 “I don’t know what we’re doing, but it’s working.”
Often this sentence is said with pride after seeing a company’s revenue trend up. However, it’s a lot more insidious than one might think. That naïve positivity can lull people into a false sense of security, even as trouble prepares to pounce. If those in a sales and marketing organization don’t know what they’re doing right, they won’t know what they’re doing wrong when things start trending down. Marketing could be wasting too much money on ad spends to bring in leads when a different stage of the funnel needs to be improved. Maybe too much of the company’s success is riding on one salesperson, who may one day decide to move on and take their profits with them. Without an understanding of where a company is succeeding and the data to back it up, no one will be equipped to fix problems when they do emerge. Pull Your Sales Funnel Apart We’ve made the case for the integrated funnel and why dividing it into stages matters. It allows sales and marketing teams to be efficient as they map tasks to the buyer’s journey and improve performance. Visualize your funnel with all your leads inside it. Now, imagine there are funnels for each of your ideal customers and their buyer’s journeys nested inside of this greater funnel. If you want to be able to successfully optimize your sales activities, you must separate these funnels from one another. The need for more than one funnel is not just about the content within it. It is also vital to track the KPIs from these different funnels separately so you can tell what effect they have on the amount of money you are bringing in. Otherwise, when you have a problem with revenue, you won’t be able to tell where you need to bust out your magnifying glass and detect how to fix it. (Refer to this blog if you need a little reminder of which sales and marketing KPIs to track.) How You Disguise Your Problems and Successes The tendency to generalize leads causes sales and marketing professionals to overlook where they are winning and where they need to improve. There are three ways oversimplification creates risks of taking the wrong actions or even no action at all. Risk Point One: Generalizing about Your Funnels Let’s say a teacher has a classroom of twenty students. Half of them are average students, about a third of them are high-scoring students and the remaining students are disruptive and get failing grades. It wouldn’t be fair or accurate for the teacher to say, “All my students are problem students,” even if that small group draws the most attention. Treating all the students the same wouldn’t help any student in that class be successful. The same goes for your sales and marketing campaigns. You could say, “All my efforts are useless,” but if you haven’t been tracking your data, you have no idea if that’s true. In fact, the sales funnel for one of your offerings might have huge potential to draw more revenue even though the income from your other offerings has stalled. If you are looking at your results as a whole when you have multiple offerings, you can’t see the specifics of what is and isn’t working. You won’t be able to see where you should keep doing what you have been doing or where you need to change direction. Risk Point Two: Having Poor, Messy Data Let’s say a client has three offerings, but when they look at their revenue, they only look at the total rather than what comes in from each. Every month, when the client views their potential revenue and their deals, all they can see is whether the numbers are going up or down. Instead of asking why their deals aren’t closing, they should have data that identifies how many deals they have for the first offer, how many for the second, and how many for the third along with how each of those funnels are performing. That allows them to diagnose the individual problems. If you don’t have your CRM set up to demonstrate these data points, the real statistics are hidden from you. Even if you have the knowledge that different offerings have different success rates, unless you are collecting data, you won’t know how to act on that knowledge. Risk Point Three: Generalizing about Your Salespeople If looking at stats from all your sales funnels at once isn't helpful, lumping the performance of each of your salespeople together may be even less so. You might identify that your team has a 30 percent close rate, but you may have one salesperson with a close rate of 50 percent and another at 15 percent. The way you interact with these two different salespeople should not be identical if you want to make effective changes. Instead, the numbers should lead you to having personal interactions with the individuals on your team. Rather than give the sales team a blanket mandate to “sell more,” it’s more effective to take pointed action. That may mean focusing on helping the salesperson closing at 15 percent to improve, replacing them if necessary or supporting your top salesperson further until they reach superstar status. In the end, using broad generalizations without detailed data analysis can lead to major risks for any sales and marketing organization. By dissecting the sales funnel, tracking individual KPIs, and avoiding the oversimplification of data and team performance, you'll be able to see what your sales and marketing organization's strengths and weaknesses are. Using a more focused approach will allow you to do more of what works and less of what doesn't. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Karl joined Justin Stoddart on the Think Bigger Real Estate podcast to dig into what makes sales meaningful and effective in an age of automation: real human connection. While many salespeople are tempted by the promise of working faster using technology, especially AI, Karl and Justin make a compelling case that being human is your competitive advantage.
In this conversation, Karl shares candid stories and experiences in relationship-driven industries, where going beyond surface-level interactions leads to trust and lasting impact. He explains how to use Iceberg Selling to build rapport with curiosity and authenticity, be more present, and apply emotional intelligence to every client interaction. Whether it’s taking the time to understand a client’s life, brainstorming ways to provide value beyond your core service, or shifting from an impersonal list of clients to a focused network of trusted partners, Karl offers a grounded, real-world roadmap to selling with depth and intention. He even tackles the tension between being efficient versus being effective, reminding us that while we should be efficient with our work, we should never be efficient with people. Listen to the full conversation on your favorite podcast app, visit Think Bigger Real Estate's podcast page or watch the video above to explore how you can be more present, show more empathy, and add more value to your sales approach. |
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We are headquartered in Colorado with domestic and international teammates and clients. Please use the contact form on this page to inquire about any of our books, podcasts appearances, speaking engagements and workshops, any of our offerings, or simply to connect.
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