how to make your sales funnel flow...

© Copyright 2005, Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All rights reserved.

How to Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.

October, 2005

Note: I am indebted to Hugh Macfarlane, author of “The Leaky Funnel,” for his

invaluable contributions to this article.

Introduction

The growth of many companies is constrained by their sales funnel. Although many of

their best minds are focused on sales and marketing, it is often one of the company’s

most frustrating efforts. Usually, they take a sort of “cocktail shaker” approach, mixing in

all the newsletters, advertisements, collateral, and sales techniques they like. Then they

shake things up in the market, promoting their company, touting their products, offering

specials, sending out “closers,” and hoping for the best.

So, why can’t they find enough prospects? When prospects are found, why do so many

fail to close as forecasted? And, why do so many prospects seem to cooperate with their

sales efforts, and yet don’t buy?

These companies are eager for prospects to buy, so why won’t they cooperate? The

reason is actually simple.

They aren’t ready. (Duh!)

What can companies do to make their sales funnel flow faster?

There is a simple, effective approach that works. You can implement it in your company.

It is not hard to do, or even expensive. The only thing it requires is that you stop focusing

on your company, your products, and your needs. Instead, focus on the prospect’s

business, their objectives, and their impediments. Then, work to remove those

impediments. Call it the buyer’s journey.

How to Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster


The Buyer’s Journey

In his book, “The Leaky Funnel,” Hugh Macfarlane provides a simple description of the

buyer’s journey. Figure 1 represents a version of that journey:

Figure 1: The Buyer’s Journey

Customers seeking to solve problems and grow their business vary this sequence

according to the circumstances. They may need the purchasing department to position

vendors early in the process (as is the case in “The Leaky Funnel”). Or, they may need to

strategically prioritize and plan for various projects, or conduct pilot testing. The stages

depend on their environment. The problem is that sellers typically ignore the buyer’s

journey in favor of their own:

Figure 2: “The Sales Process”



Clearly, buyers and sellers are coming from different planets. Companies invest heavily

in sales forces, always looking for “closers” who somehow won’t fail to make their

quotas. They spend money on CRM or sales training in an effort to improve results. They

fiddle with compensation, or even replace the sales leaders. They invest in marketing

collateral, websites, and promotion in an effort to “soften the market.” Most of the time,

unfortunately, these investments in “the sales process” (as it is typically construed) have

increasingly diminishing returns because they are focused around the company’s product,

rather than the buyer’s problems.

How can this problem be fixed? Fortunately, it is not incredibly difficult. There are four

steps to organize your company’s efforts to make your sales funnel flow faster:

Figure 3: Steps to Make the Sales Funnel Flow Faster



Define the buyer’s journey

People everywhere are trying to achieve their goals and solve problems. How much does

your company know about the problems they have, how they go about solving them, and

what those efforts cost? Do you have evidence and data to support your theories, or do

you presume to know what prospects want?

Valuable techniques exist for researching and gathering this data. For example, Voice of

the Customer initiatives provide a structured and systematic means of assembling facts

from existing sources, such as customer complaints, technical support calls, warranty

claims, and proactive interviewing and surveys. These data are then translated into lists of

issues and needs that are critical to value, or Critical to Quality (or CTQs as they are

known in Six Sigma). CTQs apply to a service like the marketing and sales process every

bit as much as they apply to the requirements for a product.

Likewise, a technique known as customer value mapping can be useful in defining who

within your prospect’s business is impacted by your products and services, and which

aspects of their world you can have an impact on.1 These insights help identify the kinds

of questions salespeople (or marketers) should be asking to uncover prospect needs

before the sales process begins.

You should gather as much information as you can via Voice of the Customer and

customer value mapping. Add that information to the collective knowledge of your team

to create a map of the buyer’s journey. Then, invite some of your customers to help you

validate that map. As you talk with them, gather as much information as you can about

their problems, their work-arounds, and what those work-arounds cost. You may find that

different types of customers have a different journey. This is important information that

may enable you to segment your market in ways more productive than traditional

marketing demographics.

1 A more complete treatment of customer and business value mapping can be found in my book, “Business Value Mapping – Why Your Prospects and Salespeople Don’t Understand Your Product’s Value and What You Can Do About It.”



