Inverting the Sales Funnel

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>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi, my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power's Daily Report. Today we have the pleasure of continuing our conversation with Ron Hubsher CEO of the Sales Optimization Group and we'll talk about the sales funnel. Ron, how do you define a sales funnel? What is a sales funnel?

>> Ron Hubsher: Well it's interesting, I think there's a traditional concept of the sales funnel where there's a bunch of different opportunities that come in the top of the funnel and smaller amount that comes out the bottom and what I've come to realize over the course of my career is that concept of the funnel is a complete myth. It leads to a lot of bad choices and misallocation of resources. It says there's a lot of stuff coming in, I don't know how to prioritize my opportunities, I don't know which opportunities are good and I should invest in them. I don't know which opportunities are winnable if I invest in them I should win and I end up making some poor choices in investing some bad opportunities. If you use a little bit of process and a little bit of thought you can actually flip your funnel from an activity based funnel to a precision based funnel. And one of the things I often look at and what I try and do with all my clients is rate the opportunities in your funnel. And what we do is we create an ideal sales fingerprint, and simply an ideal sales fingerprint is list all the attributes of clients who are highly likely to buy from you and not your competitors and we can create an unacceptable client profile. What are the list of attributes of people who are highly unlikely to buy from you or you may not chose to do business with and then you can put a rating on that.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So you can rate them like red, yellow and green; green moves forward and yellow caution and red get em out.

>> Ron: Hubsher: Absolutely and you know it's really interesting I see a lot of sales organizations investing in bad opportunities. We're never gonna win this deal or they always buy the low prices competitor.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: There's some clients that have sort of a crazy organization, a crazy decision making process where things are done on a very impulsive basis and those are the so called problem clients, and you can only allow yourself to have maybe 2 or 3 in your funnel.

>> Ron Hubsher: The first part to me is targeting. So it's almost like investing in a certain way. You want to invest in winning opportunities.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Right.

>> Ron Hubsher: You know if you had a stock that was going down would you put more money in it? No.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: How do you match the sales process to the buying process? Where do you start?

>> Typically when an organization buys there's probably about 8 different steps they go through. They'll sort of feel there's a pain, we'll say what's this pain like? The next step is seeing what you know I think there's a solution out there, they'll start making decision making criteria, they'll start exploring options, they'll get educated about different products, they'll assess the risk on the products, they'll evaluate vendors and they'll make a go-no go decision. The best sales people are really good at that top part and helping people fully understand and appreciate the pain. They'll help them show what the value is in solving that pain and in our case what we do is we talk about the increase in market evaluation. The 2 biggest areas where you can make a huge differentiation as a sales person, is setting the decision making criteria. So if you're able to re-jigger the decision making criteria to your unique competitive advantages it totally changes the sales opportunity. Your close rates just explode, your sales velocity increases dramatically and your average deal size dramatically increases. And that's one of the key areas we help our clients focus on. The other area is companies again don't chose the lowest price solution, they chose the less risky solution. And during your sales process if you can show that you're the less risky solution and that can be in terms of personal risk or business risk where this is most likely to work effectively in your organization. Those are the 2 areas where a sales person can dramatically accelerate the sales cycle.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Now Ron a lot of senior vendors say and claim that their solution will accelerate the sales funnel. Is that a factual statement?

>> Ron Hubsher: Gives the tools to better manage your funnel. It's still up to you to do the work. So they give you the tools to help you to do it. Any company that's not using a CRM system is probably severely hurting themselves but it just gives you the tools. It's like having a hammer and saw and you need a carpenter and by putting the process around those tools and the discipline around those tools you can make dramatic increases.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Thank you Ron those are excellent ideas on how to improve the speed of a sales funnel but also how to organize it more intelligently so you're more productive. Tune in tomorrow background music to Selling Powers Daily Report.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====