Identifying the bottlenecks within your organization might appear simple. You probably tend to think process. In your own marketing organization you might look at the following:
- Financial/funding approval
- Resources to turn around marketing campaigns
- The inability to automate
- Capturing subject matter expertise
- Product managers who only think feature/function
- Content development
And given your business model, these may be true bottlenecks. But, if we’re focusing on throughput, where the money is coming in, you may need to shift your focus to opportunity qualification.
“The Goal” states that the biggest challenge to developing a process of ongoing improvement is identifying the problems.
Let me tell you a story. In my previous life I managed a corporate marketing communications department. We were churning out content and campaigns as fast as we could, but were seeing little return. I decided to spend some time digging through the analytics in both our Eloqua system and CRM system. And that’s where I found the bottleneck.
No, the bottleneck was not the technology and it wasn’t really even the process. The bottleneck uncovered was ME! Well, our department.
When looking at the opportunities coming in, our funnel was sufficient. We had defined 5 stages of our sale cycle. Moving opportunities through prequalification and stages 1-2 proved relatively successful. But once we hit the midstage sales cycle, stage 3, 15% of our opportunities were lost. When I spoke with our sales manager about these stages, and closing confidence level aligned with each, he said that if we moved opportunities to stage 4 he was very confident he could close those deals. And yet, we were losing opportunities a stage earlier.
As I investigated further I inquired into the reason for that funnel leakage. The cause for that 15% loss of late stage opportunity was as follows:
- 8.5% not properly qualified (no budget, resources, or executive sponsorship)
- 2% not the right product fit
- 3% in house development and competition
- 13% product didn’t fit with customer strategy
- 24% no response
What I discovered was that we had a created a bottleneck of opportunity to our sales team. We focused so much on filling the funnel, but had generated virtually no activity to support the sales organization with funnel movement. We were not properly qualifying opportunities, we were not capturing the required information around their current operating environment and tools used, and we didn’t nurture with that late stage evaluation and justification content.
I remember thinking, if we could reduce that funnel leakage from 15%, to say 5%, what potential revenue could be generated?!
As mentioned earlier, the bottlenecks in each organization will vary depending on the business model. But remember, focus on the throughput. Which areas of your marketing business contribute to the revenue coming in? This could be your marketing opportunity flow (as defined in the above story), your sales and product configuration tool, ecommerce processes, or even your customer service organization.
Next week we’ll discuss how to exploit those bottlenecks, once identified.