Efficient Sales Frontier
Funnelcast Focus is the Efficient Frontier for Sales.
Right focus, right time, maximizes expected sales, minimizes risk.
Funnelcast’s mission is simple: enhance your judgment to maximize sales. The Funnelcast Focus is one of our most powerful tools supporting that mission.
Our focus ranking helps you prioritize open deals to maximize sales over any time horizon (month, quarter, year, etc.). It’s highly automated and easy to use. If you know how to use a to do list, you can use the Funnelcast Focus. Simply work down the focus-ranked list of deals in order every day, adding your judgment as you go.
This simple process will, in the long-run, maximize sales from your funnel while minimizing your risk.
How does it work?
The efficient frontier is a hugely successful, Nobel-prize winning technique we borrowed from computational finance. It's designed to maximize expected return from investments for a given level of risk (volatility). We simply adapted it to sales. Let’s say you’ve got 200 open deals. Each deal has an estimate of risk (the chance it will close) and return (deal size). Funnelcast Focus finds optimal "portfolios" of the top 20% of deals (a settable parameter, 40 deals in this example) that maximize expected sales for the associated risk.
Choosing an optimal portfolio of 40 deals out of 200 is a hard problem because of the huge number of possible combinations—over 2000000000000000000000000000000000000000000! We use Monte Carlo techniques to estimate the space of all portfolios and find ones that maximize sales for each level of risk (see image at left).
Each dot in that picture is a portfolio of deals. The curve at the top is the “efficient frontier”—combinations of deals on that curve represent the maximum sales for that level of risk. Highlighted dots indicate particular portfolios. Note that the standard approaches to prioritizing work (by deal size or forecast category) do not maximize expected sales for the associated risk.
You choose to rank deals from among the “balanced risk”, “value-optimized” and “maximum expected value” portfolios, in increasing order of risk. Once selected, your entire sales funnel is ranked by impact on maximizing sales for the selected risk. The top 20% of deals from the efficient frontier are highlighted in green, and all deals are ordered by importance.
The Focus is a burn-down list that shows you where to put your efforts first. It complements sales leader judgement. Work down the list each day to advance your cause—adding your judgment to each deal. This simple approach guarantees that you’re allocating resources to deals with the best chance of maximizing sales. In our case study comparing 700 company priority lists to the Focus, users saw (on average) a 60% sales productivity improvement.
Check out our proven results.