How to fix the leaks in your sales process
The answers are buried in your CRM data
This issue is for you if your sales team’s quota attainment looks anything like this:
When you see a wide spread of quota attainment in your team, it’s a sign that you have gaps in your sales process and in the skills of your team. This issue is a guide to finding the gaps and fixing them. There are 3 steps:
Calculate your stage-to-stage conversion rates to find the lossiest stage in your sales process
Unpack your lossiest stage to reveal what is driving the low conversion rate
Unpack your stage-to-stage conversion rates by salesperson to reveal individual coaching needs
1. Calculate your stage-to-stage conversion rates to find the lossiest stage in your sales process
Sales process are typically made up of a number of stages, with the minority of deals entering the process resulting in a win and the majority in a loss. Here’s an example sales process with 4 stages and a 25% win rate.
The first step to identifying your gaps is to calculate your stage-to-stage conversion rates — the % of deals that progress from one stage to the next. For a 4-stage process, you get a total of 4 stage-to-stage conversion rates, which when multiplied together give you your overall win rate.
In our example we immediately see that the lowest stage-to-stage conversion rate is from Propose to Trade. This tells us that the lossiest stage in our sales process is Propose, the stage when we are sharing proposals with customers and trying to secure a verbal commitment to purchase
