perf paper 9 tips for sales people

NINE TIPSto Unleash the Performance of Your Sales FunnelThe First of Four Performance Papers in a Breakthrough Series for Sales Professionals to Maximize Sales Funnel Performance

© Copyright 2013 Breakthrough Sales Performance™ and Mark Sellers Performance Paper Number One of Four in a Series on Maximizing Performance with the Sales Funnel

Reference GuideIntroduction................................................................................... 1

TIP 1 Have funnel visibility for 100% of your sales opportunities............... 2

TIP 2 Place all opportunities at the right customer stage............................ 3

TIP 3 The sale value for each opportunity should be only for the dollars that the sale would bring into your current year..............

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TIP 4 Know what’s changed about your funnel since the last funnel inspection.............................................................................. 5

TIP 5 Use TVR as the leading indicator of your funnel health..................... 6

TIP 6 Manage to Target TVR..................................................................... 7

TIP 7 Commit to monthly Funnel Audits.................................................... 8

TIP 8 Book your 30 day plan to your calendar............................................

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TIP 9 Book your next month’s Funnel Audit now!..................................... 10

© Copyright 2013 Breakthrough Sales Performance® and Mark Sellers Performance Paper Number One of Four in a Series on Maximizing Performance with the Sales Funnel

www.Breakthrough-Sales.com

http://www.Breakthrough-Sales.com

Message from MarkLet’s be honest - the sales funnel is old.

We don’t know if Mr. James Patterson of the NCR Corporation created the funnel 130 years ago. ago. We do know he made the sales funnel a major part of his innovative sales training system and produced phenomenal results for his NCR.

Do you ever wonder “Is the sales funnel still relevant?”

The only thing that is at risk of being irrelevant is a salesperson who adds little or no value to the customer’s buying process.The most dramatic change in selling today is not about selling – it’s about buying. The customer has changed the rules of the game of selling and buying due to customers having more information, more access to it, access to it 24/7, and customers being more connected than ever. Customers just don’t need salespeople like they used to.

Where does this leave the funnel?

The sales funnel – rather, The BuyCycle Funnel™ – is the key to making the funnel and salespeople relevant. The BuyCycle Funnel™ aligns the salesperson’s selling to customer buying, one sale at a time. It’s the ultimate resource to plan, prioritize, and organize your way to achieving quota year after year.

I have written this performance paper to help you quickly apply the concepts of the BuyCycle Funnel to your territory. Use these tips to be relevant and create a competi-tive advantage around selling.

The funnel is still the best tool in your bag to help you achieve the one thing you’re asked to achieve this year and every year – quota.

Good selling, Mark Sellers


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TIP ONE Have funnel visibility for 100% of your sales opportunities

There’s a saying ‘if you can’t see it you can’t do something about it’.

If you can’t see - literally have a list of - all of your sales opportunities that are getting selling attention you can’t fully prioritize, plan and organize for maximum sales funnel effectiveness.

If you use a CRM system be sure to include all of the opportunities on your funnel list, especially the ones at the top part of your funnel or ‘pre-funnel’, as long as they’re getting selling attention. If you use an old fashioned spreadsheet that’s fine too.

Remember to include new sales opportunities you are pursuing with existing customers, such as new products you plan to introduce or even existing products that are not currently being used. With 100% visibility to all opportunities on your sales funnel you’ll be able to plan, prioritize and organize your next 30 days of funnel activity.

Ok, that was an easy one but it’s a good place to start. Let’s kick it up a level.


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TIP TWO Place All Opportunities at the Right Customer Stage

The BuyCycle Funnel™ has buying process stages that are defined by the customer.

For example it’s the customer that who ‘acknowledges a problem’ (BuyCycle Stage 1) or ‘defines the financially compelling characteristics of the problem’ (BuyCycle Stage 2). Each stage is like an important milestone the customer reaches in the decision making process. This is the most dramatic change to occur in the sales funnel in decades. Defining your funnel like this helps you know better which customers are serious about changing, which ones are not, and what all customers have committed to so far in their buying journey.

