Rethinking the Open-Ended Sales Funnel to Drive Continuous Growth

On the evening of March 12^th, 2020, my daughter’s friend called and asked, do you think that we just experienced our last day of high school? I attempted to address their concerns, earnestly stating that such an assumption only reflected hysteria and of course, they would go back to school. I could not have been more wrong. There were lots of assumptions and decisions that were made over the last two years on both a personal and societal level, some naïve, some well-informed, some were right on target and some were way off. Some of us benefited, some of us suffered. As families, communities and society, it is time for us to start to unravel this so we learn from our successes and failures.

While it is highly unlikely that our political chasm will allow us to have an honest conversation about these lessons in the near term, as leaders of companies, we should put in place cultures and processes that allow us to actively learn and evolve. High-risk environments such as military, aviation and medicine have a long tradition of institutionalizing debriefing. High performance organizations such as professional sporting organizations and world class selling organizations embrace the debrief to advance their outcomes. This discipline can be especially impactful for companies focused on the introduction of disruptive technologies and those with complex sales processes or customized services. It can be argued that with the implementation of a well-executed debrief, the leaky, open ended sales funnel becomes a closed loop, recapturing spent resources to drive more productive outcomes.

Debriefing is defined as a dialogue between two or more people; its goals are:

·      To discuss the actions and thought processes involved in a situation

·      Encourage reflection on those actions and thought processes

·      Incorporate improvement into future performance

To be effective, a debriefing must be conducted in a manner that supports learning and models a growth mindset. Thus, the purpose is not to identify error and assign blame, but to understand why actions and decisions made sense to the participants in the moment. Such a focus increases the probability that positive performance can be reinforced and new options can be generated for changing performance to achieve desired results. This requires establishment of psychological safety for participants regardless of the type of debriefing conducted.

Does your organization regularly implement a deliberate debrief after losing or winning a large deal, launching a new product, implementing operational plans, conducting a clinical trial or researching a new theory? To do this you must:

·      Help your team members feel confident that active and honest participation in this process will be rewarded

·      Set expectations of conduct

·      Actively apply lessons learned.

If debriefing is new to your organization, consider using an outside facilitator to model facilitation and debriefing questions. An outside facilitator can be especially helpful in pulling out sensitive information and delivering unbiased observations and recommendations back to the organization. An example was that CaliberOne Solutions was able to help an organization identify processes and barriers that were sabotaging sales results when those that were on the front lines had not consciously identified the patterns and did not feel empowered to share insights. After establishing and executing on lessons learned from debriefing, the company put itself on a path to become an active learning organization that quickly filled a robust sales funnel.  CaliberOne Solutions can partner with you to lead such debriefs or train your key team members to carry this best practice throughout your organization. https://www.caliber1solutions.com/services-high-design