… but you can fix it
Why Your Sales Are Not Growing
3 areas of the sales funnel to focus on
The biggest problem every startup has is sales.
It seems that your product idea is cool, the problem that you help solve is real, you have even set up the sales process with scripts and objection handling cheat sheets, but they just would not buy. There are, of course, many aspects of why this is happening, and I could write a book on the topic, but there is one interesting point that is not covered that often.
Everyone probably knows by now the original story behind the survivorship bias . During World War II, Allied bombers returned with holes in the wings and fuselage like in the picture below, and many were lost. The question was — what can we do to save more pilots and planes?
A naive decision would have been to strengthen these very places since they were most often hit. After a little consideration, it was decided that the planes that had holes in different places than these visible ones were not returning, so it made sense to strengthen them. That proved the right choice.
So, what about my sales?
This applies directly to the sales process. Your existing customers are returning bombers. Bullet holes are doubts, objections, competitors’ FUD, etc that your sales team has successfully worked with and still managed to close the deal. And — surprise surprise — most of us focus on exactly these, known objections, questions, and doubts — but you already know how to successfully overcome them!
We write cheat sheets, battle cards, scripts based on these very visible holes in the wings. But in order to really increase sales, you need to understand which hits your potential customers are not recovering from! You have to have a different approach to all big stroke stages of your revenue funnel:
1. Won Deals
Win Analysis is the easiest thing to do, and most of you probably do it. It is definitely useful to understand which tactics helped you close this or that deal, but as I mentioned above, doing it alone will not help you grow sales dramatically.
2. Sales Opportunities
Loss Analysis starts to give you a glimpse into which areas of your objection handling, value proposition, marketing, sales materials, etc, you may need to strengthen. Be sure to talk to customers who have gone through some part of the sales process but then fell off. Try to understand what exactly stopped them. It may well turn out that these are not at all the objections that you are used to working with!
3. Leads
The above is just a small part of the picture — after all, there are many more people who came to your site, read the materials, downloaded whitepapers — but did not even turn into an opportunity in your CRM. That means you do not really know anything about them at all, apart from their company, title, email, and some other formal info — but nothing about their decision-making process!
Therefore, selectively talking to leads that have not turned into an opportunity can give you even more extremely valuable information about what should be in your product and marketing that people are missing now. After all, these people came to your website — so they are facing similar problems to the ones you are trying to solve. But they still decided not to even talk to your sales people! Wouldn’t you want to know why? Is it that you are missing features? Is it that you are not explaining your value well enough? Is it that you are missing an about us page? There can be lots of reasons you have not even thought about.
4. Website visitors
This is the category of people that came to your website but have not shared even their email or phone number with you. You might be able to get some useful information if you spoke to some of them, but it will be difficult to come by among all the noise of wrong clicks and irrelevant targeting. The “all potential customers” category is a no-brainer — you don’t know anything about them and have no way to know anything about them until you somehow get in contact with them.
Thus, you should absolutely make a classic “win-loss” analysis part of your process and also have much more focus on your Leads that do not turn into sales opportunities — if you want to have a chance to materially increase your sales growth.
Focus on invisible holes!
The above is based on Anton’s experience scaling Veeam Software to over 1 billion USD in sales in 10 years, and subsequently investing in and consulting 20+ b2b startups on global growth.
