How To Diagnose Bottlenecks In A Sales Funnel

When sales aren't moving fast enough, the first thing a sales leader should do is look at the sales funnel to identify the bottleneck. Are we not filling the top of the funnel? Are we not converting meetings to proposals? Are we not getting the contract signed quickly enough?

I've written in the past about how to build and analyze a sales funnel. 

But in some cases the sales funnel might not be granular enough to tell you what's really going on. 

With that in mind, I've come up with a set of questions to ask to help you identify trends and areas where things aren't working. 

Look across the entire pipeline and ask the questions below about each individual deal. if the answer to any question is 'no' put a checkmark next to the question. If the answer is yes leave it blank. If the question isn't relevant because the deal isn't far enough along in the sales process also leave it blank. 

After going through each of these questions for each of your deals you should get a good sense of trends and what's slowing things down and you can now focus on fixing that problem area. Do it again in a month and focus on that newly identified problem area. Repeat.

This is a super simple and quick way to find out what's going on in the funnel. It can be used for an entire team or an individual rep.

1. Is there adequate top of the funnel activity -- are we working hard?
2. Are we getting meetings with people we want to meet with?
3. Do the people we’re talking to have a problem that we’ve diagnosed?
4. Do the people we're talking to believe that the problem they have is a large and important one?
5. Do the people we're meeting with have decision making authority?
6. Is our message (solution) resonating with the people that have the problem?
7. Is there excitement around moving to a proposal?
8. Do we have agreement on a proposal?
9. Are we getting insight into the buying process and the actors that need to be involved in the buying process?
10. Are we executing the closing process at a rapid pace?
11. Are we having weekly check-ins with our project sponsor?
12. Have we identified a contract signer?
13. Is there urgency around the close date?
14. Is there anything preventing our signer from signing?

Some Thoughts On Trump & The Election

I couldn’t stay up to watch the results come in. I went to sleep around 11pm. I woke up around 4am and checked my phone and saw a Business Insider alert that said:

“Trump strikes conciliatory tone in victory speech, praises Clinton."

A small bit of light in an enormous amount of dread.

I didn’t sleep much after that. I laid there and felt a weird combination of fear and sadness. But a couple hours later when I went to the gym I started to come around a bit. Here are some of the thoughts that have been rolling through my mind today.

