How to Improve Sales Funnel? Client Focus

Sales Funnels and Chokepoints

Sales meetings often miss the mark. One reason is a lack of clarity in the true purpose of the meeting. One on ones with a sales rep supposedly focused on the sales funnel, typically lean more towards choke points rather than the customer journey. Picture this: A sales manager and rep dissect each stage of their “sales funnel” using CRM data. They look for ways to push prospects through faster, to hit those quotas. But here’s the rub – they’re viewing the process through an internal lens, fixating on their own goals and metrics. What’s missing? The customer’s perspective. This common approach reveals a crucial disconnect:

It’s time to bridge this gap. Effective sales leadership requires a dual focus:

1. Identifying internal bottlenecks that hinder efficiency
2. Understanding the customer’s journey and potential pain points

By blending these perspectives, teams can transform their pipeline reviews from mere velocity plays into strategic sessions that align internal processes with customer needs. It’s not just about moving prospects through stages faster – it’s about creating a journey that resonates with potential clients, addressing their concerns at each step. Let’s explore how to shift this paradigm, balancing the internal drive for efficiency with a genuine focus on the customer’s path to purchase. After all, the most effective sales funnels aren’t just about speed – they’re about creating the right experience at the right time.

Historical Background on Choke Points

These concepts are not new. In fact, the origin of choke points is legitimately ancient. It was the unlisted character in the movie 300, the terrain that allowed the 300 to repel Xerxes’ troops. Braveheart’s Battle of Stirling Bridge — also a choke point.  Over time, the concept of choke points expanded beyond purely military applications:

1. Maritime Trade: Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal.
2. Transportation Networks: busy seaports or key railway intersections.
3. Economic and Political Factors: tariffs and borders.

It is more recently that we get to the Systems Theory Application. In systems theory and business contexts, a choke point refers to any part of a system or process where flow is constricted, potentially causing bottlenecks or inefficiencies. This could include:

• Limited production capacity in manufacturing
• Bandwidth constraints in network systems
• Bureaucratic bottlenecks in organizational processes

Understanding and managing choke points has become crucial in optimizing various systems, from supply chains to information technology networks to sales.

Sales Funnels

In any system, progress is limited by its bottleneck. Addressing these constraints is essential to optimizing the entire process. The concept of a sales funnel, introduced by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, was designed to guide prospects through a structured journey from awareness to purchase. Modern CRM systems should enhance this journey by focusing on customer needs rather than imposing artificial barriers.

Sales Funnel Case Study

Let’s look at an example of Company A’s sales process, which takes about six months from start to finish. The process begins when a prospect signs up for the company’s newsletter and ends when they sign a contract.

Newsletter > Qualified> Appointment > Quote > Contract > Client

If the process were linear, each stage would take a month. However, no sales process is perfectly linear and real numbers should be easy to find using any CRM system. In this example, it takes almost half the sales cycle to move from signing up for the newsletter to getting qualified. After that:

Appointment Setting: The BDR sets an appointment in a week.

Quote Preparation: The sales rep takes two weeks to prepare the quote.

Quote Approval: It takes two months for the quote to be approved.

Contract Signing: It takes one month to get the final signature.

Even with CRM data, the company makes a lot of assumptions. Are reps updating stages accurately and on time? It takes weeks for the rep to prepare the quote. Also, if you’re in charge of revenue, you need to understand what happens before and after this cycle.

Tools like Outreach.io and Gong can improve accuracy, but CRMs often contain a lot of bad data. Regularly auditing this data is essential. For example, if reps handling renewals create opportunities a year in advance, it can distort reporting if the CRM isn’t properly set up.

After the Audit

Once an accurate timeframe is established for each stage and the process as a whole. There is enough information to review the steps in greater detail. Are there any stages that are really short, signaling that they could be eliminated? Does each stage make sense for your sales process and for all markets? Alternatively, are there any stages that opportunities stay in for a long time? Likely something is wrong, either from a staging standpoint or a training standpoint. It might just take that long to get on the schedule for a board sign off, but likely it is a huge red flag that something is wrong.

Bottleneck or Funnel?

The case above is a common approach to sales funnels. During a funnel review or 1-1, the manager and rep sit down and discuss bottle necks and why certain deals are stalled in one stage or another. This is a missed opportunity, if the rep and the client aren’t both getting value out of the process. If the focus goes back to what does the prospect need and was their sufficient discovery of their process. You will be able to have a clearer picture of that organization’s buying process and adapt timeframes more accurately. You will know that the deal is not stalled, but legal has a 2 month backlog.

The reverse of that is also true though. Sales is sifting, getting the rid of the not right now’s to get to the signatures. If you have a solid understanding of the market and focus on the reachable market and not a rough ideal of the TAM than no is 100% a not right now. All that is left, is sift and schedule. The details are always important, and you need to break it down to the essential components. The paradigms help organize the thinking, but make sure they aren’t getting confused.

Conclusion

Understanding and managing chokepoints, while retaining a customer focused sales funnel, is crucial for business success. Sales funnels, when optimized, can significantly enhance customer acquisition and retention. Bottlenecks, when identified and addressed, can lead to dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity.

The key to success lies in continuous improvement and adaptation. Businesses must regularly evaluate their sales funnels, seeking ways to enhance the customer journey and improve conversion rates. Similarly, they must remain vigilant in identifying and addressing bottlenecks as they arise, leveraging new technologies and methodologies to streamline operations.

In an era of rapid technological advancement and evolving customer expectations, the ability to effectively manage these choke points can be a significant competitive advantage. Therefore, businesses should prioritize the evaluation and optimization of their choke points as a core part of their operational strategy. By doing so, they can enhance customer satisfaction, improve operational efficiency, and drive sustainable growth in an increasingly complex business environment.