (higher propensity to outsource)
- Companies where a previous SDR hire failed (higher pain)
- Companies where the SDR reports to marketing rather than sales (higher dysfunction)
- Where the head of marketing is new to their role (higher urgency, lower bandwidth)
- Where that head of marketing has never managed an SDR team before (highest fit)
By the end of that process, you have a list so specific that the message is obvious. “A new head of marketing who has never run an SDR team, who has come into an existing SDR team that’s struggling because they’re suffering from churn and they’re looking to hire a single SDR in seat.” Pearl’s point: if you handed that brief to anyone on the team and asked what message to send, they’d all arrive at the same answer.
The implication for list-building tooling is direct: this level of specificity requires data that goes beyond industry and title. It requires sales intelligence signals: hiring activity, role changes, funding events, behavioral indicators. This is where platforms like Firmable become structurally important to the process, not optional add-ons.
Pearl’s maxim:
“The list is the strategy. The messaging writes itself.”
Read more about how to define your ICP here.
Real-world application
How Ready Media built its buyer database using Firmable
Jake Ragkousis had a strong ICP hypothesis when he joined Ready Media: commercial property buyers and sellers across specific asset classes, price points, and states. The challenge was that his transaction data – extracted from every commercial transaction over $1 million in Australia for the preceding six years – was entity-level. He had company names, not decision-maker contacts.
“We only had, for the most part, entities and company names,” he said. “That didn’t do much good because in order for me to successfully build a database I could retarget, I needed to find out who the decision maker was behind that company.”
Firmable closed that gap. By uploading entity lists and matching them to verified individual contacts – with direct mobile numbers and confirmed emails – Ready Media was able to move from a property transaction database to a targetable audience of actual buyers.
The downstream application was multi-channel. Ready Media uploaded the matched first-party data to social platforms, targeting specific buyer profiles (by asset class, price point, and location) with listings matched to their historical purchase behavior. On some campaigns they achieved 85-90% match rates on social – enabling them to put a specific listing directly in front of the right buyer’s feed.
“Everything else we had mapped out very neatly,” Ragkousis said. “We knew exactly who we wanted to target. We just didn’t know who those people actually were.”
How Ricky Pearl blended account-based and signal-based targeting
Pearl’s approach to the account-based versus signal-based question was direct: both are necessary, but timing signals should be actioned faster.
“The right timing often trumps the perfect company,” he said. “Those that are in-market could close the quickest.”
The practical model is a three-tier list structure: a short-term list of prospects showing active buying signals (to be actioned immediately), a medium-term list of strong-fit accounts to be nurtured, and a long-term list of target accounts to build relationship with over time. When a contact from the medium or long-term list triggers a signal, they move up.
The same logic applies to contact routing. When the direct mobile for a target wasn’t available, Pearl’s team would call the most senior contact they did have a direct number for and ask for an internal referral. “We’d phone the CFO looking for an internal referral to the COO.” Direct line as fallback, email as last resort, retargeting as the always-on layer underneath all of it.
How to apply this to build B2B sales pipeline
- Start with the problem, not the pitch. Before you build any outreach, write a single sentence that describes the specific pain your product solves. Every list you build, every call you make, and every email you send should connect back to that sentence. If it doesn’t, you’re probably targeting the wrong person.
- Build your TAM first, then layer in signals. Get a complete list of every company that could plausibly be a customer. Then apply filters in sequence – trigger events, hiring activity, role changes, specific behaviors – until the list is small enough that the message is obvious. Ricky Pearl’s rule: if you’re still thinking hard about what to say, the list isn’t specific enough yet.
- Use Firmable to move from entity data to decision-maker contacts. If you’re working from any form of company-level data – transactions, funding rounds, industry lists – map it to verified contacts before you start outreach. Entity-level data doesn’t convert. Person-level data with a direct mobile does.
- Pick up the phone before you’ve perfected the list. Set a threshold: 70% confidence in the list is enough to start calling. The calls will tell you more about your ICP than another week of research will. Treat every no as data. Document why, and use it to refine the next list.
- Measure ICP fitness all the way to closed revenue, not just booked meetings. A full pipeline with low close rates is not a pipeline problem – it’s an ICP problem. If your reps are running discovery calls that don’t progress, go back to the list and identify what the closed deals had in common that the stalled ones didn’t.