This kind of funnel design gives you the most accurate funnel possible. With an accurate funnel you can prioritize, plan and organize effective 30 day plans.

To place opportunities at the right customer stage apply the stage definitions to the opportunity to determine which definition best fits. If there’s any doubt which stage an opportunity belongs in then you know the model is working – it’s making you think about what you know and don’t know about all of the variables involved. This will help you have a more accurate funnel and better sales strategies for each opportunity. Having a funnel sorted by customer stage gives you a quick and accurate visual of your entire funnel. You’ll know if your funnel is healthy enough. You’ll even know what part of your funnel needs priority attention.


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TIP THREE The sale value for each opportunity should be only for the dollars that the sale would bring into your current year

A common, easy sales funnel mistake to make is also one that is often costly. It’s adding funnel dollars from next year to this year’s funnel. However, you can’t borrow from next year’s funnel to pay this year’s quota.

This mistake inflates the value of the funnel and makes it harder for you to prioritize, plan and organize your 30 day plan.

This mistake is usually made under one of two situations. One situation occurs if the company sells consumables. For example let’s say it’s March and you have a Stage 4 sale worth 60,000 dollars. But if you win it the first order would come in July. The customer is expected to order about 5,000 dollars monthly which means the funnel value for July to December is only 30,000 dollars. If you count that sale on this year’s sales funnel at 60,000 instead of 30,000 you’ve incorrectly overstated your sales funnel by 30,000 dollars. If you make this mistake for one sale it might have limited effect on your sales funnel management. If you make

the mistake for half a dozen sales or more you probably have a big problem.

This second situation occurs for companies that sell a capital product. It’s sometimes called ‘funnel creep’. It happens when a customer postpones the purchase date from this year to next year. Let’s say you have a sales opportunity on the funnel expected to close in December and it’s worth 45,000 dollars. At a recent sales call you learn that the customer is postponing all purchases like this until July when you’re in your next fiscal year. Your funnel for this year just lost 45,000 dollars of value. It’s true that this year’s funnel loss is next year’s funnel gain but that doesn’t help you achieve your quota for this year. Does it?


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TIP FOUR Know what’s changed about your funnel since the last funnel inspection

Knowing where, how, and why your sales funnel is changing is powerful information that’s key to unleashing the power of your sales funnel and hitting quota. It lets you prioritize, plan and organize your way to success every 30 days.

Knowing what has changed helps you justify doing what’s working and stop doing what’s not working. For example, if you consistently add no or few new opportunities to the early Stages then your funnel will eventually suffer. If you’re attending trade shows, doing phone blitzes and more and this isn’t paying off then you should try doing something different. On the other hand if your funnel consistently is producing new opportunities at these early stages month after month then learn why that’s working and continue doing it.

If finding new opportunities isn’t your challenge, but pushing them across the finish line is and your funnel is heavy in the middle stages then brainstorm ways to move the deals along and ask your sales manager to share best practices with you.


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TIP FIVE Use TVR as the leading indicator of your funnel health

Before The BuyCycle Funnel™ there was an old, traditional funnel model. The funnel value was usually determined by adding the dollar value of all opportunities. This old approach often leads to an inflated funnel value and therefore misleads salespeople on priorities and planning. It doesn’t tell you accurately how much time you’ll need to devote to the different parts of your funnel. Your forecasting will often not be accurate.

The BuyCycle Funnel uses something called TVR, or Total Viable Revenue to value the funnel. TVR is the most accurate value of your funnel because it is defined by only those opportunities that have progressed far enough in the customer buying process. TVR is a leading indicator of your funnel health because it tells you if your funnel has enough opportunities on it. Getting enough TVR on your funnel is the first significant objective of funnel manage-ment. If your funnel has enough TVR then your win rate will take care of the main goal – winning enough TVR to achieve your quota. If it doesn’t have enough TVR then your priorities are simple – get more TVR by focusing on moving opportunities from the earlier funnel stages down the funnel.

