To manage the sales funnel you first need a process that captures the new business opportunities in an organized, concise way. Capturing opportunities is one of the core capabilities of a good CRM system and the opportunity capture capability of your CRM can make managing the sales funnel a manageable process or just a sales burden to enter data. The opportunity information capture needs to be carefully integrated into the overall sales process with measurements and KPIs that drive results.
Making sure that the process drives the funnel, and that the funnel drives organizational priorities and activities, is a key part of building a high performance sales program.
Managing the sales funnel needs to be a key part of the overall management process. There are 3 key capabilities that can help you drive the velocity of business moving through the sales funnel:
First, by measuring what happens as opportunities move through the sales process, you can identify bottlenecks in the system and barriers to success — which you can then change to improve the success rate of closing new business.
- For example, we often see companies who have a very complex process to quote prices that are more aggressive than marketing is comfortable quoting. How you get through the business evaluation and price-approval process is a key component of getting information from the customer to take control of the award before your competitors do.
- You can build spreadsheets and make presentations to get approval, or you can use the business opportunity data captured in the CRM to make the decision quickly — especially when the CRM captures cost and complete business potential data and presents it in clear ways that can be used to make decisions. NEHANET captures it all in a comprehensive opportunity management solution that lets you make business decisions quickly and maximize the company’s results in the process.
Second, customer requests such as technical questions, business issues, customer specs, delivery requirements, and quality questions all need to be captured and formally responded to professionally and quickly. Most of the time all of this happens by a series of phone calls and emails that are hard to track and make the process less transparent and less of a priority as you try to close the business
- Linking opportunities to a comprehensive Activity process is a good way to get issues answered and make commitments that can make a difference. NEHANET provides an Activity solution that lets you request support from the rest of the organization, tie it all to the opportunity process, and keep it all tied together in a transparent process that links business potential to activities to priorities to keep everyone committed to closing the business quickly.
Third, building sales funnel reports and driving KPIs that drive time to closure, and success rates while tracking where opportunities get stuck in the sales, organization responsiveness processes let you identify process improvements and team priorities that can accelerate the process of moving an opportunity through the sales funnel.
NEHANET has a comprehensive opportunity/activity management solution that resolves all three of these issues to identify the best opportunities, evaluate what you should expect if you win, drive activities and priorities to get responses back to customer quickly and professionally to take charge of the new business process, and allow sales to effectively help the company succeed. We have slick funnel velocity diagnosis/analysis reports right out of the box. We present multidimensional information both at an aggregate level, and at a per-opportunity level. You can dig into the days that an opportunity spent in each phase by different criteria such as region, market segment, account rep, etc. In addition, you can slice and dice at the aggregate level by the same criteria.
Take the black magic out of the process of winning new business. Adopt the right CRM solution and take control of the sales process with comprehensive opportunity management solutions and processes.
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