Closing more deals in less time: the essential role of your Sales Funnel

Achieving significant and autonomous growth is challenging for most organizations. Despite the time and effort spent, actual growth is often marginal.

It is taking us too long to close new deals

We spend too much time on deals we end up losing

Our success is very unpredictable,

and forecasting is problematic

Our Sales Team is not continuously hunting

for new-business, cross-sell or up-sell opportunities

Our ‘Product Launches’ miss impact

due to the lack of a coordinated punch into the market

We are not able to replicate the success

of our Top Sellers to our Underperformers

Our sales funnel is not ‘big enough

to support our growth objectives

We lose deals because other departments (e.g., Legal)

are not aligned with the sales priorities

The critical role of your Sales Funnel

Your Sales Funnel should be the conveyor built that moves your Opportunities forward to closure. Sales should only be working on deals they can close. Hence, what does not move forward should not be on the conveyor belt. Read: Sales should not be spending time on these opportunities but recycle them back to marketing for further nurturing.

A well-defined Sales Funnel offers great potential:

You can match the stages of your Sales Funnel with your customers’ buying cycle to assuring Account Managers keep a customer perspective throughout the entire sales cycle.
You can create clear instructions on what actions need to be done in each stage, and, what needs to be completed before proceeding to the next stage
You can track progress for each individual Opportunity and ensure your Account Managers only work on Opportunities they can move forward
You can ensure you prioritize your high-value Customers and high-value Opportunities.
It provides you with realtime insights so you can apply learnings and further drive sales performance.

This potential can only materialize if everyone is consequently and consistently using the agreed actions and stages of your Sales Funnel. Your Performance Management approach needs to drive the required Rhythm & Rigor to assure this consistent execution.

Turning Insights into Improvement

Consistent Execution leads to actionable insights, that can be used to manage and improve the performance of your Sales Team in closing new deals:

Which stages of our Sales Funnel are taking too long? And, Why?
Which root causes for losing a deal can we detect earlier in the Funnel? Can we lose them earlier and refocus energy and attention to “deals we can win”?
What makes our Top Sellers successful, and how can we replicate their success to Underperformers?
Is the sheer size of our sales funnel ‘big enough” to fuel our growth objectives?

Ingredients of our Solution

a best practice ‘Sales Funnel’ that you can leverage to redesign your current funnel in a way that requires minimal changes and additions.
a method to match your customers’ buying cycle is included in this best practice Sales Funnel
a best practice for Sales Funnel Management to enforce consistent usage of your Funnel to obtain accurate, consolidated insights into your business development
a best practice for Performance Management to empower you and your Team to close more deals in less time
a Reference Implementation for CRM to accelerate the development (of changes in) your CRM system
a Reference Implementation for Reports & Dashboards that will provide the insights for your Sales Execution and Performance Review Cycle