Faster Funnel

How to Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster
Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.

October, 2005
Note: I am indebted to Hugh Macfarlane, author of “The Leaky Funnel,” for his
invaluable contributions to this article.
Introduction
The growth of many companies is constrained by their sales funnel. Although many of
their best minds are focused on sales and marketing, it is often one of the company’s
most frustrating efforts. Usually, they take a sort of “cocktail shaker” approach, mixing in
all the newsletters, advertisements, collateral, and sales techniques they like. Then they
shake things up in the market, promoting their company, touting their products, offering
specials, sending out “closers,” and hoping for the best.
So, why can’t they find enough prospects? When prospects are found, why do so many
fail to close as forecasted? And, why do so many prospects seem to cooperate with their
sales efforts, and yet don’t buy?
These companies are eager for prospects to buy, so why won’t they cooperate? The
reason is actually simple.
They aren’t ready. (Duh!)
What can companies do to make their sales funnel flow faster?
There is a simple, effective approach that works. You can implement it in your company.
It is not hard to do, or even expensive. The only thing it requires is that you stop focusing
on your company, your products, and your needs. Instead, focus on the prospect’s
business, their objectives, and their impediments. Then, work to remove those
impediments. Call it the buyer’s journey.
© Copyright 2005, Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc. All rights reserved. Page 1
The Buyer’s Journey

In his book, “The Leaky Funnel,” Hugh Macfarlane provides a simple description of the
buyer’s journey. Figure 1 represents a version of that journey:
Figure 1: The Buyer’s Journey
Customers seeking to solve problems and grow their business vary this sequence
according to the circumstances. They may need the purchasing department to position
vendors early in the process (as is the case in “The Leaky Funnel”). Or, they may need to
strategically prioritize and plan for various projects, or conduct pilot testing. The stages
depend on their environment. The problem is that sellers typically ignore the buyer’s
journey in favor of their own:
Figure 2: “The Sales Process”
Clearly, buyers and sellers are coming from different planets. Companies invest heavily
in sales forces, always looking for “closers” who somehow won’t fail to make their
quotas. They spend money on CRM or sales training in an effort to improve results. They
fiddle with compensation, or even replace the sales leaders. They invest in marketing
collateral, websites, and promotion in an effort to “soften the market.” Most of the time,
unfortunately, these investments in “the sales process” (as it is typically construed) have
increasingly diminishing returns because they are focused around the company’s product,
rather than the buyer’s problems.
How can this problem be fixed? Fortunately, it is not incredibly difficult. There are four
steps to organize your company’s efforts to make your sales funnel flow faster:
Figure 3: Steps to Make the Sales Funnel Flow Faster
Define the buyer’s journey

People everywhere are trying to achieve their goals and solve problems. How much does
your company know about the problems they have, how they go about solving them, and
what those efforts cost? Do you have evidence and data to support your theories, or do
you presume to know what prospects want?
Valuable techniques exist for researching and gathering this data. For example, Voice of
the Customer initiatives provide a structured and systematic means of assembling facts
from existing sources, such as customer complaints, technical support calls, warranty
claims, and proactive interviewing and surveys. These data are then translated into lists of
issues and needs that are critical to value, or Critical to Quality (or CTQs as they are
known in Six Sigma). CTQs apply to a service like the marketing and sales process every
bit as much as they apply to the requirements for a product.
Likewise, a technique known as customer value mapping can be useful in defining who
within your prospect’s business is impacted by your products and services, and which
aspects of their world you can have an impact on.1 These insights help identify the kinds
of questions salespeople (or marketers) should be asking to uncover prospect needs
before the sales process begins.
You should gather as much information as you can via Voice of the Customer and
customer value mapping. Add that information to the collective knowledge of your team
to create a map of the buyer’s journey. Then, invite some of your customers to help you
validate that map. As you talk with them, gather as much information as you can about
their problems, their work-arounds, and what those work-arounds cost. You may find that
different types of customers have a different journey. This is important information that
may enable you to segment your market in ways more productive than traditional
marketing demographics.
1
A more complete treatment of customer and business value mapping can be found in my book, “Business
Value Mapping – Why Your Prospects and Salespeople Don’t Understand Your Product’s Value and What
You Can Do About It.”
Establish metrics for each stage

