How can I tell which part of my sales process is slowing everybody down?
If sales feel slower than they should, the problem may not be a lack of leads. You could have plenty of opportunities coming in and still be losing revenue because people are getting stuck somewhere between their first inquiry and actually becoming a customer.
The easiest way to find the problem is to stop looking at sales as one big process.
Break it into stages, measure how long people stay in each stage, and look for the point where leads suddenly slow down, disappear, or require your team to do a lot of manual work.
That point is probably your bottleneck.
How do I figure out where leads are getting stuck?
Start by mapping the steps a typical customer takes from the moment they contact you until they buy.
For many small businesses, the process looks something like this:
- New lead comes in
- Someone responds
- Lead is qualified
- Appointment or consultation is scheduled
- Estimate or proposal is sent
- Follow-up happens
- Customer makes a decision
- Sale is won or lost
Your process may be simpler or more complicated, but the important part is being able to see where every opportunity currently sits.
Salesforce recommends tracking pipeline stages because doing so makes it easier to identify things such as sales-cycle length, resource problems, and process bottlenecks. For example, if proposals consistently sit for a week before anything happens, the proposal process may be slowing sales down.
A CRM and lead capture system makes this much easier because every opportunity can be assigned to a specific stage instead of being scattered between inboxes, spreadsheets, text messages, and someone’s memory.
What numbers should I look at in my sales pipeline?
You don’t need twenty dashboards. Start with four numbers.
1. How long does each lead spend in each stage?
This is often the fastest way to spot trouble.
Imagine your numbers look like this:
- New lead to first contact: 15 minutes
- First contact to appointment: 1 day
- Appointment to estimate: 1 day
- Estimate to decision: 12 days
That last stage immediately deserves attention.
Maybe prospects don’t understand the estimate. Maybe nobody is following up. Maybe your pricing is unclear. Or perhaps your salesperson simply doesn’t have a reliable process after sending the proposal.
Salesforce’s sales-stage analysis specifically looks at how many days opportunities spend in individual stages and compares current opportunities with historical performance to identify stalled and at-risk deals.
You can apply the same idea even if you have a two-person company.
2. What percentage of leads move to the next stage?
Time isn’t the only clue. Look at conversion between stages.
Maybe 80 percent of leads who schedule an appointment actually show up, but only 30 percent of new leads ever schedule one.
Your problem probably isn’t the sales consultation. It’s what happens before the consultation.
Salesforce notes that stage-conversion analysis can help businesses understand what percentage of opportunities progress beyond each stage.
Instead of saying, “We need more leads,” you may discover that improving one transition would produce significantly more sales from the leads you already have.
3. How quickly are new leads contacted?
If the slowdown happens right at the beginning, speed may be your problem.
Research from InsideSales analyzed more than 55 million sales activities involving 5.7 million inbound leads and found conversion rates were more than eight times higher when the first attempt happened within five minutes compared with waiting longer.
That doesn’t mean every small business needs someone staring at a phone twenty-four hours a day.
It means your system should acknowledge the lead and start the conversation quickly.
Workflow automation can automatically respond to a form submission, assign the lead, create a follow-up task, or send the prospect information about the next step.
That removes one of the most common bottlenecks: waiting for someone to notice that a new lead arrived.
4. How many opportunities have no clear next step?
This one is less glamorous, but incredibly useful.
Open your pipeline and look at every active opportunity.
Can you answer these three questions?
- Who owns this lead?
- What happens next?
- When is that supposed to happen?
If the answer to any of those is “I’m not sure,” you’ve probably found part of the problem.
A pipeline works best when stages aren’t simply labels. Each stage should tell your team what needs to happen before the opportunity moves forward.
HubSpot recommends giving pipeline stages clear exit criteria so salespeople know when an opportunity should advance rather than allowing deals to sit indefinitely in vaguely defined stages.
What if scheduling is what’s slowing everything down?
Make it easier for qualified leads to book themselves.
If your staff sends an email asking for availability, waits for a reply, suggests three times, waits again, and then manually puts the appointment on a calendar, you’ve created unnecessary friction.
An online appointment scheduling system can let prospects choose from available times immediately.
This is particularly useful when the appointment itself is the gateway to the next sales stage, such as:
- consultations
- estimates
- demos
- inspections
- discovery calls
- service appointments
Every unnecessary back-and-forth creates another opportunity for the customer to lose interest or contact someone else.
What if leads are getting estimates but aren’t making decisions?
Then look closely at your follow-up process.
Ask yourself what happens after an estimate, proposal, consultation, or demo.
If the answer is, “Our salesperson is supposed to follow up,” that’s not really a process.
Define what should happen.
For example:
- Day 0: Proposal sent
- Day 1: Confirmation email
- Day 3: Follow-up text
- Day 7: Sales follow-up
- Day 14: Final check-in
- Longer-term: Move the prospect into a nurture campaign
Automated email and SMS marketing can handle much of that routine communication while still allowing your team to jump into the conversation when a prospect replies.
The goal isn’t to automate every conversation. It’s to automate the parts that are easy to forget.
How do I know whether the problem is my people or my process?
Look for consistency.
If every salesperson struggles at the same point, there’s probably something wrong with the process.
If one person consistently moves leads forward while another gets stuck, you may have a training or execution problem.
You should also look for stages that require employees to repeatedly perform the same administrative task.
For example:
- copying information between systems
- manually sending appointment reminders
- assigning leads
- sending the same follow-up email
- checking whether someone replied
- updating spreadsheets
- reminding themselves to call someone
Those aren’t necessarily sales problems. They’re workflow problems.
And workflow problems are often much easier to fix.
Should I automate the slowest part of my sales process?
Sometimes, but don’t automate a bad process just because it’s slow.
First figure out why the stage is taking too long.
If customers aren’t accepting estimates because your pricing or offer is confusing, sending them six automated text messages won’t solve the real problem.
But if good leads are being forgotten, follow-up is inconsistent, appointments require too much back-and-forth, or your team spends hours moving information between systems, automation can make an immediate difference.
Surge by Thrive’s workflow automations can trigger actions from events such as form submissions, missed calls, appointments, and changes in a customer’s status. Combined with the Surge CRM, that gives you a much clearer view of where leads are sitting and what should happen next.
What’s the fastest way to find my sales bottleneck?
Pull up your current opportunities and look for the pile-up.
Where are the most leads sitting?
Which stage has the longest average wait?
Where does the biggest percentage of prospects disappear?
Where does your team complain about doing the most repetitive work?
And where do prospects repeatedly need someone to remind them what happens next?
You don’t necessarily need more traffic, more advertising, or more leads to increase sales.
Sometimes the fastest way to grow is simply helping the opportunities you already have move through the business faster.
If your leads are spread across spreadsheets, email inboxes, calendars, text messages, and sticky notes, request a live demo of Surge by Thrive and see how a CRM, sales pipeline, scheduling, email, SMS, and automation can work together in one system.
You can also contact Surge by Thrive if you’d like help identifying where your current sales process is getting stuck.