Developing a sales funnel is a fundamental business tool for growth and revenue. All business need customers, and customers don’t just fall from the clouds. There needs to be a process to attract, close, and grow customers for long term business success. Over the years I have worked in several organizations, big and small, selling to a variety of different customers in different geographic regions. The products and people have been very different, but the fundamentals of sales and the process has remained the same. What’s discussed here is just a guide, and it should be tweaked to cater to your needs.
Introduction to Pipeline
The sales pipeline is a list of all accounts in your total
addressable market that you have identified to be a good market fit. For example
if you were a boutique business selling to SaaS startups, the pipeline will be
as many of these companies as possible. The idea is to “drain the swamp” so you
can quantify the opportunities and feedback to the business about the market
and areas for product improvement or potential.
A key sales metric is how many “In Pipeline” opportunities have converted to “Contact Made”. This helps the business understand if their attract phase is working.
Sales Cycle
A sales cycle helps the organization bring process and order
to the sales engagement, to help teams progress deals in an orderly fashion to
success and keep work orders and pipelines at a forecastable state.
S1 - In Pipeline
The opportunity is on our radar on our pipeline list or has
been added. Our goal is to have the prospect interact or engage with us in any
way or form possible, so that our brand name registers with them, and we
commence the first stage of building familiarity which will lead to trust. To
achieve this goal, there are several ways to interact:
- Targeted advertising to get in-front of them
- Linkedin Messages
- Contacting them directly via their website
- Asking a mutual contact for an introduction or a recommendation
We have established basic engagement with the prospect
through some communication medium. Our goal is to get on a verbal or video
phone call with them to qualify the lead better. We already know from our
pipeline that this customer meets our basic on-paper criteria. This is a whole
sales step on its own because this is the most challenging part – convincing
someone that barely knows you, to give you some of their valuable time, to sell
your wares to them.
The key theme here is that we believe our products and
services are world class, and once we get them on a phone call, we can convince
them of this fact and unlock the deal. This is all about getting their
attention span to do so.
There are a couple of things to note:
1.
Basic research of their organization to
understand who the decision makers are, and who has influence. You want
to ensure your product is being sold to the right audience. This is often not
an executive, but a mid-level decision maker.
- Proactively offer them some times to meet-up, and be very responsive.
- Most opportunities drop at this stage, and that’s fine.
- It is worth offering a coffee catchup if in the same geographic area as well. This can build quick rapport.
- Never sell at this stage, this is all about understanding how you can work together with them.
S3 - Qualify
We have the prospects attention for a phone call. Our goal
is now two-fold. We want to understand if the customer will be a good fit for
us, and if so, convert. If not, politely drop and refer elsewhere.
We now have several objectives we need to accomplish in a
single phone call:
- 1Identify if the prospect is what we’re after for our business goals.
- stablish an insider prospect at the organization who will be our champion / voice.
- Convert the opportunity to a solutions selling phase.
I like to run through these meetings in quite a specific
flow:
1.
Open the conversation with your introduction –
build personal rapport. People like people, and this deal relies on that. Get
to understand them at a persona level.
2.
Open up what your organization does, why, and
what your company objectives are (E.g. helping SaaS companies by taking the
burden of websites off them). This is important as this is the opening move of
building trust, where they understand you come in peace and have the means and
motives to help them.
3.
Ask the prospect about their business, and the
challenges they want to solve (i.e. why they’re interested in you because you
can obviously do something for them), and what their goals are.
4.
Confirm the prospect’s pain points, empathize
with them.
5.
Dig in deeper into the areas of your product
that could be of value to them, and judge their reactions. This is an immediate
sign of engagement or an opportunity lost.
6.
If they are aligned to our business goals, be
very clear with the propspect how you can add value to them, and offer a way
forward (e.g. an onsite visit, a call with their key stakeholders, etc).
7.
Give the prospect time to process, and be clear
with them that you will follow up in x days, or if they’re keen, leverage the
enthusiasm and set something up immediately after.
8.
ALWAYS tell them at the start, and send them
your slide decks and other resources straight after so they can leverage your
work in their internal meetings with their stakeholders.
9.
DON’T avoid commercials. It’s good to give them
a range for an example of work in the past, so they understand the pricing you
sit in. Nobody can have an internal discussion without understanding costs
involved. By being upfront, you make their lives easier to sell you inside.
This introductory call if it goes well, will give you a
point of contact within an organization who will be your new internal champion,
and also a clear way into the organization to develop further.
S4 - Develop
By the develop stage the prospect is interested in working with you, and
this is now a two-way relationship. The prospect wants to know you better and
what you offer, and you want to understand their needs better so you can offer
them the right services and a good customer experience. Different organizations
have different approaches here, all of which are fine. This is where the
strengths of your work can be shown and there’s no right process. Here are
examples I’ve used in the past:
Large tech company: We
would often propose, be accepted, and deploy a team of solution engineers on
site for a week to do a quick “hackathon” with the prospect’s engineers. This
would consist of an account manager who would engage business leadership, an
engineering manager to engage technical leadership, and a squad of engineers to
sit side-by-side with engineers to understand their needs better to. By the end
of this process we accomplish both trust across the vertical hierarchy of the
prospect’s organization, and a great understanding of what they need, why they
need it, and how we’re going to implement it.
Mid-Size B2B Company: We would deploy yours truly on site to the prospect
for a few days, wine and dine the executives, then spend some quality time on
the tarmac validating that we can actually solve their problems, and there’s no
major edge cases that would create a business risk, and do a comprehensive
on-site demo (with a mini projector and all) to the widest possible stakeholder
group to build consensus.
Startup B2B Company: We would understand the prospect’s problems,
pick one that would be easy for us to solve with our technologies, ask for, and
get 5 years of historical data from the prospect and have our data science team
run it through our systems, then have a value quantification team create
reports to show the customer how much money they could have saved over the last
5 years had they used the technology, with future savings forecasted.
Some advice:
1.
This is the risky of the process. Until this
point there hasn’t been a time commitment on either side, but now you are doing
significant work to understand your prospect, without any commitment from them.
It’s a requirement but it’s also important to know they don’t have any skin in
the game. Therefore it’s important to focus your efforts on the high level as
much as possible, and don’t get caught in the 80/20 trap where understanding
the last 20% of work takes up 80% of your time.
2.
You need to outsell the competition here. Most
organisations will have another one or two competitors shortlisted against you
that they are evaluating. Most services are commoditized and your competitive
advantage is you. You need to build trust, and convey competence.
3.
For some customers, they may not know what they
really want for their future. This is a dangerous one for you, because they
also won’t be sure what they want from you. To reduce the risk here, I often
pitch my ideal state for them to them, and if they are dismissive or
nonchalant, I will drop the opportunity fairly fast but politely.
4.
Timebox your approach and communicate it at the
start. This cannot be a never-ending solution selling piece. All the examples
above have clear timelines (one week hackathon, 3 day site visit, a data
request), asks, and outcomes that you’ve defined. This is also a meaningful step
to establishing trust with the prospect (i.e. you’re now transacting – getting
something from them, and returning something to them, as promised). It’s
important to take a lead role here and be firm with the client, e.g. “Let’s do
an ideation session for no more than a few hours this week, and create a
solution plan by the end of next week”.
The end goal of this is to develop trust, develop an understanding of what the prospect needs, and a clear delivery plan on your side to help them. This all leads to S5 – making the proposal.
S5 - Propose
- Simple explanations for what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and the value its going to bring.
- Easy to understand terms of engagement (i.e. legal documents).
- Easy to understand payment terms and billing.
S6 - Closed: Won
S7 - Closed: Lost