Dr. Noah St John identifies five symptoms of a broken sales funnel, then walks through a client case where the CEO wanted to hire more closers. The real problems: marketing generated low-quality leads that wasted 40% of reps' time, and a six-week internal approval bottleneck killed conversions.
Number four, broken handoffs. What does that mean? It means leads are dropped or mishandled between teams, causing lost opportunities. And number five, systemic friction. That means internal friction issues—not your sales reps—are blocking leads from converting to revenue. Right? So those are the five elements of a clogged funnel. Do you have any of these? Can you relate? Type a comment in the chat. And let me know, can you relate to any of these 5? All right, so next, let's look at a case study, one of my clients, and the real-world impact of reducing friction. Now, his initial assumption, the CEO's initial assumption, he believed that more closers were needed due to a thin pipeline and low productivity. So, he was going to bring on more closers. Well, what does more closers mean? Closers are great. You need them. It means more expense, more training, time lost, and so forth. So, that was his assumption. So, what I did was I tested his assumptions. It's always important to test your assumptions. Now, his marketing was creating interest. There was interest, but the messaging was bland and ineffective, reducing the lead quality. That means their reps were chasing bad fit leads. They were wasting up to 40% of their time pursuing leads that were not a good fit. Also, internal approval delays were delayed up to 6 weeks due to slow internal approval processes.
