Managing a sales funnel for Export

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welcome back to another edition of whiteboard Wednesday and I'm pretty excited about this particular session because I actually just came from a client and was talking through this this whole concept and it's actually a conversation that comes up quite often and it's really about you know the pipeline and how you drive accountability and compensation and control and handoff throughout the process and typically it extends just past the sales pipeline to the demand generally qualification role and certainly in the marketing pipeline so I thought I'd walk through all that I'll apologize because my my uh my sales pipeline over here is probably not the uh the best of designs but you know when think about a pipeline at least we have the basic shape we think about the traditional concept of a of a sales pipeline here which this is looking to represent right and and every sales manager or sales vice president is familiar with that I identify a number of stages I'll go through that in a little bit but these days you really have to think about pipeline in a broader context that encompasses not only the sales process but also the marketing process and as appropriate the demand generational lead creation process so I would I would call what we have up here I'm marketing pipeline top the funnel activities and uh what I would call the middle is in in my world really a demand demand gen or lead call Pipeline and those of you who've visited my blog and and seen some already know that I'm a big fan of you know essentially segmenting the selling role from opening to closing and trying to maximize you know your closure and the value of your your end-to-end sales people if you will so as we as we look at the pipelines couple ways to think about this uh one is you know just in terms of what is delivered at each stage and sort of the naming convention and you know a lot of time what we'll see is the concept of leads coming to the top of the funnel and leads are sometimes a little too much of a generic term but generally include things like site visitors uh individuals like Booth attendees right if you do if you do trade shows and other things like that they could also be generated from content marketing you know via ebook or white paper downloads right and uh oftentimes these uh you know these these these leads are progressed or treated or handled by marketing to the point where they can be considered a marketing qualified leader at mql another popular term as as you get down the pipeline refers to the fact that as they become a sales ready lead or ready for a salesperson we call those sales qualified leads now the challenge of course is how does marketing take a lead to the point where it is sales ready there's a lot written about that and a lot of uh a lot of good marking effort there but I'm really of the belief that if you have a demand gen and Lead qual team you can quite significantly move the needle on uh on your sales qualified lead so in your in your demand generation pipeline you're going to be looking at metrics and dealing with things like calls that they're making Outreach appointments set and that appointment's held very important metrics ultimately though we really want sales demand gen that is to be responsible for creating and I'll draw a little box right here a new opportunity and I believe also a scheduled conversation for the sales rep so the real power in a demand gen team in addition to rationalizing leads against the current database Etc is that I get a lot of control over this point right here where my where my where my leads are actually converted into an opportunity so this gets us into the uh the main you know concept of a funnel and how things enter in the funnel just use my my schema for uh for how I look at a funnel my first stage is always called Prospect and I actually create that at zero percent my second stage I call qualify at uh 20 my third engaged at 50 percent and my fourth is committed at eighty percent sometimes I'll use an additional stage referring to a legal process a lot of negotiating but I really prefer a simple stage model here and what you'll note is that the the demand gen rep here is the one who physically you know creates the opportunity and hands it off to sales the question that often comes up is well that sounds great but how do you really ensure that you know if this is the line of demarcation between demand genital sales how do you make sure that demand Jett isn't just chucking stuff over the wall and make sure that uh obviously that that sales isn't uh isn't isn't sandbagging or not handling those those properly well I use the concept of the movement to a qualified op is a key metric in my process and what that means is the sales rep will pick up the opportunity which in a CRM system is going to Encompass the concepts of timing and starting a clock and probability and value Etc but really there's a there's an inflection point or a decision tree at this point the salesperson will pick up the opportunity with a scheduled meeting one of two things will happen either the sales person will advance the opportunity to qualify or the sales person will put it to close lost and opportunities that go from Prospect immediately to close lost do my little Trash Can here which I'm fond of obviously present a stop Gap or a safety valve or a way to check on the process and see what's going on there's there's always two potential problems one is that demand gender pushing opportunities too quickly the other is that sales is not adequately handing those opportunities and able to advance into the pipeline so really when I have a waste rate out of my Prospect Ops where I'm failing to get a qualified opportunity I gotta ask why right what was the reason is there a is a closed lost reason that we use I'm a big fan of using closed lost reason codes so you can determine what's coming out here so one is why and the other is what percentage is this occurring in so I can now measure this and understand a very important piece of my Pipeline and then you know the rest of the stuff that the funnel is pretty pretty pro forma obviously down here is my closed one often I'm really good at managing sales around around this area right here so that's typically not my problem getting new leads into my problem it's really in this middle area to move stuff through the pipeline so the next question that people often ask is is you know what are the appropriate ratios what do things look like here and what are what are what are some appropriate measurements and I'll try not to write too small but starting starting from the top an appointment ratio on a first pass basis is typically this may be surprising on cold leads one to two percent obviously can go up quite a bit from there based on qualified leads or based on trade show leads or referrals Etc but one to two percent is not a bad appointment set rate for a lead call team in terms of appointments held I'm typically looking to track that in the 80 range I want 80 of my appointments to stick the first time and obviously I want to schedule those in terms of of creating an opportunity it's actually a a bit of a two-part metric because what I'd like to have is for my initial appointments I'd like 50 of these to be moving on to a second conversation second scheduled conversation with an opportunity created and then I'm actually looking for uh I'll I'll say basically uh 80 percent of these Prospect opportunities to make it to a qualified opportunity so a lot of metrics in there and uh I'll probably probably send out a typical spreadsheet usually calculate this stuff in terms of the actual actual pipeline I believe that an effective pipeline is going to run from qualified to closed one in the 20 range maybe up to 25. percent and really that's a reflection of obviously the percentages in the pipeline but also the fact that not all deals happen the first time around and really having an effective mechanism to capture all this closed lost stuff if you will and understand why it was closed lost and then recirculate back into my marketing pipeline is critical a Harvard Business Review did an article recently on why deals don't close and not surprisingly oftentimes the real challenge is a no decision a stalling of corporate will or momentum so a lot of times being able to pull these deals back in gives you another bite at the Apple so I hope this is helpful in understanding both how marketing and Lead quality demand gen and sales work together how these uh these components hand off to one another and also how you can measure that in a very effective way to get to get some good data and see if your pipeline is building to a successful month quarter year Etc hope that's been helpful and as always please leave comments and questions and look forward to responding