Evaluating and Enhancing Your Sales Funnel

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The most painful part of any sales funnel, is actually evaluating your funnel. We all have sales funnels, and we input data on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. However, if that data isn’t useful or helping us move forward to ultimately win a pursuit, then what’s the point of having any of it in there?

Because you have to…right? Or your boss told you to. The list of excuses can be extensive.

Look Upstream, Not Where the Problem Currently Is

Find the root cause of the problem. Each sales stage plays a particular role within your organization, with a set list of KPIs and metrics. If you review and find out that you are sending out proposals and losing, you can’t specifically look at the stage that your proposals reside in, you need to look further back to see why specific opportunities got to that specific stage, and submit a losing bid.

How did your opportunity get to that particular stage? Were there specific parameters/gate reviews/Go-No-Go decisions that were accomplished for the opportunity to move forward? If there was one opportunity like this, I’m sure there are many more.

Look back one stage, look back at the stage before that (depending on how many stages you have set in your sales process), and review the qualifications required for opportunities to move forward.

Lack of Ownership

Someone actually needs to take ownership of solving the upstream problems. If not, sales teams will keep going through the phases. Be able to move quickly if a customer wants to move quickly, but have a structured approach to make the proper steps through a customer journey.

“That’s not mine to fix” can be a common occurrence you will hear too.

If you are responsible for ownership of your company’s sales pipeline, even your own opportunities, you need to be accountable for how it is set up, what is in it, the process, how it is staged, and so forth.

Analyze Your Data & Insights

Within your CRM, collect, organize, and visualize your sales funnel data. Look for patterns, gaps (i.e., missing information, contract value, decision-makers, etc.), and anomalies.

For example, you see that there is a significant drop-off in opportunities between two stages. This can be due to factors such as:

Follow-ups

Inadequate nurturing and customer engagement

Competitor factors

Lack of internal coordination (i.e., marketing, customer service, executive, technical)

Shift in customer preferences, market dynamics

Quality leads

Review One Step at a Time

Instead of trying to conquer your whole sales funnel at once, start at one stage, and then go from there.

Get feedback from your sales team and customers on current obstacles, bottlenecks, and areas for improvement.

This could be because the leads aren’t strong (fix your lead quality with marketing), presentations aren’t connecting (work with marketing and product management), or need executive-level support with customers (work with senior management).

By the time you are at a proposal stage and want to submit, you should have the voice and ear of the customer.

Implement Your Improvements and Experiments

You are going to find what works best for you and your team. I’d recommend using a data-driven approach and customer-centric so you can optimize your sales funnel, and increase your overall hit rate.

Start with looking at the areas that need the most improvement, whether it’s lead generation, qualification, proposal submission, negotiation, or closing.

Test your new experiments. If your feedback from sales was you needed better quality leads, work with marketing to improve how you can get better leads. This could range from asking clearer questions, to even including a chatbot across your social media channels so that when leads do come in, your sales team has a clearer picture of what a lead is looking for.

CRM Health Grader

Want to check out how healthy your current sales pipeline is? We have a partnership with SetSail, and you’ll see 12 critical indicators of CRM health, including:

Opportunities without recent activity

Contacts missing key data

Poor account coverage

Low rep activity levels

Currently only available to Salesforce users. Click here to access it for free today.

This is never fun to do. It opens up gaps that we all will say “We should have addressed this earlier.” It’s still January and a great time to address it.

You are now adding additional structure to your sales foundation.

Stay humble, stay hungry. Have a great week and I’ll see you next week.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

Build your Sales CRM – Download our free Sales eBook on How Your Sales Team Can Maximize Your CRM Tool. Whether it’s Hubspot, Salesforce, or another CRM tool, make sure you leverage it to your advantage.

Awesome Sales Resources – Transform your sales engagement across Social Selling, CRM, Lead Generation, Enablement, and more.