1. I used to kind of like Donald Trump. I remember listening to him when he would call in to the Don Imus show many years ago. I didn’t know much about him and he was pretty right-leaning on fiscal issues but on the social stuff he was definitely a New Yorker. He was a reasonable guy and made good some good points. And I loved how positive he was. We’ve all been annoyed by his constant use of adjectives like "terrific" and "tremendous" and "unbelievable" but back then I kind of liked it.
2. Month after month throughout the primary and into the general election everyone laughed at the notion of Donald Trump becoming President. It was a joke. What he pulled off last night was amazing. He brilliantly tapped into a large amount of fear and anger and ignorance and was able to light a fire among a huge number of rural voters.
3. To light this fire he talked about a ban on Muslims entering the country, reversing Roe v. Wade, repealing Obamacare and building a wall on the Mexican border. I’d be willing to bet that not one of those things will happen. And I’d be willing to bet that Trump doesn’t actually want any of those things to happen. Those issues generated talking points that won him the election. He won. He doesn’t owe anybody any favors and he doesn’t need to do any of that nonsense. If he wants any chance at reelection he’s going to have to come way, way back to the middle.
4. We need to create a new word and stop using the word “racist”. It’s too strong and inflammatory and in most cases inaccurate. I don’t think Trump is racist and I don’t think most of his supporters are racist. I think they’re ignorant and uninformed and fearful of a changing world but I don’t think they’re racist. When we call them racist it makes thoughtful conversation almost impossible.
5. Trump is a brilliant marketer and he knows that taglines work. "Make America Great Again" was the perfect tagline for him and it’s a crystal clear indicator of his strategy. When he says this to fearful voters in rural areas what he really means is let’s go back 50 years to a time when the world was less competitive. Where automation wasn’t destroying jobs and we didn’t have to compete globally and you could stay at a job for thirty years and you didn’t need two incomes. We live in a global economy now and those days are over but that vision is incredibly appealing to a lot of people.
6. The most important political issue to me personally is healthcare. Throughout the campaign Trump has continuously threatened to “Repeal Obamacare!” and has received loud cheers for it. I’ll bet if you asked the people cheering what that actually means most of them would have no idea. Those that do have an idea would probably just assume he’s referring to the mandate. I really doubt that healthcare is going to be high on Trump’s list. The election is over and he doesn’t need the “Obamacare” talking point anymore. Further, there are now 22 million people that have insurance as a result of the Affordable Care Act and that will be difficult for politicians to roll back. A lot of people were angry when Medicare launched but virtually nobody would advocate taking it away. And most of the payment reform has been rolled into a new law called MACRA that is separate from the Affordable Care Act. Healthcare is complicated and for the most part on a good path that should be supported by both parties (if you remove the politics). I don’t see things changing in a material way in the next four years.
7. You can argue that Trump has no experience but the reality is that Obama didn’t have the greatest experience and that turned out ok. What Obama did in the last two elections was also amazing. I’m a big fan of Obama but he was not the most qualified candidate when we was first elected. The presidency is now a popularity contest. We just have to get used to that.
8. Having said the above, I think we deserve a president that is prepared and dignified and isn’t reckless. I always thought George W. Bush was in over his head and wasn’t well prepared and was misguided but he didn’t embarrass our country and he wasn’t reckless. This is my main concern with this outcome. Being embarrassed by our President isn’t the end of the world but I do fear his recklessness. The generals should keep him in line when it comes to putting troops on the ground where they don’t belong but his rhetoric clearly can’t be contained. This isn’t about fearing that he has his finger on the button. This is about tiny groups of people all over the world looking for a reason to hate America. There is no worse time in American history in my view to be alienating our enemy. They are inside of our country and outside of our country and they have no home state and no borders and we can never find them all. Reckless, reactive, inflammatory speech from the American president is the most useful recruiting tool that Isis and other terror groups could ever imagine. I fear that he may not be able to rein this in. I truly hope I’m wrong.
9. As of right now it's being reported that 118 million people voted. Trump got 59 million and Clinton got 59 million. The difference is 0.3 percent. That's just crazy.
10. Finally, Trump is our President. Obama said this morning that we should all be rooting for Trump now and he’s absolutely right. We may hate everything he says and disagree with everything he says but like it or not he’s our President. As much we don't want to, we have to at least accept that.

Enterprise User Acquisition & Consumer User Retention

In thinking about a product's user acquisition, the nice thing about enterprise products is that when you get one customer you get a lot of users. You just need to sell one CIO on your product and you’ll quickly pick up thousands of users.

The not so nice thing about enterprise is that you’re going to lose about 20% of those users every year due to employee turnover. Your entire user base is going to turn over every five years. Acquisition scales in enterprise. Retention does not.

The not so nice about consumer products is that, unlike enterprise, you have to acquire users one by one. You don’t have the scalable distribution channel that you have with enterprise. In consumer, user acquisition is expensive and really difficult.

But the nice about consumer products is that once you get users you can keep them forever (you don’t have the turnover problem).

It’s interesting to note that some companies have figured out how to take the good from enterprise and the good from consumer.

One example is eShares, an enterprise product that digitizes paper stock certificates and options and warrants and rolls them up into an easy to use cap table to help startups and startup employees manage their equity. Employees generally sign up for the service just before their start date when they receive an option grant from their new company (to sign the option grant employees need an eShares account). If the employee leaves the company they keep their account open to manage their equity and they can add subsequent option grants from subsequent companies to keep all their documents in one place.

eShares is brilliant in that they have morphed an enterprise product into a consumer product and have reaped the benefits of both models. This is a super powerful way to quickly build a huge set of engaged users and is a great way to get ahead and build a platform rather than just a useful app. I’m sure eShares investors are taking note.