Week 3: Where do our deals drop off?

“Gotchas” to look out for include..

• Stage exit criteria defined
  • Is your sales team aligned on what happens in each stage? 
  • Do you have documented entry/exit criteria for each stage?
• Linear progression (can't go backwards)
  • ​​​​​​​For conversion rates to reflect accurately, stages should progress in one direction only. Forward. 
  • Check your CRM settings: Are deals able to go backwards? 
    • ​​​​​​​If so, this messes up your conversion rate stats, so beware!

Anything else I missed that your peers should be aware of when looking at funnel conversion rates to see where deals are being closed lost? 

Reminder to complete the Week 3 exercise above PRIOR TO our Wednesday huddle. It shouldn’t take more than 30mins to complete. 

Post your takeaways here!

@amber-victoria Sorry to miss last week’s meetings. Thank you for putting together such a useful program.. Can’t wait for this week’s meeting..

Week 3 Work - William

We have six sales stages that we use and the majority of deals are dropping off at the first stage, Problem Identification and Research. The second highest dropoff is happening at the second to last stage of Proposal and Negotiation.

In both cases we are losing to ourselves (choosing to stay on lower tiers of service non-enterprise) and the vast majority of the deals are under 50k.

An area of investigation that this brings up is how are we differentiating our Enteprise product and how well are we doing discovery around customer pain and drivers?
I do think it is a red flag that deals are dropping at the Proposal and Negotiation stage and I will have to deep dive on that as well.

A few things to note from my review:

1. We allow reps to move opps backwards, so I’m not sure how reliable the conversion rates are
2. Our sales cycles are 5-6 months, so I’d love to be able to have a T12M view

@Stephanie Pisani  re: Deals going backwards. Here’s a tutorial video on how to create that report directly in SFDC to see conversion rates between your stages (even when they go backwards). Let me know if this is helpful!

@William Lauffer  let us know what happens re: Expansion deals are at risk due to lack of differentiation and/or value to existing customers. 

@amber-victoria Very helpful. Thank you! I noticed that there were a few duplicates. For example, there was an opportunity that converted from stage 3 to 4, but it was counted twice. Once where the opportunity owner was a manager and a second time where the AE was the opp owner (because the manager owned the opp for a time). Any ideas on filtering out the duplicates?

@Stephanie Pisani If I remember correctly, you have to add a filter to the report to only see results for when the opportunity stage has changed. I thought they covered that in the tutorial but I guess not. Maybe we can screen share and I can walk you through editing your report. 

@Stephanie Pisani following up on this. On your opportunity field history report in Salesforce, add a filter for “Field/Event” and set that equal to stage. That should remove duplicate records in your report and only show stage changes.