Efficient Sales Frontier
Funnelcast Focus identifies the deal portfolio that maximizes expected sales for a customer-specified level of risk.
Funnelcast’s mission is simple: enhance your judgment to maximize sales. Funnelcast Focus is one of our most powerful tools supporting that mission.
Funnelcast Focus identifies a deal portfolio that maximizes expected sales for a customer-specified level of risk.
Using it is simple. If you know how to use a to-do list, you can use Focus. Work down the Focus-ranked list of deals in order each day, applying your judgment as you go.
Over time, this systematically directs effort toward the deals most likely to maximize sales at the specified level of risk.
How does it work?
The efficient frontier comes from modern investment portfolio theory—work for which Harry Markowitz received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. It identifies the portfolios that deliver the maximum expected return at each level of risk. We adapted that concept to sales.
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Let’s say you have 200 open deals. Each deal has an estimated probability of closing and an associated deal value. Together, those determine the expected sales and uncertainty of a portfolio of deals.
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Say for instance, that you have the resources to actively work 40 of them. Which deals should you work? There are vastly more possible 40-deal portfolios than grains of sand on Earth. A human cannot possibly evaluate them all and select an optimal portfolio.
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Funnelcast searches this enormous space of possible portfolios and evaluates each portfolio's expected sales and risk. (See image.)
Each dot in the illustration represents a portfolio containing the same number of deals. The curve at the top is the efficient frontier: portfolios on that curve represent the maximum expected sales available at each level of risk.
Funnelcast uses the customer-specified risk level to select the portfolio on the efficient frontier for that level of risk. It turns that portfolio into something operational: a rank-ordered Focus list.
The top-ranked deals are those that contribute most to the optimized portfolio. The rest of the funnel is similarly ranked so salespeople know where to focus next.
Focus is a burn-down list. Work down it each day, applying your judgment to each deal: Can we advance this deal? If yes, work it. If not, move on.
Across 700 comparisons, Focus portfolios produced 60% more in-quarter sales on average than same-sized company-priority lists.
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Check out our proven results.