Establish metrics for each stage

Once you map out the journey for your prospects, you are in a position to begin gathering

data about your process. As in any production process, there are three kinds of

information. First is the calculation of lag time, which is the time it takes for prospects to

progress through each stage of their journey. Second is the quality of the opportunities.

Third is the quantity of the opportunities, which enables the calculation of throughput

(and improvements in throughput). These are interdependent variables, as we will see.

In measuring lag time, first try to guess how much time it takes for buyers to progress

through each of the stages of their journey. Then, do some research, and identify the

actual amount of time it takes them to progress. You could do this by examining

information in your existing forecasting or opportunity management system, or by asking

salespeople to keep some records for a while. (You might not be able to get perfectly

clean data on each stage. Still, you should be able to get enough information to begin

identifying differences between what you thought lag time would be and what is actually

the case.

One large client measured the length of the sales cycle for deals it won, and the deals it

lost. The average time for winning a deal was 56 days. The average time for losing a deal

was 156 days. While it might be a bit extreme to take so much longer to lose a deal than

it does to win one, it points up an interesting phenomenon.

Buyers who take longer than is normal to progress become far less likely to buy. They are

called laggards, and you can measure them in your own business. How much time do

salespeople spend trying to sell laggard prospects?

One telecommunications company mined data from its forecasting system. They

compared the days of sales effort required to win deals (i.e., progress to a yes) with the

days of sales effort required on deals they lost (i.e., progress to a no). It turned out these

were vastly different numbers. Deals they won happened relatively quickly. Deals they



lost often took much more sales time. In fact, in one year the company spent a staggering

19,000 more days pursuing buyers who didn’t buy than ones who did!

Of course, your business will be different, but this clearly illustrates the importance of

measuring the progress of opportunities through the buyer’s journey, aka the “sales

funnel.” But how do you learn what is wrong with these laggard prospects, and perhaps

what to do about them?

That is the point of the second critical thing to measure in your sales funnel, the quality of

the opportunities. Here is an example from an engineering client who was struggling with

the same problem – lagging buyers – although they used a different metric: for them it

was a low close ratio that hovered around 10% regardless of what they did to improve it.

They joked about having so many deals that wouldn’t close they “needed a bulldozer to

push them onto the next quarter’s forecast.” Since deals weren’t closing, management

decided salespeople needed training in how to close them, and we were hired to help.

However, when we brought in a group of salespeople and their managers and begin to

learn the nature of the deals in their sales funnel, it became apparent something was

wrong. The opportunities in the sales funnel had nothing in common. One was for a

mysterious electrical problem the client’s engineer had been unable to diagnose. Another

was for labor on a construction project that was going out for bid. A third was to quote

design work against an incumbent engineering company. Management had failed to

define what a qualified opportunity was. Like many people, they assumed qualification

was a remedial issue best left up to the sales department. As pressure mounted to close

more business, salespeople began chasing harder and harder after anything that moved.

In manufacturing terms, it was as if they were attempting to add value to scrap.



We quickly worked to help them define appropriate qualifying criteria, and then applied

it to their sales funnel.2 Two things happened very quickly. First within 90 days, the close

ratio skyrocketed to just over 40%, freeing up an enormous amount of resources for

pursuing higher quality opportunities. Second, by removing all those low-quality

opportunities clogging the funnel, it became apparent that there wasn’t enough work in

process to support the business plan. With the air finally cleared, management could

focus on the real problem: finding more market.

Clearly, we must understand the quality of the opportunities in the funnel if we are to

really have an idea of the quantity of opportunities in the funnel for forecasting and

making management decisions.

Using the sales funnel as a production metaphor has been around for a long time, and

measuring it has always been a big challenge. This is largely a result of setting up the

foundations incorrectly (i.e., defining the process in terms of our actions, instead of the

prospect’s). This mistake sets the stage for a host of problems, which are only amplified

when CRM software systems are used to automate measurement of the sales funnel.

Salespeople know they are paid to sell, not to keep administrative records. As a result,

scratching the surface of most company’s sales process measurements often shows the

wrong data being collected, no data being collected, or nothing to substantiate the data

that is collected.