Once you map out the journey for your prospects, you are in a position to begin gathering
data about your process. As in any production process, there are three kinds of
information. First is the calculation of lag time, which is the time it takes for prospects to
progress through each stage of their journey. Second is the quality of the opportunities.
Third is the quantity of the opportunities, which enables the calculation of throughput
(and improvements in throughput). These are interdependent variables, as we will see.
In measuring lag time, first try to guess how much time it takes for buyers to progress
through each of the stages of their journey. Then, do some research, and identify the
actual amount of time it takes them to progress. You could do this by examining
information in your existing forecasting or opportunity management system, or by asking
salespeople to keep some records for a while. (You might not be able to get perfectly
clean data on each stage. Still, you should be able to get enough information to begin
identifying differences between what you thought lag time would be and what is actually
the case.
One large client measured the length of the sales cycle for deals it won, and the deals it
lost. The average time for winning a deal was 56 days. The average time for losing a deal
was 156 days. While it might be a bit extreme to take so much longer to lose a deal than
it does to win one, it points up an interesting phenomenon.
Buyers who take longer than is normal to progress become far less likely to buy. They are
called laggards, and you can measure them in your own business. How much time do
salespeople spend trying to sell laggard prospects?
One telecommunications company mined data from its forecasting system. They
compared the days of sales effort required to win deals (i.e., progress to a yes) with the
days of sales effort required on deals they lost (i.e., progress to a no). It turned out these
were vastly different numbers. Deals they won happened relatively quickly. Deals they
lost often took much more sales time. In fact, in one year the company spent a staggering
19,000 more days pursuing buyers who didn’t buy than ones who did!
Of course, your business will be different, but this clearly illustrates the importance of
measuring the progress of opportunities through the buyer’s journey, aka the “sales
funnel.” But how do you learn what is wrong with these laggard prospects, and perhaps
what to do about them?
That is the point of the second critical thing to measure in your sales funnel, the quality of
the opportunities. Here is an example from an engineering client who was struggling with
the same problem – lagging buyers – although they used a different metric: for them it
was a low close ratio that hovered around 10% regardless of what they did to improve it.
They joked about having so many deals that wouldn’t close they “needed a bulldozer to
push them onto the next quarter’s forecast.” Since deals weren’t closing, management
decided salespeople needed training in how to close them, and we were hired to help.
However, when we brought in a group of salespeople and their managers and begin to
learn the nature of the deals in their sales funnel, it became apparent something was
wrong. The opportunities in the sales funnel had nothing in common. One was for a
mysterious electrical problem the client’s engineer had been unable to diagnose. Another
was for labor on a construction project that was going out for bid. A third was to quote
design work against an incumbent engineering company. Management had failed to
define what a qualified opportunity was. Like many people, they assumed qualification
was a remedial issue best left up to the sales department. As pressure mounted to close
more business, salespeople began chasing harder and harder after anything that moved.
In manufacturing terms, it was as if they were attempting to add value to scrap.
We quickly worked to help them define appropriate qualifying criteria, and then applied
it to their sales funnel.2 Two things happened very quickly. First within 90 days, the close
ratio skyrocketed to just over 40%, freeing up an enormous amount of resources for
pursuing higher quality opportunities. Second, by removing all those low-quality
opportunities clogging the funnel, it became apparent that there wasn’t enough work in
process to support the business plan. With the air finally cleared, management could
focus on the real problem: finding more market.
Clearly, we must understand the quality of the opportunities in the funnel if we are to
really have an idea of the quantity of opportunities in the funnel for forecasting and
making management decisions.
Using the sales funnel as a production metaphor has been around for a long time, and
measuring it has always been a big challenge. This is largely a result of setting up the
foundations incorrectly (i.e., defining the process in terms of our actions, instead of the
prospect’s). This mistake sets the stage for a host of problems, which are only amplified
when CRM software systems are used to automate measurement of the sales funnel.
Salespeople know they are paid to sell, not to keep administrative records. As a result,
scratching the surface of most company’s sales process measurements often shows the
wrong data being collected, no data being collected, or nothing to substantiate the data
that is collected.
Many of these problems can be resolved once operating definitions of the process are
revised to acknowledge the actions you want customers to take along their journey. As
we will see, this enables your company to be in a better position to bring marketers and
sellers together and to identify the tactics that can help the buyer progress in the journey.
Implementing these tactics opens many new possibilities for measuring the progression
2
A more complete treatment of qualification criteria is available in my book, “How to Develop
Qualification Criteria that Will Help You Find and Win Customers.”
of those buyers, often without encumbering the sales force with the administrative
burdens of traditional approaches.
Match your selling tactics to the stages of the buyer’s journey

