How To Diagnose Bottlenecks In A Sales Funnel

When sales aren't moving fast enough, the first thing a sales leader should do is look at the sales funnel to identify the bottleneck. Are we not filling the top of the funnel? Are we not converting meetings to proposals? Are we not getting the contract signed quickly enough?

I've written in the past about how to build and analyze a sales funnel.

But in some cases the sales funnel might not be granular enough to tell you what's really going on.

With that in mind, I've come up with a set of questions to ask to help you identify trends and areas where things aren't working.

Look across the entire pipeline and ask the questions below about each individual deal. if the answer to any question is 'no' put a checkmark next to the question. If the answer is yes leave it blank. If the question isn't relevant because the deal isn't far enough along in the sales process also leave it blank.

After going through each of these questions for each of your deals you should get a good sense of trends and what's slowing things down and you can now focus on fixing that problem area. Do it again in a month and focus on that newly identified problem area. Repeat.

This is a super simple and quick way to find out what's going on in the funnel. It can be used for an entire team or an individual rep.

Is there adequate top of the funnel activity -- are we working hard?
Are we getting meetings with people we want to meet with?
Do the people we’re talking to have a problem that we’ve diagnosed?
Do the people we're talking to believe that the problem they have is a large and important one?
Do the people we're meeting with have decision making authority?
Is our message (solution) resonating with the people that have the problem?
Is there excitement around moving to a proposal?
Do we have agreement on a proposal?
Are we getting insight into the buying process and the actors that need to be involved in the buying process?
Are we executing the closing process at a rapid pace?
Are we having weekly check-ins with our project sponsor?
Have we identified a contract signer?
Is there urgency around the close date?
Is there anything preventing our signer from signing?