Learn from the Mane of Sales Stages

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Following a sales methodology is key to improve the allocation of resources on the high-potential opportunity and the forecast of the revenue. But how can we know if the methodology is well followed and how can we identify if our sales team need coaching? One possible angle is to look at the sales stages and analyze if our sales opportunity follow them chronologically and identify from which stages sales opportunities are lost.

This article shows how a Sankey diagram helps visualize the data and what types of actions or recommendations we can take.

Assumptions

Our CRM tool can provide us with the successive sales stages followed by the sales opportunities.

In this example, we consider our sales process/methodology contains the following Stages, but the same principles apply using different ones.

Data visualization (“the mane”): Sankey Diagram

We use a Sankey diagram (R with the networkD3 library) to show the historical moves of the sales opportunities From one sales stage (on the left) To another sales stage (on the right). The width of the lines represents the number of opportunities moving during the time range.

To facilitate, the interpretation of the graph we use three colors:

• Green: the opportunity moves to the next sales stage.
• Grey: the opportunity does not move to the next sales stage (i.e., some sales stages are skipped or the opportunity moves backward).
• Red: the opportunity is lost.

Illustration

Actions and Recommandations

Let’s take three examples to illustrate the type of actions we can take from such graph. For that, we pretend we generated a Sankey Diagram corresponding to 3 sales teams.

Team 1

• Team 1 need coaching to better follow the Sales Stages.
• Team 1 could disqualify more opportunities in the earlier stages. Most of the lost opportunities are lost after Stage 2 where we could expect a decreasing quantity of loss from the early stages to the later Stages. The idea is to lose low-potential or “un-winnable” opportunities as early as possible in order to avoid wasting resources that could have been allocated to better opportunities.
• Team 1 has a fair conversion rate from Stage 5.

Team 2

• Overall, Team 2 follow the sales stages chronology.
• Team 2 lost opportunities in the earlier stages.
• Team 2 do not have a fantastic conversion rate from stage 5 (need coaching).

Team 3

• Team 3 have a clear problem with the leads because nearly half of them are lost or trashed.
• Team 3 need coaching because they lose a significant percentage of opportunities in stage 5 (very late).

Next Steps

The objective of this article was just to give an overview of what value a Sankey diagram can bring. We can clearly perform deeper analysis:

• Zoom based on the type of business, region, products, opportunity size, etc.
• Replace the “number of opportunity moves” by their value to visualize the potential revenue moves.
• Etc. our imagination is the limit.