POSTED BY: | August 10, 2021

What I have found recently is that sales teams, marketing teams, product teams, leadership teams…all the teams have data. No one is short on numbers, but many are short on what is behind the numbers or how to sort through the cluttered information. Clients often come to me with data that shows where they lose clients in the sales funnel. They have identified where the problem is but need to understand exactly what to do about it to make the best of their investment.

Landing page hits, bounce rates, page progression insight, loss rates from sales representative to consultant—you name it! Many are well equipped to diagnose where the problem is. The downside is that there are often just multiples guesses and plenty of unsubstantiated hypotheses as to why prospects are lost at various points in the sales funnel, but no real data or insights around the prospect experience that can provide validation.

Hence, the Leaky Bucket analysis. This analysis segments the sales funnel by point of loss and digs in to understand the prospects at that point in time. To answer your silent question; yes, this works to get past the “it’s the price” conundrum. In the end, there isn’t a price problem, but a perception of value problem. Our goal is to understand what kept the prospect from seeing value and learning the true barriers that are standing in their way as they trickle down the funnel.

This analysis can also take an inside-out perspective. If you ask the Chief Marketing Officer, Director of Business Development, Product Owner, and Sales Associate simultaneously why they believe a prospect does not buy the product or service, each response will be different. Oftentimes, the best way to reach alignment and understand all perspectives is to first start with an internal discovery process in an anonymous format. This is where a third-party market research firm (*cough* SMARI *cough*) which provides total anonymity becomes handy.

Having both the internal working hypotheses from all internal stakeholders as well as the barriers to purchase behind the data metrics can empower a team to truly drive action down the sales funnel. When so much investment is made to get a prospect to look in your direction, why not put more effort into really understanding what happens once they find their way to you?