This is the daddy of sales management processes. Many people often refer to their sales “pipeline”. Well, it’s not a pipeline, which by definition has a uniform diameter – meaning that every potential customer would become a paying customer eventually.
It’s a funnel because there is no sales business in the world which does not leak or filter out possible customers from its sales process.
Two things reduce as you progress down the Funnel – Time and Uncertainty.
Each order begins at the top surrounded by doubts, ifs and buts, usually with a long time in the future before the order is expected.
You work the order through the funnel until you have eliminated doubt and uncertainty about whether you’ll get the order, and when you’ll get it.
Each part of the Funnel demands a different type of Selling Activity.
TOP.
At the Top of the Funnel the task is to Prospect. Any data which suggests a possible match between what you can offer and what a potential buying organisation might be looking for means you have a Prospect.
Prospecting is the process of verifying whether there is a match. To do this you must have contacted at least one of the Buying Decision Makers (Strategic, Tactical, Assessor) and/or your Guide, and have answers to each of the questions in the Question Matrix.
MIDDLE.
The Selling tasks in the middle of the funnel revolve around making sure that the Buying Stakeholders are convinced that your’s is the right solution.
Qualifying is the two way process which leads to you both understanding how each will benefit, and not just corporately. It means making sure that the Business Case (ie proposal) for each Stakeholder is sound, and that you are matching the right people in your organisation with your customer’s. The buyers are also qualifying you – they have their Purchase Funnel, though they probably don’t know it.
BOTTOM.
If you’ve done everything well right from the top of the funnel, the order will be at least a 90% certainty. The sales activity here is closing; i.e. helping the customer to decide to buy now.
So what order do you work the Funnel in? Is it simply a matter of closing some orders, writing some proposals and doing some prospecting? Well, no. If you do it that way you’ll start to see gaps in the flow of business and you’ll end up with either feast (too much business) or famine (too little). The way to work the Funnel is:
- Bottom first: Get those orders in first – they’re what pay for everything else.
- Top up the Top – Do some prospecting, marketing activity, promotion
- Work the Middle – Qualify those prospects, get in front of them, get those proposals out
If you work this system then you’ll go a long way to smoothing out the flow of business through your Funnel, making it easier to forecast sales and thus plan resources.
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