Managing a sales funnel for facilities

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[Music] hi my name is Josh Wanda and welcome to selling pilot TV today we have the pleasure of meeting with Mark sellers who's the founder and CEO of breakthrough sales performance welcome hi Gary you have written the excellent book on funnel management what is the state of the art now of the funnel well we published the follow principle three years ago as you know and I think we took the trade by storm because we were finally publishing things that that people were talking about or thinking about and the big idea was that you wanted people to switch from a sales cycle funnel to by second phone and that that was part of it it was a big part of it yeah so we created the bycicle funnel and but then we also created a process we said we need to rethink you know the role that the funnel plays in a business so we're promoting it as a business process for selling and I think that's taking on and obviously the 2.0 world gets that but what we're finding over the past three years is that companies are committing what I'm calling the three sins if you will of sales funnel management they're they know just enough to be dangerous and you know very briefly those those sins are number one they're changing the stages they're they're more like a bycicle funnel if not a complete by cycle funnel and they're thinking that that's enough to change selling behavior that's kind of sin number one so in other words what they did in the past that they had sequential steps that they liked and then learn from the customer how they want to buy and then they realigned those steps and didn't go anywhere bottom line is they're finding that the things they want to change are not being changed in their say oh wait a minute we changed our stages all right what's going on here which leads to kind of a second sin and that is they've they're throwing a technology solution CRM at a process problem so you know everybody's got CRM these days and you know whichever a SAS model software it doesn't matter but they've changed the stages they've put them into their CRM and then think that the things are going to change so what's the missing link here they're really not providing coaching around the funnel you know they're not training their managers to coach they're thinking the managers get this funnel stuff and and and they're just going to let them do what they do or do it they're their own way so that's a that's a key missing thing they're also not providing a regular inspection of the funnel and again we have these things called funnel audits and so combined with no coaching no funnel audits and they're not getting the results that they need so what do you suggest that sales managers think about in order to manage the funnel more effectively what better how do you measure funnel effectiveness I think what they have to do number one they have to step back and say changing stages is not enough putting them into our CRM is not enough we have to provide coaching or we have to provide even training in the funnel we have to make sure our final design is right so that's number one it with regards to measurement you know we can measure quantitatively okay how effective people are doing we can also measure qualitatively how effective they're doing funnel management and at least give them a way to say we're making progress or we're not making progress and and we know better why so what do you saying really is that you need to have like an architect to develop the blueprint for a house we need to have sales now just create a funnel blueprint that not only goes into the details of the stages but also as a blueprint for getting people to execute on that yeah absolutely and then you were talking about the process and the people in a technology yeah yeah there's a there's a people component of that it has to be has to be addressed and there's a technology component and there's a process component so having an architect draft that yeah I think that's a good way to approach and you have the architect and in your book show us the steps that's that's what we're doing for our clients yeah well thank you mark we are going to continue our conversation with Marcus Ellis tomorrow where we talk about opportunity management and the bicycle follow [Music]