When growing your business, one of the most important success strategies you can employ is that of the “sales funnel”. This simple and infinitely adaptive concept (also known as the “sales tunnel” or “sales pipeline”) allows you to bring together sales processes with sales statistics to develop a picture of how every customer goes from unqualified prospect to their purchase and beyond.

By understanding your prospects better, determining what makes an ideal potential customer and analysing where the leaks in your sales process might be (reasons why sales do not complete), your business will be able to better plan for success.

Growing your business from where it is today to where you wish it to be tomorrow involves developing an effective sales funnel, managing it and occasionally unblocking it when things don´t quite go according to plan.

Optimise

So where could things possibly go wrong? Well, first, not nearly enough organisations have a defined sales funnel process which means that they are effectively leaving their ability to achieve their monthly targets to chance. Oh, I´m sure that if you´re growing your business you´ll have great sales people, and wonderful managers keeping them in check, spurring them on to achieve their own individual targets. But without a sales funnel to formalise the real numbers within your sales strategy, how can you hope to accurately assess its effectiveness or formulate enhancements to it?

Sales funnel blockages can occur for many reasons, but the top four are undoubtedly:

Growing your business does not always mean packing in the prospects. A badly timed marketing campaign can pull in more potential business than your staff can cope with, creating a blockage at the top of your funnel. While to have more business than you can cope with may seem like a good thing, when stretched staff and long hours result in mistakes or important customers being left waiting then reputations could be at risk – something you cannot afford when growing your business. Worse still is when an ill-thought-through marketing campaign pulls in the wrong kind of potentials and time that could be spent with serious potentials is wasted while staff are tied up with prospect after prospect who really have no place in the sales funnel.

Some people (and hence some organisations) are just naturally pedantic, slow to decide or overly bureaucratic. Slow-moving prospects can create a serious bottleneck in your sales funnel. Excessive amounts of time may need to be spent urging these prospects to move forward or in complying with their over-demanding decision-making processes.

When growing your business it is essential that you have the best staff behind you. Poorly trained personnel are major contributors to bottlenecks and this must be addresses quickly to prevent such an issue becoming endemic within your organisation. Talkers need to be aware of the time they spend with each potential, slackers need to learn to pick up the pace, the slapdash need to remember to gather all the information they´ll need when it´s needed, and the close-shy need to become expert closers.

Innovate

Such bottlenecks will cause delays and have the potential to create serious corporate-wide problems as the sales process grinds to a halt. So what can you do about it? Well, first you´ll need to categorically identify the root cause of the problem before attempting to resolve it.

This may involve assessing whether your sales funnel is correctly constructed or if it requires reshaping around more realistic customer behaviour or numbers. It could involve pre-qualifying your potentials so that you can better utilise your human resources to increase productivity and profitability. Or it could mean finding new and innovative ways of convincing those who are moving too slowly through the funnel to go at the right pace. In extreme circumstances this may even mean your wilfully ejecting those potentials that have little or no chance of reaching the end of the funnel without taking up far too many resources to get there. Nothing should prevent you from growing your business.

Just as the makeup of your sales funnel is unique to your organisation, so will the solution to its inefficiencies be.

Grow

Growing your business into a well-oiled customer-satisfying and profitable machine requires a sales process that is well considered, constantly analysed and efficiently lubricated to ensure a steady and manageable flow of potentials to sales and beyond. Let your customer service be friendly, your marketing innovative, and your sales strategies bottleneck free.