- Run at least one high-value, invite-only event per quarter. Jake Ragkousis and Ricky Pearl both cited small, curated events – 10 to 20 people, specialist speakers, genuine knowledge exchange – as consistently outperforming scaled outbound for building real pipeline. Scarcity is a feature. Invite only the exact buyer profile you want in the room.
- Do the unscalable things deliberately and regularly. Networking lunches, individual referral conversations, handwritten follow-ups, direct calls to senior contacts. These have low throughput and high conversion. Build them into your weekly rhythm as a fixed allocation, not an occasional add-on when the pipeline is thin.
Conclusion
Knowing how to build B2B sales pipeline from scratch is a solvable problem. It requires precision over volume, a hypothesis-driven approach to ICP definition, and the discipline to test assumptions against actual revenue rather than proxies like meeting volume or open rates.
Jake Ragkousis and Ricky Pearl got here through different routes – one building a startup challenger brand against two incumbents, the other running outbound at scale across hundreds of companies. Their conclusions are the same: start with the pain, build the list before writing the message, pick up the phone early, and do the unscalable things that automated systems can’t replicate.
The reps and teams that build durable pipeline are the ones who treat list-building as a strategic function, not an admin task, and who use tools like Firmable to close the gap between a strong hypothesis and a targetable, verified audience.
Learn more about how to build B2B sales pipeline
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FAQs about how to build B2B sales pipeline
Ricky Pearl’s advice, drawn from running outbound programmes for hundreds of APAC go-to-market entries, is to focus on the pain rather than the brand. Find people who are exhibiting the symptoms of the problem your product solves. They don’t need to know who you are — they need to have the problem. This narrows your initial outreach to a smaller, better-qualified population and makes the message much more direct. In most B2B segments outside enterprise, brand recognition is not the barrier people assume it is.
Start with a hypothesis and layer in signals to get specific enough that the message becomes obvious. Ricky Pearl’s approach is to take your broadest possible TAM — every company that could plausibly need your product — and then apply sequential filters: trigger events, hiring behavior, role changes, structural signals within the target account. Each filter narrows the list and sharpens the message. The goal is a list so specific that any rep would send the same message to it. Once you start running calls and campaigns, measure conversion all the way through to closed revenue, not just to booked meetings, and use that data to validate or refine the hypothesis.
Yes. Ricky Pearl’s outsourced SDR programs have averaged over 17.5% connect rates across Australian B2B campaigns, and he reports similar numbers in New Zealand. AI call screening has had minimal measurable impact. The more important point is that the phone is the only channel that consistently returns a no with a reason – and that qualitative data is what lets you refine your targeting faster than email ever will.
Jake Ragkousis at Ready Media used Firmable to convert entity-level transaction data into verified decision-maker contacts. He had extensive data on commercial property transactions – company names, asset classes, price points – but no individual contacts. By uploading that data to Firmable, he matched entities to specific decision-makers with verified emails and direct mobile numbers. He then uploaded that first-party data to social platforms, achieving match rates of 85-90% on some campaigns and serving listings directly to the right buyers in their feeds.
The clearest signal that your ICP needs adjusting is not a low connect rate – it’s a high meeting rate with a low close rate. If reps are booking calls but deals aren’t closing, the ICP is off. Pearl recommends building lists that are specific enough to be testable: change one variable at a time, measure the downstream impact, and document what changes. If you’re throwing things at the wall and something sticks, but you can’t explain why, you haven’t found your ICP – you’ve found a sample.
Ricky Pearl’s model is to run both simultaneously at different time horizons. Signal-based prospects – those showing active buying triggers – should be actioned immediately because in-market timing matters more than perfect account fit. Account-based lists should run in parallel as a medium and long-term nurture. When a target account generates a signal, it moves up the priority stack. The mistake is treating these as either/or strategies. They’re complementary layers of the same pipeline program.
Jake Ragkousis structures Ready Media’s events around genuine knowledge exchange rather than product pitches. He brings in specialists – town planners, developers, sector experts – to share insights the audience can’t easily access elsewhere. The format is deliberately constrained: invite-only, 20 people maximum, explicit selectivity in who gets invited. Ricky Pearl’s principle is similar: the curation matters more than the content. People attend because of who else is in the room. Define your ICP, fill the room with only that profile, and the pipeline conversations happen naturally.
