How Do You Solve Problems in your Sales & Marketing Funnel?
Being in a fast growth scale-up or start-up is really stressful when it comes to poor pipeline conversion — wherever that is top-of-funnel, mid-funnel and/or bottom-of-funnel.
How do you get into the details of what you need to solve for, what needs to be done and what actions can you take? It’s a conversation I’ve had numerous times over the years and came up again this week on a call with a CRO of a SaaS business.
My advice was based in 3 parts:
- You have to create “problem pods”. You need to bucket your problem statements into pods for commonality. You may have 1 problem pod or 10. An example of a problem pod would be “Pipeline Conversion” or “Deal Velocity” or “Repeatable Deal Cycle”. Then within each of these pods list out all the associate problem statements i.e. “How do we improve Deal Velocity” or “We don’t have enough leads at the top of the funnel”.
- You separate “problem pods” into individual projects. One layer down you then create a space for each pod. You then list each problem statement down to build a table — from left to right it should go: Problem Statement / Guiding Vision / Priority / Next Action. This is how you start problem solving to address issues.
- Focus your attention at each team meeting or 1:1’s. In order to take action you need to orientate the team around ownership for solving these problems with you. Give ownership. Make it a habit and way of working to dig into the detail on solving your problem pods.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes!
Hi, I’m Edwin and I’m an advisor, coach and mentor. I help SaaS companies, and people get to the next level. You can join my mailing list of avid learners 🖊, or join my 20K+ LinkedIn network, or learn about my advisory services 🧠. For more info, visit edwinabl.com.