I mentioned the cocktail shaker where we put all our tactics together and shake them up
hoping something good happens. Once the buyer’s journey is defined, a much more
effective approach breaks their process into stages and makes each work individually.
Ask yourself the question, “What tactics can we apply that are good enough to help
buyers move from stage one to stage two in their journey?”
After you answer this question to some degree, put the tactics in place, and make them
work. Then, move on to the successive stages of the process, asking the same questions
and making the answers work.
You’ll find that some of your current tactics may not actually be necessary to move
buyers through their stages. You’ll also stages where you don’t have tactics that are good
enough. Often, simply by aligning the tactics to specific stages through the buyer’s
journey helps accelerate them. That’s because it prevents you from making the mistake of
focusing on your product instead of their problem.
For example, if a prospect is at the beginning of the cycle and you promote benefits of
your product, you won’t connect because these benefits are important to them only at the
end of the cycle. By focusing on where the buyer is on their journey, and devising a
means of helping them get to the next stage instead, you automatically become more
productive. Some marketers call this a “market to message match.”
Likewise, salespeople are taught if they fail to help the prospect formulate the problem,
something else or someone else will or can. If you can get prospects troubled about the
right problem, not only are they going to have the right need, but they are going to have
the right expectations of what is going to happen when that need is met. Then you are
going to be in a position to put an offer on the table that is compelling and appropriate.
This is one of the reasons to focus your communication around the problem you are in the
business of solving, and not just the need that you are in the business of meeting.
For example, if you focus on needs instead of getting buyers troubled about their
problems, you can get an odd behavior. You can get them to recognize a need for your
product or service, and even interest them in your product or service. With some effort a
salesperson may even get them to acknowledge the dollar value of their potential
solution. However, if the right people in their business are not troubled by the pain of
lacking your product or service, they may not act. In effect, they will have implicitly
decided not to act, even though they have not done so explicitly. This is the trap named
by the old adage, “you can’t sell the solution, unless you’ve sold the problem first.”
There is another subtle but important distinction between a need and a problem. A need
can be described in positive language. If they have a need, but don’t have a problem,
frequently they won’t act. Unfortunately, many of us are uncomfortable talking in
negative language about the bad that may happen.
However, consider the insurance industry, which has done a good job of talking about all
of the bad things that flow if you don’t have insurance or if you are underinsured, and for
which you need protection. The technique works. The fact is buyers are inundated with
problems all the time. They are focused on problems and are constantly trying to solve
problems. It is a mistake to settle for talking about needs, because for each of the unmet
needs there is an underlying problem. For each of those underlying problems we should
needle them, because in truth we want buyers to be troubled about the problem as well as
their needs.
Lets return for a moment to the beginning of the buyer’s journey. What could you do to
get an untroubled and unaware prospect to recognize the dangers of doing nothing?
• Perhaps your company could get well-written articles placed in various journals
read by key executives in your industry. If the articles provided a call to action at
the end with an enticing offer of more information (and not for your product!),
you might be able to set up a stream of inquiries.
• Once you’ve created this stream of inquiries, what can you do with it? Would
information on specific case studies help them, or perhaps information on
remedies or other problem-solving information? Suppose you knew that some
were considering a "roll their own" approach. Would they be interested in the
details of what is actually involved?
Suppose a prospect recognizes the problem, and the need, but is being held back by a
different issue? Here is another example, this time further down the buyer’s journey. One
company I worked for launched a new line of industrial devices based on micro-computer
technology (an advance over mini-computer technology). This should have been a
tremendously successful product launch to its customers (who were typically
manufacturing engineers). Unfortunately, it did not turn out that way at first. Although
the new device saved money and space, it also unfortunately required the customers to
learn a new programming language. Naturally, the company also offered wonderful (and
wonderfully expensive) classes so people could to learn how to program these new
devices. For the buyers, however, the time away from their plants, combined with the
cost of the classes created a problem that dampened the market, and sales were not
meeting targets. Touting the benefits of the new product didn’t work. Lowering the price
didn’t work. Only lowering the barrier to learning that new programming language could
solve the problem.
The sales force, themselves degreed engineers, jumped to the rescue. They launched
wave after wave of “lunch-n-learns” in regional distributor’s offices throughout the
country teaching the basics of the new programming language to existing customers for
free. Prospects could tinker with the devices, learn a few simple programming routines,
get a decent lunch, and be back at their posts within a couple of hours. This greatly
increased their comfort level with the new machines, and made the engineers more
receptive to trying the new device on low-risk projects.
It worked. Orders began to climb and, ultimately the annual revenue targets were met.
Clearly, matching your selling tactics to the stages of the buyer’s journey is not strictly a
selling issue. The key is in getting sales and marketing together to solve these problems.
In many companies, unfortunately, marketing departments are asked to produce product-
oriented communications and promotions instead of spending time on problems
customers want and need to solve (such as those mentioned above). As a result,
unfortunately, talented people may work ferociously to produce newsletters that may go
unread, leads that might be ignored, and collateral that could go unused. Matching your
marketing and selling tactics to the buyer’s journey is a perfect way to unite the two
departments on goals that produce measurable results.
Improve one thing at a time

