Regular Funnel Review
When and How Should You Analyze Your Funnels?
As someone in charge of overall revenue, it is your job to keep things growing. How that happens depends a lot on individual styles, experience, personality, and the team around you. However, there are qualitative and quantitative ways to help you in your goals that give you a better picture granularly and overall of your business.
The busiest times for everyone are month-end, quarter-end, and year-end. Not everyone operates on the same cycle, but everyone has a date at which one period ends and another begins. The measurement of success and failure of the last period begins immediately, with the hope that there is enough pipeline to start the next period off strong.
What typically happens is a big push into the end of a period (let’s say for simplicity going forward that it is month-end). Incentives are offered, meetings are held, legal and compliance reviews are pushed, and contracts are exchanged. Some deals will move into the next month due to seen or unforeseen circumstances. Champagne will be popped or a long night will be had by everyone from top down.
Often what is missing in the intermediary period between month-ends is a look backwards. What worked, what didn’t, what needs to change and what processes can be updated to ensure more leads and deals going forward? The metrics you receive benchmark the progress against a goal and the past. Numbers like total number of leads, overall dollar value of deals, new customer logos, etc. flow freely and end up in reports to management.
Digging for Analytics Gold
In the non-month-end times, it is important to get a more detailed look at what happened. Understand how the SDRs contacted leads passed to sales, understand what was said in each of the six marketing campaigns run over the month. Compare the performance of an eBook to the email outreach campaign formulated by an SDR. Determine the success rate of a specific phrase in an email from the VP of sales to a potential customer.
There is not an easy time, no time that isn’t busy, it’s just the nature of the role. For the company to keep the lights on, deals need to flow. Paying each member of the team requires dollars generated by new customers and with new products. It may seem like there is no right time to dig, but without it just imagine a Salesforce CRM filled with useless notes taken quickly while in the middle of a deal. Why bother? Is there really a need to keep data on an old webinar campaign?
Reviewing what happened in the past leads directly to new pipeline, new leads, and new deals. There is no perfect time, so the time is now.