Close more deals in less time: Accelerate your Sales Funnel: 

Your Sales Funnel plays a critical role in Growing Your Business: it is the conveyor belt that carries your deals forward towards closure whilst the various roles and departments collaboratively work on moving the deals forward.

You need a consistent Sales Funnel with clear stages to be able to run diagnostics and draw conclusions on how to accelerate your Funnel. Common issues and improvement objectives are:

• • Sales Reps spending time on opportunities that are not really opportunities, and hence should be recycled to marketing for further nurturing. Sales Reps should be rigorous in the first stage of the Sales Funnel in their evaluation of a new opportunity. Is the Opportunity Real? Can we Win it? and, is it Worh it? If not all three checks can be made positively then it’s not an Opportunity

  • Sales Reps spending time on opportunities they can not move forward due to lack of commitment, budget or ‘need’ on the customer side. “Deadwood” should be removed and Sales should focus on opportunities they can move forward

  • Deals that get stuck due to lack of support that the Sales Reps might require. For example, support from Legal in the contracting stage of the Sales Funnel. Sales Priorities should be leading to anyone in the organization, and only overruled by exceptions by top management

  • Replicating success to other Sales Reps, Teams, or Regions. Analysis of top-performers often reveals things that can be replicated and taught to other Sales Reps .

Feed your Sales Funnel : Generate Sales-Ready Leads

Once your Sales Funnel gains traction (the ‘conveyor belt’ starts runninng faster), you will need more provide more Leads that Sales can follow-up on to qualify as opportunities. Marketing (Communication) will play an important role in feeding your Sales Funnel with these new leads. This is achieved by connecting your Marketing Funnel with your Sales Funnel. Handover of Leads from Marketing to Sales requires a clear definition of when a marketing-generated Lead is ready for Sales. Leads rejected by Sales need to be recycled and further nurtured by Marketing.

New Product Launches – “One Coordinated Punch”

Successful New Product Launches require a well-orchestrated approach that harmonizes the required efforts from all involved departments, e.g. Marketing Communications, Product Marketing, Sales, Pre-Sales, and R&D. This objective is a very logical extension to the processes you will have already put in place for your Sales Funnel, your Opportunity Management and your Lead Generation, but only if these have been designed and setup with this extension in mind.

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