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Have you been to the doctor lately? The Funnel doctor?
Do you go to keep your funnel healthy?
Or do you wait until your funnel is really sick before you see
the doctor?
Your funnel has some basic indicators of health. But, we often ignore those indicators.
Today I am going to show you how to
assess the health of your funnel and prioritise
what to fix. Lets start with what gets them
in the way of us seeing what to fix and knowing what to leave alone.
Well the first problem is random acts of marketing
without any framework every idea is a good one.
Boredom in sales and
definitely in marketing. We get fascinated with new toys we just
can't wait to try the latest tactic. We have a seller-centric
view of the world particularly when we're planning. We have
no sense of the velocity that we're actually trying to achieve.
So again, and idea is a good idea. So
looking forward is a good idea, but do we only ever look forward?
The final gap
is that we're always planning and never measuring. We have no sense of the
velocity that we're actually achieving. Shortly I'm going to
show you how to assess the health your funnel and to work out what to fix.
Now a little later I will show you how we do that in funnel plan but before that I want to do two things.
I'll show you how to assess the health of your funnel, without a
funnel plan and I am going to invite you to share blogs
like this. But let's get to that health assessment first.
How do we work out what to fix in what priority order?
We need three things. Firstly, we need to build a
clear view of a perfect future. What do we want
the funnel to look like? And make sure that that picture
delivers you decent share of the addressed market.
A fully utilised sales force, realistic outcomes,
and above all a really clear picture. You need a straw-man model
so you can so some sense-checking against it - something to measure yourself against.
The second thing is we need
to identify the gaps. The gaps can come in a couple of guises.
Gaps in reality when you compare the plan
against the actual. So you need your analysts to
build a velocity report in your CRM so you can
know how may of your target buyers have reached each stage
every month so that you can compare that to your
velocity model. The perfect model of what we suppose to be going on, but also gap in
potential. Compare yourself to benchmarks and get your funnel coach to help you with this.
How much better can we be getting at each of these stages? Because there's no point
if we're already the best in the world at a certain
stage there is no point trying to get better. Whereas there might be other
stages that we're falling behind. The third thing is fix and
fixate. Agree what to fix and then fixate
on fixing it. One of our clients got their
pose-to-close ratio down from one in eight
to one in four. But it took three
years of concerted effort. Every month the leadership team would
agree the focus for that month. What can we as a team
focus on improving this month in the funnel? And with the progressive
kaizen-like focus, they've doubled their yield
per sales rep, inch by inch not mile by mile. Well if you've enjoyed this
then likely you'd enjoy others. If you haven't done so already please go to
mathmarketing.com/blog to subscribe to
either to our twice a week blog or the once a month
catch all. You can also go to YouTube
and you can subscribe to our channel there. Now if you already have but you've got a colleague who hasn't
now might be the perfect time to send them a quick email and invite them to
subscribe. Well here's how we assess
the health in the funnel plan. Clearly we're going to be looking at the funnel velocity
and the first disconnect I like to look at is share. For example 1400 sales
from 12,000 named targets in only about 12 percent share.
Now, some markets 12
percent is the big guy, some markets12 percent
is not. If 12 percent is not enough for that
target market to consider you to be the go-to provider
to be if you like the gorilla in that market, then consider insisting
on lower leakage rates at one or more of the stages so
that you need fewer names or reconcile yourself to be in
the chip in your chosen market.
Now to change your leakage, make sure you go back to your strategy and
drops a segment or two so that marketing and sales
only invest time with this now reduced market size
and make sure you choose tactics that can generate that improvement.
Next, take a look at sales utilisation. You simply can't
run a sales force at over a 100 percent for three years.
So, lower your targets or build a bigger team
or ask marketing to do more of the grunt work
in troubling buyers so that you don't need as many
meetings consumed in those early stages.
Let me show you the difference between losing let say
half a meeting at an early stage in the funnel
to half a meeting in the late stage. Let's take a look at that now.
Clearly if we're using fewer meetings
at the top of the funnel i.e. we've got marketing doing more of the work
then we have a less busy sales force. Finally check if it smells right sometimes
detailed leakage per stage thinking can
mask simple clarity. Do you really think you can close one in two
on average? Not a peak. Not on a good month
but on average. Adjust your plan as necessary.
Now you can look for the gaps. I'll show you how we can choose
tactics to fix those gaps on another day.
But for now, may your funnel be full
and always flowing.