Think about every owner in your target market. Not the ones who called you. All of them.
At any given moment, a small slice of them are ready to sell right now. They have decided, they are looking for an advisor, and they are taking calls. That slice is roughly 3%.
Those are the owners your inbound marketing reaches. They are also the owners your referral network sends you, the ones searching for a broker, the ones answering listings. Which means every advisor and broker in your market is competing for the same 3%, at the same time, with the same message.
The rest of the market
Chet Holmes, who ran sales for Charlie Munger's companies, mapped buyers into a pyramid by how ready they were to buy. The same shape holds for sellers, and it looks like this:
Look at the middle. Sixty percent of the market has not decided anything. They have not thought about selling, or they assume they are not interested. They are not searching, not answering listings, and not raising their hand to anyone. Nothing about them is broken. They simply have not been asked.
They will never find you. There is no campaign clever enough to make someone search for a thing they have not considered. The only way you reach that 60% is if someone contacts them directly.
What this means for a pipeline
If every opportunity in your pipeline comes from inbound and referrals, your pipeline is built entirely on 3% of the market, and it moves at whatever speed that 3% happens to be moving this quarter. That is why deal flow feels like feast and famine. Eight referrals one week, then six quiet months. You are not doing anything wrong. You are fishing in a small, crowded pond.
The 60% in the middle is where consistency comes from, because its size does not swing. It is always there, and almost nobody is talking to them.
And the bottom 30%, the owners who know they are not ready? When you are reaching out directly, you will hit some of them too. That is fine. It costs you a call.
The pyramid is Chet Holmes' framework for buyer readiness. Applying it to sellers, and mapping which channels reach which tiers, is our own reading of it, based on what we see running campaigns.