Top of the Funnel Problems
These problems are easy to identify. If you look at the value of your pipeline and the number doesn’t change from week to week, you are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.
If you test these opportunities by walking through whatever method you use to qualify only to find they fail your tests, you are looking at a very bleak future.
Related: Infiltrate Your Competitor’s Sales Funnel
By the way, the most important test as to whether an opportunity is qualified or not is whether your dream client agrees to explore change and makes the commitment to change.
Middle of the Funnel Problems
If the middle of the funnel is empty, you really have a top of the funnel problem. You aren’t qualifying real opportunities, or you aren’t gaining the right commitments.
Mostly middle of the funnel problems show up as stalled opportunities. If you skip stages of the sales process you can wind up with stalled deals. Almost always what is skipped over is a difficult-to-gain commitment, one that if it had been gained would have moved the opportunity forward.
Deals also die in the middle of the funnel when you try to forgo the necessary consensus-building. That’s one way to run a good opportunity right into a ditch. Without consensus, the status quo wins.
Bottom of the Funnel Problems
Deals get stuck here when you are missing consensus, when you haven’t created enough value, when you haven’t effectively addressed risk, when new stakeholders (like purchasing and legal) enter the process, and when you fail to outline and gain agreement on what steps will be taken next.
Without a compelling reason to change, deals get stuck at the bottom. Without resolving your dream client’s fears, the risk can keep them from moving forward.
Related: Niche Marketing: Inverting The Sales Funnel
A lot of sales people worry about asking to engage with purchasing or legal, but the sooner you deal with that reality, the sooner you move your deal forward (and the sooner your client gets the benefit of your solution).
Your sales funnel reveals the areas of your sales game that you need to improve.
Questions
- What does your funnel look like? Draw it out.
- What does the shape reveal about how you sell?
- What problems are common amongst the clustered deals in your pipeline?
- What needs to change to get things moving?
