I love to see a full sales funnel with plenty of new sales opportunities being added frequently and a big flow of converted sales coming out at the bottom. Filling that funnel can take a little while depending on the type of business and sales you are in. Web generated opportunities can soon fill your funnel especially when your sales cycle is short. If you are in a more relationship driven sales environment, new opportunities may be less frequent yet their individual opportunity value may be a lot higher.
If you regularly add new opportunities and follow up on the ones that are in there already, conversions will take place.
Most CRM applications used today, show the funnel in all its glory. Here are my 3 tips managing the sales funnel.
Include value as well as number of opportunities. This will show how dependent you might be on just one or two big deals. This will help avoiding bigcasitus, the sales person’s disease that prevents you from adding any further deals because you focus on that BIG one only. (I first had a bout in 1986 and it was not much fun)
Work on your conversion ratios for each stage in the funnel. It is not uncommon to convert less than 20% of all sales opportunities. That would mean every 5 new opportunities going in the top of your funnel result in 1 sale. If you know how many sales (or revenue) you need to make in a year, you can work out how many new opportunities you need to put in the funnel.
Keep filling the funnel. That is what the boss gives you a nice base salary for. Make the sales and the bonuses start to flow.
