Tingono’s 12-Month Pipeline Strategy: Building Tomorrow’s Revenue Today

Tingono’s 12-Month Pipeline Strategy: Building Tomorrow’s Revenue Today

Most B2B founders obsess over this quarter’s pipeline. They track opportunities, optimize conversion rates, and forecast revenue 30-90 days out. This works when deals close in weeks or months.

It breaks completely when deals take a year to close.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Parry Bedi, CEO and Co-Founder of Tingono, shared how he manages pipeline in a business where “our sales cycles are twelve months plus.” The revenue closing in Q4 2025 comes from pipeline generated in Q3 2024. Miss a quarter of pipeline generation, and you won’t feel the pain until three quarters later—when it’s far too late to fix.

The Time-Shifted Reality of Long-Cycle Sales

Standard pipeline management assumes a relatively direct relationship between pipeline generation and revenue. Build pipeline this month, close deals next month or next quarter. The feedback loop is tight enough that you can see what’s working and adjust quickly.

Year-long sales cycles destroy this assumption. The pipeline you’re building today won’t convert to revenue until next year. The revenue you’re closing today comes from pipeline you built last year. You’re essentially running two parallel businesses: managing today’s closings from historical pipeline while simultaneously building the pipeline that will determine revenue 12 months from now.

This time shift creates several problems that don’t exist in faster-cycle businesses. First, you can’t use current conversion rates to forecast accurately—you need historical conversion data from deals that started 12+ months ago. Second, you can’t respond quickly to changes in your market because by the time you see the impact in revenue, the damage happened three quarters earlier. Third, you need to maintain consistent pipeline generation even when current revenue looks healthy, because a gap today means a crisis next year.

The Pipeline Depth Calculation

In long-cycle businesses, pipeline depth becomes more important than pipeline velocity. You need to know not just how much pipeline you have, but how much pipeline you need at each stage to hit revenue targets 12 months out.

Here’s how the math works. If your average deal size is $100K and you need $1M in revenue next Q4, you need 10 closed deals. If your close rate on qualified opportunities is 20%, you need 50 qualified opportunities. If it takes three months to move from initial conversation to qualified opportunity, you need to start those 50 conversations no later than Q1 of next year. Which means you need to be building your prospect list and beginning outreach in Q4 of this year.

For Tingono, operating with a small team and limited sales capacity, this calculation determined everything about their GTM motion. “It was us cold emailing and cold calling,” Parry explains. They couldn’t rely on inbound or wait for prospects to find them. They needed to proactively generate a specific volume of conversations each quarter to ensure adequate pipeline 12 months later.

The discipline required here is extreme. When current revenue looks good, the natural temptation is to ease off pipeline generation. But in a long-cycle business, that’s deadly. Current revenue is the result of pipeline generation you did a year ago. If you slow down now because things look good today, you’ll have a revenue crisis in 12 months.

Building Lists That Feed the Future

With the need for consistent pipeline generation established, the tactical question becomes: how do you actually generate that pipeline quarter after quarter?

Tingono’s approach was deliberately simple and repeatable. “We would just build a list and start going after that list,” Parry shares. No complex marketing automation. No multi-touch nurture sequences. Just targeted lists of companies in regulated industries that matched their ideal customer profile.

The key was making list building a systematic process, not an ad hoc activity. Each quarter, they needed to identify a new cohort of prospects to engage. This required understanding their total addressable market, segmenting it by industry and company size, and working through those segments methodically.

For founders in similar long-cycle businesses, this means treating list building with the same rigor you’d treat product development. You need a repeatable process for identifying prospects, enriching contact data, and determining outreach sequences. You need to know how many prospects you need to contact each quarter to generate the required number of qualified conversations.

The advantage of this approach is predictability. Once you know your conversion rates at each stage—from prospect to conversation, conversation to qualified opportunity, qualified opportunity to close—you can work backwards from revenue targets to determine exactly how much prospecting activity you need. It becomes a math problem rather than a guessing game.

Forecasting With a Year-Long Lag

Traditional sales forecasting looks at current pipeline and projects forward. In long-cycle businesses, you need to look backward to forecast forward. The deals closing next quarter started 12+ months ago. Understanding the characteristics of those early-stage conversations tells you more about future revenue than looking at late-stage opportunities in your current pipeline.

This requires tracking different metrics than typical sales organizations. You need to know not just close rates, but time-to-close distributions. Not just average deal size, but how deal size correlates with initial conversation characteristics. Not just win rates, but how win rates vary by industry, company size, and initial pain points discussed.

For Tingono, this meant building institutional memory about what early indicators predicted successful closes 12 months later. Did certain types of initial conversations convert at higher rates? Did prospects from specific industries move faster through the process? Did deals initiated in certain quarters close more reliably?

These insights become the foundation for forecasting. When you start a conversation in Q1, you can estimate the probability and timing of that deal closing based on historical data from similar conversations. Aggregate across all your Q1 conversations, and you can forecast Q1 of next year with reasonable accuracy.

The Quarterly Rhythm That Prevents Gaps

The most dangerous thing in long-cycle sales is inconsistent pipeline generation. A strong Q2 followed by a weak Q3 doesn’t show up in revenue until you compare Q2 and Q3 of the following year. By then, you can’t fix it—you just have to live with the consequences.

Tingono avoided this trap by establishing a quarterly rhythm of pipeline generation that became non-negotiable. Regardless of how current revenue looked, regardless of other priorities, they maintained consistent outreach activity. This wasn’t about hitting arbitrary activity metrics—it was about ensuring they’d have adequate pipeline 12 months later.

The tactical implication is that pipeline generation can’t be something you do when you have time. It needs to be scheduled, measured, and protected. For Tingono, with founders doing the selling, this meant blocking time each week for prospecting, regardless of current deal flow or customer demands.

When the Model Breaks Down

Long-cycle pipeline management works when your sales process is relatively stable. But several factors can break the model and make forecasting unreliable.

Market shifts can change conversion rates in ways that don’t show up in revenue for a year. A new competitor, regulatory change, or economic shift might reduce close rates, but you won’t see it in closed revenue until deals in your current pipeline work through the cycle.

Changes in your product or positioning can also distort forecasts. If you pivot your messaging or add features that change your ideal customer profile, historical conversion data becomes less predictive. You’re essentially starting over with a new model.

Team changes matter too. If the person who generated pipeline 12 months ago is no longer with the company, and the new person has a different approach, you can’t assume historical conversion rates will hold. For Tingono, staying small mitigated this risk—with founders doing the selling, the sales approach stayed consistent.

The Principle: Build Two Years Ahead

Strip away Tingono’s specifics and you’re left with a principle: in long-cycle businesses, you need to be building pipeline for revenue that’s 18-24 months out. Not because you can forecast that far accurately, but because the lead time is so long that you need to start generating pipeline before you know exactly what you’ll need.

This is fundamentally different from fast-cycle sales where you can be responsive. In long-cycle businesses, you’re making bets today that won’t pay off until next year. You can’t wait until you need revenue to start building pipeline—by then, it’s too late.

For Tingono, staying “pretty capital efficient” as Parry notes, was partly about ensuring they had enough runway to let their long-cycle model play out. You need 18-24 months of runway not because you’re unprofitable, but because the revenue you’re building today won’t materialize until then.

The companies that succeed in long-cycle markets are the ones that embrace this reality rather than fighting it. They build pipeline relentlessly and consistently. They track leading indicators from early-stage conversations. They maintain discipline even when current revenue looks strong. And most importantly, they recognize that in their business, tomorrow’s revenue is being built today.