Many of these problems can be resolved once operating definitions of the process are

revised to acknowledge the actions you want customers to take along their journey. As

we will see, this enables your company to be in a better position to bring marketers and

sellers together and to identify the tactics that can help the buyer progress in the journey.

Implementing these tactics opens many new possibilities for measuring the progression

2 A more complete treatment of qualification criteria is available in my book, “How to Develop Qualification Criteria that Will Help You Find and Win Customers.”



of those buyers, often without encumbering the sales force with the administrative

burdens of traditional approaches.

Match your selling tactics to the stages of the buyer’s journey

I mentioned the cocktail shaker where we put all our tactics together and shake them up

hoping something good happens. Once the buyer’s journey is defined, a much more

effective approach breaks their process into stages and makes each work individually.

Ask yourself the question, “What tactics can we apply that are good enough to help

buyers move from stage one to stage two in their journey?”

After you answer this question to some degree, put the tactics in place, and make them

work. Then, move on to the successive stages of the process, asking the same questions

and making the answers work.

You’ll find that some of your current tactics may not actually be necessary to move

buyers through their stages. You’ll also stages where you don’t have tactics that are good

enough. Often, simply by aligning the tactics to specific stages through the buyer’s

journey helps accelerate them. That’s because it prevents you from making the mistake of

focusing on your product instead of their problem.

For example, if a prospect is at the beginning of the cycle and you promote benefits of

your product, you won’t connect because these benefits are important to them only at the

end of the cycle. By focusing on where the buyer is on their journey, and devising a

means of helping them get to the next stage instead, you automatically become more

productive. Some marketers call this a “market to message match.”

Likewise, salespeople are taught if they fail to help the prospect formulate the problem,

something else or someone else will or can. If you can get prospects troubled about the

right problem, not only are they going to have the right need, but they are going to have



the right expectations of what is going to happen when that need is met. Then you are

going to be in a position to put an offer on the table that is compelling and appropriate.

This is one of the reasons to focus your communication around the problem you are in the

business of solving, and not just the need that you are in the business of meeting.

For example, if you focus on needs instead of getting buyers troubled about their

problems, you can get an odd behavior. You can get them to recognize a need for your

product or service, and even interest them in your product or service. With some effort a

salesperson may even get them to acknowledge the dollar value of their potential

solution. However, if the right people in their business are not troubled by the pain of

lacking your product or service, they may not act. In effect, they will have implicitly

decided not to act, even though they have not done so explicitly. This is the trap named

by the old adage, “you can’t sell the solution, unless you’ve sold the problem first.”

There is another subtle but important distinction between a need and a problem. A need

can be described in positive language. If they have a need, but don’t have a problem,

frequently they won’t act. Unfortunately, many of us are uncomfortable talking in

negative language about the bad that may happen.

However, consider the insurance industry, which has done a good job of talking about all

of the bad things that flow if you don’t have insurance or if you are underinsured, and for

which you need protection. The technique works. The fact is buyers are inundated with

problems all the time. They are focused on problems and are constantly trying to solve

problems. It is a mistake to settle for talking about needs, because for each of the unmet

needs there is an underlying problem. For each of those underlying problems we should

needle them, because in truth we want buyers to be troubled about the problem as well as

their needs.

Lets return for a moment to the beginning of the buyer’s journey. What could you do to

get an untroubled and unaware prospect to recognize the dangers of doing nothing?



• Perhaps your company could get well-written articles placed in various journals

read by key executives in your industry. If the articles provided a call to action at

the end with an enticing offer of more information (and not for your product!),

you might be able to set up a stream of inquiries.

• Once you’ve created this stream of inquiries, what can you do with it? Would

information on specific case studies help them, or perhaps information on

remedies or other problem-solving information? Suppose you knew that some

were considering a "roll their own" approach. Would they be interested in the

details of what is actually involved?