Improving the flow of prospects through the funnel can take several forms, as we have
seen. When lag gets excessive in a given stage, it forms a bottleneck and may be a place
where throughput can be improved. In fact, it turns out that prospects who lag behind the
averages are actually less likely to close.
As mentioned earlier, one useful strategy is to proactively leak these prospects from the
funnel to free up salespeople’s time to focus on better ones. However, this is problematic
for several reasons.
Salespeople’s temptation is to prevent leakage. After all, their job is to close the deals.
And once they’ve put energy into a prospect, it is theirs. What if it closes in the future?
Besides, who or what is going to take care of the prospect if they don’t? Where are you
going to leak it to? What happens in sales is we hang on to buyers that are already dead.
Trying to prevent leakage exacerbates lag.
Although salespeople may be keen to take on new leads, they don’t want to let go of the
ones that have stagnated in their funnel. Instead of hanging on to them, a more healthy
behavior is to leak them forcibly. One client established a new business rule. If
salespeople wanted to take on five new leads, they had to leak (or progress) five old ones
from their funnel (e.g., put them into the nurturing program, which we’ll discuss
momentarily).
This has interesting implications. Rather than look at the salespeople and say, “We have a
problem, so lets re-skill them,” this change simply forced salespeople to focus on buyers
who were ready to progress. It actually had a faster effect of improved efficiency.
Further, we were able to go back and look at the relative data on people’s conversion
performance to evaluate the need for skills improvement, and in some cases change
people out. But the bigger change was to get them to focus on their funnel, on the ones
most likely to close, and forcing them to give up five old leads if they were going to get
five new ones.
Now, if we are to proactively leak prospects out of the funnel, where can you “leak them
to?” and how can you know they’ll be taken care of? If the intent is to recycle the leaked
leads, then simply restarting them again at the top isn’t going to work. We need to have
something to which we are going to recycle them.
Often the answer is simple. Some clients leak their buyers to a newsletter focused on
solving problems they are interested in. One client with a large average order size hired a
retired sales manager as a nurturer. When prospects reached a point where they were not
going to progress, salespeople would say something to the effect of, “Look, it seems we
may have reached a point where it might not be worth your time or mine to continue our
discussions. I’d like to introduce you to a colleague of mine whose name is Joe. Joe is
going to make contact with you every month, and share with you one little insight we’ve
gained from one of our customers that we think might be helpful to you. However, his
real objective is to make sure that we keep out of your hair until it is appropriate for us to
come back and bother you again.” They had a 90% success rate of clients specifically
agreeing to participate in this nurturing program. They gained clients who opted in every
month.
Joe was able to 1) keep on the radar screen until it was time to get them back into the
funnel, and 2) identify when the timing changed, so he was able to get the salespeople
engaged even when the time frame accelerated or got delayed further.
Sometimes, a kind of breakthrough improvement is possible, called a “lag buster.” One

