Do you report your real funnel to your sales manager?
Reporting to the sales manager
On a regular basis sales people need to report to their Sales Manager.
There are several cases to be distinguished:
1) Enough sales:
The Salesman has enough sales leads in his funnel, thus he will only declare those he is absolutely sure of. And he will keep quiet about the other possible sales.
He has no need to raising expectations or even have his targets increased.
If he would miss one of the mentioned leads, then he still can present one of his leads he still has on hand.
2) Below target:
The Salesman is below target. Still he needs to prove he is doing fine.
He will come up with any possible lead, more or less qualified, which might generate sales.
He knows how much and when he is really going to close, but keeps this to himself.
3) Way below target:
The salesman is significantly below target.
Additional to presenting all possible leads, qualified or not, he might even present one lead that will bring sustained growth for the company based upon the potential number of users or consumers of their customers.
Clueless Sales Manager looks into the CRM
The Sales manager will not get the correct picture of the funnel for the company as some of his salesmen will understate their sales funnel, while others will exaggerate their number of leads.
As he doesn’t know who is under over estimating, he is clueless as he has no hard data.
Thus in order to have a reference, he will be looking into the CRM for contacts and contact history, allowing him asking questions about companies, contacts and meetings.
This is one reason why the CRM is being used to verify the number of leads and the number of contacts. In order to be able ask questions about contacts within companies in the CRM.
The CRM is being used as a management control instrument, and not to enhance customer relationship.
Website visit report by company
If the Sales Manager could get a report about the visiting companies on the website of the company with the frequency and intensity of their visits and their interests, he would be able to ask more specific questions. Thus his questions would be more precise or to the point.
Additionally he could offer help and insight into the sales processes of his salesmen using his experiences, as he could visually see the reactions upon the communications with the contacts in the companies and their visits.
This would allow him to ponderate the declared leads and funnels from every salesman based on a better conversation, which will give him better data for the funnel of teh company.
More from LEADS Explorer
- What to do when sales is seriously under budget ?
- What to do when your business is slow ?
- How to catch the lost leads of your leaking funnel
LEADS Explorer Recommends
“Funnel inaccuracy” is certainly not anything new. As one seasoned sales manager once told me — sales reps will report whatever they’re told to report. Their pipeline will always look “just right.” This may work for them in the short term, but, what the manager can get from the CRM is historical data and pretty quickly determine who regularly sandbags and who has real accuracy.
I’m not sure I get your leap to the “website visit reports by company.” I’m not arguing that that is not valuable information. As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s invaluable…to the sales rep for sales efficiency (I’m a fan of what marketing automation tools like Eloqua can offer on that front when integrated with the CRM). And, it can be useful data from a “hunting” perspective. Whether driven by Sales or driven by Marketing is somewhat immaterial — if there is noticeable traffic (recency *and* frequency) to your web site from a given company, it’s worth investigating what content they’re looking at and, possibly, trying to do some legwork to find the right people in that company to talk to. I don’t see this really relating to giving a sales manager a tool to help coach sales reps, though.
@Tim Wilson – Thanks for your comment.
If you would see the application with the Activity charts and the different ways to sort the companies, then the blog post could make it’s point.