Suppose a prospect recognizes the problem, and the need, but is being held back by a

different issue? Here is another example, this time further down the buyer’s journey. One

company I worked for launched a new line of industrial devices based on micro-computer

technology (an advance over mini-computer technology). This should have been a

tremendously successful product launch to its customers (who were typically

manufacturing engineers). Unfortunately, it did not turn out that way at first. Although

the new device saved money and space, it also unfortunately required the customers to

learn a new programming language. Naturally, the company also offered wonderful (and

wonderfully expensive) classes so people could to learn how to program these new

devices. For the buyers, however, the time away from their plants, combined with the

cost of the classes created a problem that dampened the market, and sales were not

meeting targets. Touting the benefits of the new product didn’t work. Lowering the price

didn’t work. Only lowering the barrier to learning that new programming language could

solve the problem.

The sales force, themselves degreed engineers, jumped to the rescue. They launched

wave after wave of “lunch-n-learns” in regional distributor’s offices throughout the

country teaching the basics of the new programming language to existing customers for

free. Prospects could tinker with the devices, learn a few simple programming routines,



get a decent lunch, and be back at their posts within a couple of hours. This greatly

increased their comfort level with the new machines, and made the engineers more

receptive to trying the new device on low-risk projects.

It worked. Orders began to climb and, ultimately the annual revenue targets were met.

Clearly, matching your selling tactics to the stages of the buyer’s journey is not strictly a

selling issue. The key is in getting sales and marketing together to solve these problems.

In many companies, unfortunately, marketing departments are asked to produce product-

oriented communications and promotions instead of spending time on problems

customers want and need to solve (such as those mentioned above). As a result,

unfortunately, talented people may work ferociously to produce newsletters that may go

unread, leads that might be ignored, and collateral that could go unused. Matching your

marketing and selling tactics to the buyer’s journey is a perfect way to unite the two

departments on goals that produce measurable results.



Improve one thing at a time

Improving the flow of prospects through the funnel can take several forms, as we have

seen. When lag gets excessive in a given stage, it forms a bottleneck and may be a place

where throughput can be improved. In fact, it turns out that prospects who lag behind the

averages are actually less likely to close.

As mentioned earlier, one useful strategy is to proactively leak these prospects from the

funnel to free up salespeople’s time to focus on better ones. However, this is problematic

for several reasons.

Salespeople’s temptation is to prevent leakage. After all, their job is to close the deals.

And once they’ve put energy into a prospect, it is theirs. What if it closes in the future?

Besides, who or what is going to take care of the prospect if they don’t? Where are you

going to leak it to? What happens in sales is we hang on to buyers that are already dead.

Trying to prevent leakage exacerbates lag.

Although salespeople may be keen to take on new leads, they don’t want to let go of the

ones that have stagnated in their funnel. Instead of hanging on to them, a more healthy

behavior is to leak them forcibly. One client established a new business rule. If

salespeople wanted to take on five new leads, they had to leak (or progress) five old ones

from their funnel (e.g., put them into the nurturing program, which we’ll discuss

momentarily).

This has interesting implications. Rather than look at the salespeople and say, “We have a

problem, so lets re-skill them,” this change simply forced salespeople to focus on buyers

who were ready to progress. It actually had a faster effect of improved efficiency.

Further, we were able to go back and look at the relative data on people’s conversion

performance to evaluate the need for skills improvement, and in some cases change

people out. But the bigger change was to get them to focus on their funnel, on the ones



most likely to close, and forcing them to give up five old leads if they were going to get

five new ones.

Now, if we are to proactively leak prospects out of the funnel, where can you “leak them

to?” and how can you know they’ll be taken care of? If the intent is to recycle the leaked

leads, then simply restarting them again at the top isn’t going to work. We need to have

something to which we are going to recycle them.

Often the answer is simple. Some clients leak their buyers to a newsletter focused on

solving problems they are interested in. One client with a large average order size hired a

retired sales manager as a nurturer. When prospects reached a point where they were not

going to progress, salespeople would say something to the effect of, “Look, it seems we

may have reached a point where it might not be worth your time or mine to continue our

discussions. I’d like to introduce you to a colleague of mine whose name is Joe. Joe is

going to make contact with you every month, and share with you one little insight we’ve

gained from one of our customers that we think might be helpful to you. However, his

real objective is to make sure that we keep out of your hair until it is appropriate for us to

come back and bother you again.” They had a 90% success rate of clients specifically

agreeing to participate in this nurturing program. They gained clients who opted in every

month.