client offered a data security technology whose average sales price was $400k. Their
approach was different from that of competitors, and their company was quite new. They
were asking buyers to make two hard decisions: First, “Do I buy your approach” and,
second, “Do I buy you (your company).” They were winning sales, but they were taking
18 months – 18 months! It was taking that to convince them to the tune of $400k.
So, after some investigation, we recommended something you may already do. We
recommended a “puppy dog sale.” You know how this works. Puppies are cute, they are
small, they are going to grow up into dogs, but the fact is we can sell puppies more easily
than we can sell dogs. So what they said to the buyers was this: “The average life of a
solution like this is 48 months. We’re not going to ask you to make a decision for 48
months. Instead, we’re going offer a one-month solution, fully guaranteed, with no
obligation. And we’re going to offer it for 1/48th of the full price.” They had a finance
company package up the one-month solution. Because their product was software based,
the unit cost was extremely low. And, fortunately, their start-up costs were also low, so it
was viable and doable. Because the decision was a very small one, suddenly the buyers
were making decisions in three weeks. They rapidly gained speed through the sales
funnel.
This lag buster was possible because the vendor chose to bear the initial risk. By making
buyer’s decision’s more accessible they rapidly increased the speed at which their funnel
flowed.
I’ve written elsewhere about a similar kind of situation, where Quadrant Homes, a Seattle
home builder, redesigned their business model to sell larger homes less expensively by
leveling their production schedule. Their approach made it easier for buyers to make
decisions, and has caused them to grow into one of the largest home builders, and one of
the fastest growing companies, in the state of Washington. You can find the article,
“Grow Your Business and Lose the Fat by Putting Marketing and Selling on a ‘Lean’
Diet,” on my website, in the articles section under “case studies.”
Summary
Most businesses make an unfortunate assumption that drives marketing and selling apart.
That assumption is that marketing’s job is to do the media stuff, and sale’s job is to sell
the product. Under these circumstances, inevitably, the marketing department ends up not
really understanding what it is throwing over the wall to sales. To the extent this happens,
marketing does not become intimate with customers; it just takes responses or database
listings and hands them off to sales.
In reality, marketing’s job is to work together with the sales department to find the
greatest pockets of market potential, to devise the most effective ways of attracting those
prospects to your company, to qualify them and convert them, and to automate the
process as much as possible. The sales department’s job is to do everything that can’t be
automated.
Your company needs sales and marketing departments to jointly plan and implement the
buyer’s journey. When figuring out what tactics are best for each stage of the buyer’s
journey, it is not clear at all that marketing should handle the top of the funnel and sales
should handle the bottom. The boundary between them is blurred. What matters is that
the company create and execute the best tactics they possibly can, and that both sales and
marketing have shared ownership of executing those tactics with some kind of rhythm.
Faster Funnel Sales Process Tuneup

Michael Webb has developed a 30-minute “Faster Funnel Sales Process Tuneup”
conducted over the phone with you and your top staff members. In this fast-paced, zero-
nonsense session, Michael will walk you through the approach and answer questions
about how to apply it in your business. What, exactly, are the stages of your buyer’s
journey? How can you measure these stages? What tactics can synchronize with your
prospects at each stage? How can marketing and sales work together to improve each
stage? tuneup@salesperformance.com or visit:
http://www.salesperformance.com/services.aspx, and look for “Sales Process Tuneup.”
About The Author

Michael J. Webb is President of Sales Performance Consultants, Inc., a leader in helping
companies improve sales performance by applying step-by-step scientific principles. He
has worked with clients such as American Express, 3M, Marriott, Microsoft Great Plains,
and many others to improve their sales processes and results. He also works with sales
training firms, such as IMPAX Corporation, to help integrate the best selling practices
into client companies’ sales operations. His website, www.salesperformance.com,
contains a wealth of hard-to-find articles and resources on process improvement for
marketing and sales organizations.

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How to Make Your Sales Funnel Flow Faster

Michael J. Webb, Sales Performance Consultants, Inc.

They aren’t ready. (Duh!)

What can companies do to make their sales funnel flow faster?

The Buyer’s Journey

Figure 1: The Buyer’s Journey

Figure 2: “The Sales Process”

Figure 3: Steps to Make the Sales Funnel Flow Faster

Define the buyer’s journey

Establish metrics for each stage

In manufacturing terms, it was as if they were attempting to add value to scrap.

Match your selling tactics to the stages of the buyer’s journey

Improve one thing at a time

Sometimes, a kind of breakthrough improvement is possible, called a “lag buster.” One

Faster Funnel Sales Process Tuneup

About The Author

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