A bubble in the funnel is created when sales reps are starved for leads. The air pocket signifies that your pipeline is weak. (There’s not a lot going in there.) Bubbles are usually created as acts of omission rather than acts of commission. Some examples of how funnel bubbles happen:

1. Decision-making slows down in the summer when prospects take breaks for vacation.

In fact, this perception becomes a reality and it shouldn’t. I explain to clients and prospects that even if companies in your target market offered their executives two weeks off each summer, those executives are still working 11 out of 13 weeks or almost 85% of the time. June, July and August are no reasons to ease up on prospecting. The result of the mistaken notion that summers are slow creates a bubble in the funnel that is entirely avoidable.

2. Big companies start budgeting for the new year at the beginning of that year and don’t effectively execute until the end of the first quarter or the beginning of the second quarter.

Your sales team needs to be prospecting (you can bet your competitors are) and this delay pursuing targets causes a bubble in the funnel that is, again, avoidable.

3. The current crisis is keeping everyone from focusing on business.

Again, not true. Sure, the coronavirus has disrupted our lives significantly, but it’s not a reason to let a bubble in the funnel form. The rapid pivot toward customer retention and expansion needs to happen—but not at the expense of prospecting for new business. As with everything in life, balance is important to keep pipelines loaded (and bubbles at bay).  

Three recommendations to avoid a bubble in the funnel

Select the right accounts and the right number of accounts.

The more prospects you select to market to the fewer dollars there are to market to each prospect. Most companies prospect too broadly meaning that they are spreading a finite amount of money over too many prospects. This blog is about building your Total Addressable Market—selecting the right accounts based on size, vertical, location, environment and active or latent need. In that blog I write:

“Only a small percent of any given group of prospects will be in the market for what you sell at any given point in time.

For example, if 5% of prospects are in the market for your service and you have a close rate of 20%, then 100 prospects will generate one closed deal per sales cycle. So, if the sales cycle is three months and you need five deals per quarter, then the target market (TAM) will need to be 500 prospects.”

Talk about them, not about you.

If your messaging is more about your service and/or solution and less about the prospect’s pain—that will impede your sales efforts. This blog is about building value statements that address prospects’ needs. In that blog I write:

“If they engage with us, we’ll optimize their prospect experience—so their sales targets are more likely to convert, so the sales team is more productive—and so the organization accelerates its revenue.”

Conversations with prospects will require multiple touches and multiple touch cycles.

Cadence management and multi-cycle nurture processes are required to drive revenue. It will take 8 to 10 touches and 3 to 5 cycles of contact with simple, prospect focused messaging to drive the conversations required to keep the pipeline full earn closed deals. In the nurture blog I write:

“Nurturing is essential for successful lead generation—both inbound and outbound.

In fact, I propose that nurturing is the most underutilized activity at a marketer’s disposal. Additional touches using the phone, voicemail and email—across multiple cycles is well worth the time and expense. In fact, nurturing programs increase the lead rate significantly:

Standard B2B lead-generation programs produce an average 5% lead rate.

Advanced B2B lead-generation programs (which includes nurturing) produce an average 15% lead rate—three times higher.”  

Even before the current crisis, pipelines were anemic due to the following:

1. Overall, fewer than 60% of reps make quota.

2. Only a small percentage of marketing-generated leads are accepted by sales.

3. The #1 sales execution issue reported by sales execs is the lack of highly qualified sales leads followed by not getting enough leads.

All three of these issues must be resolved even more urgently now. The bubble has already been impacting your pipeline for a month as we move toward the end of April 2020. The good news, though, is that overcoming the challenges will cost less money than what you are probably currently spending.