Selling Strategies for Perpetual Winners: Chapter 4 - Run a Funnel Check

During this challenging economic time, perpetual winners grit their teeth and take stock of their sales funnel. They face the ugly truth of their current reality and wisely use this time to plan. If they spot an opportunity to act now, they do so.

The funnel check is pre-season preparation for the upcoming games. It’s your 30,000-foot, big-picture view of a rapidly shifting landscape, reflecting returning revenues, business lost, and new business to be gained. Put this together as soon as you can. Review it weekly and use sales intelligence to spot situational changes. 

Open Deals

Start at the bottom of your funnel. List all open deals, including orders on hold, open quotes and proposals. Apply logic and make your best guess (because that is all it will be) of what you expect will reactivate.

Add a star by all orders from first-time buyers. Since these buyers have less experience with you, their trust will be more precarious, and they may need extra attention to maintain their business.  

Once you complete this step, take a minute to mourn lost business if you need to. But no more than a minute. There is no time to mope right now. It won’t change anything, and your actions today will pay off in the future.  

Mid-Funnel

Customers and prospects who fall in the middle of the funnel represent the accounts you were working on to get new opportunities from existing customers and prospects.

Define where you were when the economy hit pause.  

• List who you were pursuing
• Detail individual opportunities, including revenue dollars
• Identify the selling stage (early discovery, collecting details for quoting, building consensus among decision-makers, etc.)

Now, gaze into your crystal sales ball. Make your best predictions about what will happen once the business world moves forward. Possibilities include:

• The sales process cranks back into gear and moves forward
• Buyers, affected by corporate spending freezes, are prohibited from purchasing now
• Opportunities evaporate completely because the immediate need for a product or service disappears

The pace of recovery will differ by industry. Some buying spigots will open as soon as normal (or semi-normal) business conditions appear to be at hand, even before buyers are back in the office. Other spigots will remain fully closed until buyers return to their desks, get marching orders from the top brass, and are fully confident that no set-backs lurk around hidden corners.

No matter what the situation, perpetual winners face up to it. They anticipate hurdles so that they can adjust and succeed.

Top of the Funnel

At the top of the funnel, you have two categories of potential buyers. The first category contains your prospects. These are the contacts at accounts who have not bought and who you were working to engage when the economy dipped. 

List all prospects, along with what you have previously done to move them forward and any thoughts about engagement. This is not the time to call a halt to all prospecting activity. Still, you do want to be sensitive to the current environment and use sales intelligence when engaging in outbound selling to people who are relative strangers. We will discuss this more in a later chapter, so stay tuned.

The second category contains unexplored opportunities with current customers. There are a host of reasons why sales professionals haven’t explored possibilities with existing customers, such as:

• Lack of sales knowledge (resulting in a lack of selling confidence) about a product or service that you sell and the buyer purchases, resulting in no forward push to make a sale 
• The buyer you know is not the decision-maker for the untapped revenue opportunity
• You were too busy selling and servicing other accounts

There is no better time than now to think about unexplored opportunities at current customers, where you already have a track record. If a lack of knowledge about a product or service is holding you back, fix the problem so you can come back stronger than ever.

One More Thought on Perspective

By taking a hard look at your funnel, you gain perspective on the short-term and the long-term. We have not experienced anything like this before and will have to make continual readjustments as the situation unfolds. 

As we move forward, we should all expect to hear “No” more often. Perpetual winners know that most of the time, no does not mean no forever. It just means “Not today.” 

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