It’s natural for prospecting to slow down at the end of a fiscal period as sales professionals focus on closing existing opportunities. This occurs at the end of a month, quarter, or year. For most companies, December scores a hat trick, as it represents the end of all three.
That makes right now the perfect time for managers to evaluate their sales funnel. When the out-of-office replies start rolling in, take a few moments and answer these five questions so your team can hit the ground running in 2025.
“The secret to selling is to be in front of qualified prospects when they’re ready to buy, not when you need to make a sale.” – Bill Brooks, Founder, The Brooks Group
1. Does Your CRM Simplify Pipeline Management?
Your CRM should be an easy-to-use tool that mirrors your sales process. You’ll find it’s not only difficult to coach people when they’re using different sales techniques and strategies, but it’s even more difficult to see what’s going on by looking in your CRM. That should never be the case.
Before you can optimize your sales funnel for 2025, you’ll need to get your sales professionals on the same page. Once everyone on your team is using the same process, they will all speak a common language and use the same terminology to describe where opportunities are in their pipeline.
Assuming your team is properly updating the CRM, sales pipeline management will become much easier. You’ll be able to see conversion rates for progressing an opportunity from one phase of your selling process to the next. This aggregate data will enable you to assess the health of any individual’s pipeline.
2. Do You Know Each Sales Professional’s Conversion Rates?
Understanding the state of your funnel and average conversion rates from phase to phase in your process are both key sales metrics.
We tend to visualize funnels in a perfectly conical shape, with a wide top and narrow bottom, but they seldom are. A sales professional may have more opportunities in the middle or bottom than they do at the top. You can tell if this is a problem by comparing their numbers to their previous performance and your team’s average.
Similarly, you’ll want to know what percentage of opportunities make it from one stage to the next. Not to belabor the point, but this is where naming and explaining each stage becomes vitally important.
The term “prospecting” is too broad. Phrases such as “initiating contact,” “qualifying decision maker,” “assessing needs,” and “presenting value” are not only more specific, but they also remind sales professionals what they should be doing in each phase.
When you see advancement percentages that don’t follow the team’s average or a sales professional’s usual ratios, you will know where to focus to help that seller.
3. Have You Defined What Makes a Qualified Prospect?
Sales professionals can sometimes be overly optimistic about an opportunity. If your marketing team is sending your sales team leads, it’s important to make a distinction between a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and a sales qualified lead (SQL).
Your sales team needs to have strict criteria for identifying the characteristics of a qualified prospect.
A prospect is qualified when they:
- Are aware they have a need.
- Have the authority and ability to buy.
- Have a sense of urgency.
- Trust your sales professional and your organization.
- Are willing to listen.
It’s the sales professional’s responsibility to continue qualifying prospects until all five of these characteristics exist, as it is unlikely a prospect will make a purchase until they do. If you have a sales professional who continually has deals that “get stuck”—meaning they’re expected to close this month but keep getting delayed from month to month—that sales professional is likely not qualifying properly.
4. Do You Regularly Clean House?
Most sales professionals have some opportunities that keep getting pushed forward. While there’s no real downside of doing that, it can make their funnel look bigger than it really is.
Once in a while you need to do some funnel cleaning. Think of it like dusting: You don’t have to dust your house every day, but, if you don’t do it for a year, the dust is going to build up and people will notice.
The end of any fiscal period (month, quarter, or year) is a great time to have conversations about stalled deals that have been in the CRM for too long.
How long is too long? Just look at the average time an opportunity spends in each phase and you’ll know. If a sales professional can’t give you a clear explanation for why an opportunity needs more time, then you may have an unqualified or dead deal that you need to get rid of.
Work with your marketing team to put those prospects back into a nurture sequence.
5. What’s Your Plan for Existing Customers?
Make sure you’re measuring touchpoints with existing accounts at the start of the year. Customers may need to spend their budget in Q4, but they’re already thinking about next year. Budgets aren’t always finalized in January, making it a great time to help clients plan for the future.
Your team needs to call existing customers who didn’t make a purchase in Q4, or who your sales professionals haven’t spoken with in a month. Every sales professional should have a recurring New Year’s resolution to find out what their existing customers’ plans are for the coming year.
Do You Need Help Managing Your Sales Funnel?
If you don’t have the right tools to build or manage a sales funnel effectively, consider The Brooks Group’s Sales Pipeline Management training. You’ll learn proven pipeline techniques to optimize your sales process, keep deals moving through the sales funnel, and improve sales results. You can get more information here.
