Introduction:

As an entrepreneur, your sales funnel plays a vital role in achieving your revenue goals. It determines the strength and sustainability of your company.

A good and consistent sales funnel will put your organization in a strong and secure position, maximize the utilization of time and resources, and allow you to expand into new areas, launch meaningful in-house products, and cover any potential revenue gaps.

Therefore, it's essential to prioritize your sales pipeline to ensure consistent cash flow and cover any potential burnout leaks.

Our Past Experience

At our IT service start-up -Weboconnect , we learned this lesson the hard way after experiencing a failure in 2014. However, we restarted in 2016 with a focus on strategic funnel building and prioritizing our leads and prospects.

Learnings:

"Building relationships, recurring clients, and long-term clients" became our guiding principles, all of which helped us build a strong and sustainable pipeline.

So, how do we optimize our pipeline? How do we prioritize our leads?

Inverted Pyramid - We prioritize our leads first by hot, cold, or warm. Then while prospecting, we prioritize them by possible ticket size. We first analyze lead quality and prospects further to determine the possible ticket size.

Here are the six categories or filters we use to prioritize and segregate our leads in the sales funnel:

1. Ship - Enterprise clients: These clients have a fairly large ticket size. So we deploy our skilled and experienced manager to address their pain points. Alternatively, I handle those clients. Typically, closing large ticket-size prospects takes longer, but the higher budget and longer-term benefits make it worthwhile.
2. Bubble - Immediate demand: We identify leads that match our current needs. For instance, if our app development team is available, we prioritize app projects to maintain a good return on investment and avoid being idle.
3. Station - Recurring Clients: Consistent cash flow is vital to pay our team's salaries, so we prioritize clients that offer recurring business or monthly retainers instead of milestone-based payments. To achieve this, we offer them flexible payment options such as Monthly installments and team-wise support during and after development. In these cases, we don't just offer plain product development.
4. Raindrops- Quick and small: We get leads with smaller ticket sizes, such as information-based websites, blogs, and landing pages. They are normally completed quickly, and these projects come in greater quantities, providing a good return on investment.
5. Drone - Futuristic: We also consider prospects that challenge us to adopt upcoming technologies and stay ahead of future competition. These projects may be riskier, but they have the potential to transform our business in exciting new ways.
6. Root - Outsourcing lower ticket sizes: Occasionally, we receive leads with lower ticket sizes that we can't handle in-house anymore as we have moved up the ladder. In these cases, we partner with agencies from tier 3 cities. We outsource the development work to them but keep design and communication with our internal team. As a result, we receive a small but certain plain profit.

Note: We don't refuse our services to those clients or discriminate against any kind. We inform them about our partnered agency and outsource upon their agreement.

Our partnered agencies usually have a proven track record with us. Upon finishing modules, our testers test them, and the product manager approves them before it comes to us for a final review before sending an update to the client.

How it helped us :

By prioritizing our leads using the above criteria, we grew our team from three to over 35 in just six years. Our ticket size increased from $500 to $100,000, and revenue from $2k per month to $30k. We evolved to incorporate AI, ML, and IoT

Conclusion:

While it's not rocket science, it requires a conscious effort to analyze your own sales records, identify leads, prospect further, align with your organization's goals, and create a strong sales funnel.

PS: We made Categorie's name a little unusual for ease of understanding. As you know, sales come with pressure and sometimes it can become monotonous and boring. You can set your own name at your convenience.