Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster!
Businesspeople everywhere want their sales funnels to flow faster. They want customers to pay higher margins. They want sales to cost less.
So, they hire the best salespeople and marketing experts, pay them well, and ask them to work really hard. Still, they suffer from:
- Inability to identify the causes of problems (“Is it in our people, our products, or the market?”)
- Long, unreliable sales cycles (“We need a bulldozer to move our opportunities out farther in the forecast every quarter.”)
- Costly, wasteful, and ineffective business practices (e.g., low yield on direct marketing, low close ratios, high costs for branding, tradeshows, or product development)
- High turnover among sales and marketing employees
- Turf wars and conflict over resources (allocating budget for advertising vs. feet on the street?)
Scratch the surface in these companies, and you find they have no consistent meanings for what is a lead, or a qualified opportunity. Salespeople have little reason to standardize how they do their jobs. Marketing managers don’t really understand the value their customers gain from their products and services. The messages they hear from customers over and over say “Your competitor can do it faster, smaller (or bigger), and cheaper.”
It doesn’t have to be that way.
These problems are caused by the traditional (functional) approach to selling, marketing, and servicing.
My mission is to help you get your company out of that trap by learning to lead, measure, and manage sales and marketing as a business process.
When your firm learns to manage sales and marketing as a business process you’ll find you can pinpoint the bottlenecks in your revenue production system. You’ll know exactly how to make your sales funnel flow faster, and your margins grow fatter. Your team will proactively support your goals and objectives. And, you’ll be able to predict your results far more accurately using simple techniques proven half a century ago in the field of quality management.
You’ll still have to work hard, there’s no getting around that. But the rewards will be much, much greater.
Please, join me in exploring what I believe is a new era in American business: the era of sales process improvement.
You can learn about sales process improvement in my books (click on the links at the upper left of this blog), or on my main website (www.salesperformance.com). You can ask questions, or share your observations here:
- How do your experiences confirm (or contradict) what I’ve written about?
- In what ways have you dealt with these challenging issues?
- What are some successes others can learn from?
- What are some mistakes others can avoid?
I really look forward to hearing from you!
Michael J Webb
mwebb@salesperformance.com
Aug 2, 2006