Counting only TVR toward funnel value solves one of the most common and costly problems that many salespeople can make – inflating the value of their sales funnels. It’s not about filling the funnel. It’s about filling it with TVR.


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TIP SIX Manage to Target TVR

The concept of TVR is key to having an accurate funnel but there’s another concept you need to manage your sales funnel. You need to manage to the Target TVR throughout the year.

Target TVR is how big your funnel needs to be to have high confidence that you’re on track to hit quota. When your TVR is at or above the Target you’re on track and you should make the middle parts of your funnel a priority on your 30 day plan. When you don’t have enough TVR you’re not on track and you need to focus more on the early stages to get more TVR.

How do you know how much Target TVR you need? That’s determined by your win rate and your quota gap.

If you manage to a 50% win rate then your Target TVR should be 2 times the size of your remaining sales quota gap for the year.

If you manage to a 25% win rate then Target TVR should be 4 times the size of your remaining sales quota gap.

If you’re below the Target TVR the first place to find more TVR is usually the early stages of your funnel. You hope to find a lot of opportunities at these stages that have high potential. Advancing those opportunities to later stages adds TVR to your funnel. If your funnel doesn’t have much going on at the early stages then guess what? You need to bring more early stage opportunities onto it through aggressive and steady prospecting activity. That’s the priority.


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TIP SEVEN Commit to monthly Funnel Audits

Because your funnel changes all the time you must also change your priorities and your 30 day plan. You need a way to stay on top of those changes for two reasons. One, to know the health of your funnel, and two to set the most up to date, effective 30 day plan.

This is the purpose of the Funnel Audit™.

A Funnel Audit™ helps you quickly analyze funnel health by knowing if you have enough TVR and knowing how many opportunities you have at the earlier stages. It helps you quickly see which stages of the funnel deserve priority attention. Then you can act on that information by setting the right 30 day plan.

The Funnel Audit™ is a great way to learn what’s working and not working in your funnel management. For example, if you consistently add new opportunities, or if you do a nice job of moving them along the Funnel Audit™ reveals that. If the opposite is true the Audit will reveal that for you and you can take corrective action.

Your sales manager should help you do Funnel Audits and give you valuable coaching. If you manage resellers or a dealer network you can do Funnel Audits with the salespeople in those companies. It’s a great way to focus your efforts and selling resources for the good of your company and the reseller.

When done properly a Funnel Audit takes only 60-75 minutes each month. This is a very small investment of time that yields a significantly high return.


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TIP EIGHT Book your 30 day plan to your calendar

There’s a saying in sales that you have to plan the work and work the plan.

One of the best habits to increase your success in working the plan is to go to your calendar when you finish the plan and book ‘appointments’ for the work you just decided you needed to get done.

For example if your funnel desperately needs a lot more early stage opportunities to generate new TVR then you could book an appointment on your calendar for a two to four hour block of time to talk to existing customers about products or services you don’t yet sell to them. Like any appointment if something else tries to take that time from you you’ll hopefully say no, you’re busy. It’s that important. It might not seem urgent sometimes. But without committing time to the tasks you’re less likely to achieve your sales goals.


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TIP NINE Book your next month’s Funnel Audit now!

The key to making sustainable changes in your sales funnel performance is to commit to regular, structured Funnel Audits month after month. Like any change you’re more likely to create a new standard of work if you perform the work again and again.

The best time to book next month’s Funnel Audit is at the conclusion of the Audit you just completed.

These are simple, powerful habits that are fundamental to consistently performing at high levels for managing your sales funnel.


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If you found this paper helpful, check out these other sales links:

Find The Funnel Principle book and other highly recommended sales related books at Marketo’s book club:Marketo’s book club View The Funnel Principle and other sales books

Download a chapter from The Funnel Principle at this link:Download chapter from The Funnel Principle book

Check out Mark Sellers’s blogs hereFunnel Principle Blog


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http://www.marketo.com/book-club/the-funnel-principle/

http://www.breakthrough-sales.com/funnel-principle.html

http://breakthrough-sales.com/blog/


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