Joe was able to 1) keep on the radar screen until it was time to get them back into the

funnel, and 2) identify when the timing changed, so he was able to get the salespeople

engaged even when the time frame accelerated or got delayed further.

Sometimes, a kind of breakthrough improvement is possible, called a “lag buster.” One

client offered a data security technology whose average sales price was $400k. Their

approach was different from that of competitors, and their company was quite new. They

were asking buyers to make two hard decisions: First, “Do I buy your approach” and,



second, “Do I buy you (your company).” They were winning sales, but they were taking

18 months – 18 months! It was taking that to convince them to the tune of $400k.

So, after some investigation, we recommended something you may already do. We

recommended a “puppy dog sale.” You know how this works. Puppies are cute, they are

small, they are going to grow up into dogs, but the fact is we can sell puppies more easily

than we can sell dogs. So what they said to the buyers was this: “The average life of a

solution like this is 48 months. We’re not going to ask you to make a decision for 48

months. Instead, we’re going offer a one-month solution, fully guaranteed, with no

obligation. And we’re going to offer it for 1/48th of the full price.” They had a finance

company package up the one-month solution. Because their product was software based,

the unit cost was extremely low. And, fortunately, their start-up costs were also low, so it

was viable and doable. Because the decision was a very small one, suddenly the buyers

were making decisions in three weeks. They rapidly gained speed through the sales

funnel.

This lag buster was possible because the vendor chose to bear the initial risk. By making

buyer’s decision’s more accessible they rapidly increased the speed at which their funnel

flowed.

I’ve written elsewhere about a similar kind of situation, where Quadrant Homes, a Seattle

home builder, redesigned their business model to sell larger homes less expensively by

leveling their production schedule. Their approach made it easier for buyers to make

decisions, and has caused them to grow into one of the largest home builders, and one of

the fastest growing companies, in the state of Washington. You can find the article,

“Grow Your Business and Lose the Fat by Putting Marketing and Selling on a ‘Lean’

Diet,” on my website, in the articles section under “case studies.”



Summary

Most businesses make an unfortunate assumption that drives marketing and selling apart.

That assumption is that marketing’s job is to do the media stuff, and sale’s job is to sell

the product. Under these circumstances, inevitably, the marketing department ends up not

really understanding what it is throwing over the wall to sales. To the extent this happens,

marketing does not become intimate with customers; it just takes responses or database

listings and hands them off to sales.

In reality, marketing’s job is to work together with the sales department to find the

greatest pockets of market potential, to devise the most effective ways of attracting those

prospects to your company, to qualify them and convert them, and to automate the

process as much as possible. The sales department’s job is to do everything that can’t be

automated.

Your company needs sales and marketing departments to jointly plan and implement the

buyer’s journey. When figuring out what tactics are best for each stage of the buyer’s

journey, it is not clear at all that marketing should handle the top of the funnel and sales

should handle the bottom. The boundary between them is blurred. What matters is that

the company create and execute the best tactics they possibly can, and that both sales and

marketing have shared ownership of executing those tactics with some kind of rhythm.



Faster Funnel Sales Process Tuneup

Michael Webb has developed a 30-minute “Faster Funnel Sales Process Tuneup”

conducted over the phone with you and your top staff members. In this fast-paced, zero-

nonsense session, Michael will walk you through the approach and answer questions

about how to apply it in your business. What, exactly, are the stages of your buyer’s

journey? How can you measure these stages? What tactics can synchronize with your

prospects at each stage? How can marketing and sales work together to improve each

stage? [email protected] or visit:

http://www.salesperformance.com/services.aspx, and look for “Sales Process Tuneup.”

About The Author

Michael J. Webb is President of Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., a leader in helping

companies improve sales performance by applying step-by-step scientific principles. He

has worked with clients such as American Express, 3M, Marriott, Microsoft Great Plains,

and many others to improve their sales processes and results. He also works with sales

training firms, such as IMPAX Corporation, to help integrate the best selling practices

into client companies’ sales operations. His website, www.salesperformance.com,

contains a wealth of hard-to-find articles and resources on process improvement for

marketing and sales organizations.

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