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Introducing: The Funnel Principle

August 20, 2008

And now for a sales book every salesperson should read:

The Funnel Principle: What Every Salesperson Must Know About Selling

There’s two things I immediately liked about The Funnel Principle, a sales book I recently read by international sales consultant and expert Mark Sellers:

  1. I could begin using many of the concepts immediately
  2. I could apply many of the new concepts using our existing CRM: Salesforce.com

To simply say I enjoyed Mark’s book would be an understatement. Frankly I couldn’t put it down and afterwards, I went through it,  jotted down all the major points and began working on implementing his ideas into our own funnel – the ideas are practical enough that in most cases you can begin using them right away.

One of the key questions the Funnel Principle continually gets the reader to ask himself is the fundamental question: “What’s my funnel’s ability right now to close enough business to hit my quota?” One of the main points of the book is that in order to properly answer this question (upon which your sales success rests), you need accurate insight into the value of your funnel at any given point in time. The problem is that the traditional methods of funnel valuation come up short and produce unrealistic measurements for sales people and managers.

The reason traditional funnels under perform is that they focus on selling acitivities instead of how customers buy and where the customer is in the buying process. To solve this problem Sellers introduces the Buy Cycle Funnel. The BCF is a process that defines your sales funnel according to how your customers buy and provides you with insight into where a particular opportunity is at in the funnel at any given time.

Each stage in the BCF is defined by customer commitment. What this means is that instead of determining what stage an opportunity is at based on your last activity (e.g send proposal), opportunities move down the funnel based on commitments customers have made – you never leave an interaction with a customer open ended – there is always a commitment of some kind made in order for the opportunity to progress.

If you’re used to the traditional model of funnel valuation and management, the ideas in The Funnel Process may take a little getting used to at first – change is always tough – but the value in Seller’s message is clear: if you can more accurately gauge the value of your funnel then you can focus your time and energy on the activities that are needed in order to achieve your quota at any given point in time.

The Funnel Principle is one of those books that should be in every top performer’s library. Ideally sales people will read it and combine the new way of valuing and managing their funnels with a proven sales process for maximum effect.

Thanks for the wisdom and for a great read Mark!

To learn more about The Funnel Principle, visit Breakthough-Sales.

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