The “sales funnel” is the forecasting and deal stage process where the customer decision with prospecting the customer and discovering their needs and then the selling journey advances to building strategies and solutions followed by validation of the solution, negotiations, and final review. The last step of the process is to win the deal and close it with a signed contract. The prospect can be generated from a variety of sources including Marketing Campaigns, Trade Shows, Inside Sales, as well as Sales Reps just to name a few.

Use case

Before we started using Domo for sales funnel management, we struggled to consolidate the data across the variety of forecasting tools used by our international offices. Even offices that used the same tool might fill in its fields differently: one region might use the “Manager’s Order Forecase Category” field to designate the level of confidence for winning the deal, for example, while another might use the Seller’s Order Forecast Category field.

Bringing our sales funnel reporting into Domo helped us to drive global sales funnel forecasting accuracy. Today we use a variety of visualizations to illustrate the health of the funnel including funnel cones, waterfalls, and a single heat map that shows the volume and deal stage as compared to the order forecast level of confidence from each of our sales regions.

Conclusion

The heat map allows us to monitor the health of our sales funnel as frequently as we need to—for example, more frequently at the end of fiscal quarters or years. It reduces manual errors and eliminates the rules of thumb we had to apply before. The ultimate business results are greater confidence in our forecasts and earlier awareness of problems we need to address.