Flatten the Funnel: Take the noise out of your prospecting
Do you know how many prospects your B2B field sellers can handle at one time? Prevailing practices in the sales world would generally answer that question with, “As many as possible!” But the truth is that your field sellers can only actively manage a finite number of prospects at any given time. Though sales people often put in some of the longest hours in the business world, even they can only fit so much into one day.
Which means that your field sellers do not need a ridiculous number of leads in their queue cluttering up the CRM. They need just enough prospects to keep them at capacity. Everything else in your late-stage prospecting efforts is just noise that the sellers must wade through to get to what they want – a handful of buyers-in-motion.
This is often where the breakdown between lead generation teams (usually marketing) and sellers originates. Marketers get tasked with “filling the top of the funnel” – this idea that an organization should shove as much into the top of the funnel as possible in hopes that something shakes down through the various layers and turns out to be a buyer-in-motion. But sellers generally recognize these types of leads as a source of noise – not something actionable. Consequently, the seller ignores the leads, marketing gets frustrated with sellers’ lack of follow through, and the CRM gets pumped full of data that ends up being outdated, unused, and obscures truly actionable prospects.
Sales Intelligence can help you out of lead purgatory. The solution is not more tools to manage data or new rules on MQLs and SQLs. The solution is to flatten your funnel. This means delivering just enough buyers-in-motion to your sales team to keep them busy – but not enough to bog them down with having to spend their days triaging potential leads.
Easily said, perhaps, but how is it done? As referenced in a previous , Drowning In Data, sales people do not need huge volumes of data – they just need access to the right data at the right time, to help them engage buyers-in-motion. This is where Sales Intelligence can help you flatten that funnel. While sellers may not need all that data, your Intelligence team can do a lot with it. The amount of data that can be brought to bear on your sales process in this age is astounding. Internal sales data, competitive data, open market research, prospect intelligence, intent data, surveys – it is all waiting to be applied to your prospect pools. After the intelligence is incorporated, your field sellers receive a handful of potential buyers-in-motion to pursue – and a lot less noise in their pipeline. Turn your marketing team loose on the same intelligence derived list and watch your marketers have a lot more fun in their roles, not to mention an increased ROI on marketing spend.
To make this work, there are a few things you need to have in place:
1. You need someone dedicated to pulling your intelligence framework together. This may be a separate team, or a discipline embedded in an existing support team. Best practice for your intelligence team would suggest incorporating someone with sales experience, if possible.
2. You must know how many prospects your sales team needs to be at capacity and make their goals. (If the number of prospects needed to be at capacity does not meet or exceed the number of prospects needed to make the sales plan, then your sales plan is misaligned and there is some work to do – but that is a topic for another day). Determining the number of active prospects required usually rests on a fairly simple metric – the “value of an activity” metric. Reach out if you are unfamiliar with that metric and want to know more.
Traditional funnel based lead generation efforts often dilute the power of the organization’s CRM and pipeline reporting with lots of noise. Remember that in this data age, it is not the quantity of leads that count. It is the quality. An intelligence driven sales practice can help you flatten your funnel, remove the noise, and make the most of your field sellers’ time.