KF Sell Funnel Scorecard Video Transcript

Purbita Banerjee: Welcome. My name is Purbita Banerjee, and I am the general manager of our Sales Effectiveness product line at Korn Ferry. In today's video, we'll explore the Funnel Scorecard,® a powerful tool designed to help sales teams qualify and prioritize deals effectively. Joining us today is Jamey Webster, a seasoned sales-strategy expert who specializes in Miller Heiman sales methodology. He's here today to help us unpack the value from Funnel Scorecard. Welcome, Jamey.

Jamey Webster: Thank you very much, Purbita.

Purbita: So Funnel Scorecard® is a useful tool for those concerned with improving forecasting, strengthening pipeline, and directing resources towards the right deals. It's a great opportunity-qualification tool and includes objective evaluation criteria developed by recognizing key factors that impact the sales team's ability to win the deal. The scorecard is a living tool. It is validated by analyzing previous sales opportunities, and it is updated continuously through the deal cycle. Working with the scorecard gives organizations a way to rank and prioritize opportunities to pursue while highlighting the steps that will move them forward. So Jamey, can you elaborate a bit more as to why an organization would choose to use our Funnel Scorecard® and what makes it so valuable to their sales process?

Jamey: Sure, no, I'm happy to. I think that the thing to understand is that, in complex opportunities where we've got multiple buying influences involved in the decision-making, it's really mandatory these days that we have strategy on how best to navigate that buying process and get to a successful close. What we have that empowers that process is, of course, Strategic Selling® with Perspective, which is a very effective approach to winning more deals in a more efficient, effective way. The issue is that not every deal requires a long, big strategy for you to figure out, A, "is this winnable?" and then, B, "how am I gonna win it?" And so what the scorecard does is it provides a quick way for a seller to analyze an opportunity, determine are the ingredients here for success, is this something that I should be spending my time on and my effort, my energy, on? Or do I need to cut, move on, and look for an opportunity where the ingredients are there? The scorecard gives us that quick-pass approach to really analyze: "Do I have what it takes to win this deal?"

Purbita: So can you elaborate more on what are those ingredients? Are there certain prerequisites to ensure that the scorecard will be impactful?

Jamey: Absolutely, matter of fact, what might be helpful is if I show you. So what we have in front of us is just a sandbox edition of salesforce.com. You see a pretty straightforward landing page, but if I come over here to our opportunities, with KF Sell embedded into salesforce.com now, you see your opportunity list, and I have the ability to click on an opportunity, and now we have some new tabs. You notice down here I have the overview of the opportunity. And then I have a scorecard and a Blue Sheet tab. If I click on that scorecard tab, it's gonna ask me do I wanna create a scorecard. When I go to this section, what you'll notice is we have a pretty-standard research-based five questions that comes standard with KF Sell, and the scorecard is asking questions like "is budget available?" "do we have the access that we need?" "do we have a clear understanding of the customer's buying process?" "do we have a strong relationship with a supportive economic buying influence?" and "have we developed at least one coach?" This is out-of-the-box standard scorecard criteria that is completely founded on the research that Korn Ferry has done for so many years now, trying to understand best practice. From a seller's perspective, it's a very simple process of answering yes, no, or unknown, and I'll just give you an example. If I say, "Yes, budget exists on this opportunity," 20 points is assigned to this deal. If I say, "No, no points are assigned to the deal"... And I think it's probably important to point out that what happens down here is the value of the deal now drops, so "no, there is no budget for this opportunity," says, "Well, the value of this opportunity is reduced by that amount." If I answer unknown, there's a couple things that are important to see here. Still, no points are assigned in the scorecard, but the value of the deal stays at 100. Unknown is saying, "I don't know right now if there's budget, but I'm going to go find out." And so it gives the seller a very quick way to just go through, answer the questions based on the discovery work that they've done with the client, and, at the end, produce a score, in this case just clicking through, 60 out of 100 right now. So that's the out-of-the-box approach to scorecard. Now, what I want you to see here, though, is many of our clients choose to customize this scorecard, and it would be our recommendation that you customize it to your business, to the criteria you believe matters as it relates to what does a good, winnable deal look like. And so if I come in and if I go back to my opportunity and just click on it here and say, "Let's look at it again, but we're gonna build a new scorecard," I have the ability to just delete the one we just created. Oh, it's gonna take me a second here. There we go. Through a dropdown, I can now select one of my custom scorecards, and you can customize as many scorecards as you want, based on product line, based on a vertical they may be selling into. So I have a KF scorecard here that I can open up, and now we've gone from five research-based standard questions to, in this case, 20 company-specific questions that we've built with our leadership with some of our top-sellers to say, "What does it take? What does a good deal look like?" This is what we would tend to do with our clients is come in and work with you to build these customized scorecards. Same process, though. You know, now, in this case, we now have things like "has the client demonstrated an interest in a strategic long-term win-win partnership with Korn Ferry: yes, no, or unknown?" And as I score, you'll notice the weights now are changing some because not every question's worth the same amount, but if I come in and just say yes to everything, you'll see the weights that we've given to these categories, and I've got 100 out of 100 here. This now allows us to have a deeper look into the opportunity to really tie it back to our sales and our buying process that we're working in and get some really good answers on, A, "is this a winnable opportunity?" and, B, "where are our red flags? Where are we missing information that, if we went out and worked in discovery to find, it could actually improve our chances of winning?"

Purbita: So interesting and so simple. I think the power of this tool is that it is so elegant and so simple, and thanks so much for actually demonstrating that, within our Korn Ferry Sell tool... For those that are not aware of this tool, this is the Korn Ferry application within the Salesforce CRM, it embodies the Miller Heiman methodology that just makes it really easy for sellers to use this in the flow of their work, so as you were showing this, Jamey, I noticed that there are two categories: business criteria and opportunity criteria. Can you give an example for what are the differences between the two, why are both of these important, and how would a seller manage these, you know, day to day, on a regular basis? Or what's the right cadence for them to manage these?

Jamey: That's a great question, so we break it up because there's really two questions that wanna ask every seller is "is this a good company to be pursuing? Is this client that you've identified an opportunity in... Is it a good organization for us to develop a long-term win-win relationship with?" That's the business criteria. Really out of our control, but we're asking ourselves, "What does good look like as it relates to our best clients? And how do we go out and replicate the best client?" You know, we can't run 'em through a machine and just produce more and more of our favorite clients, so we wanna ask ourselves, "What are their characteristics? What are the traits of those best clients? And how can I, when I'm analyzing and assessing new opportunity, try and find companies that best match that?" And then once we say, "Yes, this is a good business to pursue," then we ask ourselves, "Is this a good opportunity to pursue within that business line?" And so now we're looking at things that, in a lotta ways, are in our control: "Can we map our capabilities to their needs? Do we have access to a supportive economic buying influence? Have we found and developed a coach?" You know, all of those things now fall into the opportunity criteria so that we're looking at it kinda from both sides of the glass.

Purbita: And so when you think about how a seller would use it... And you know, when it's a qualification tool, winning fast or finding the right deals to win fast is almost as important as losing fast if you know that, you know, it's not worth your time. So how do you expect a seller to use this on a regular basis? Like, is a low score bad? Is a high score good?

Jamey: It's another really good question, and there's two things I would say, kinda splitting your question up. The first one is this. As I said earlier, if you're familiar with Strategic Selling® with Perspective, the Blue Sheet, as a lotta people have come to know it over the years, it is an incredibly effective way to analyze an opportunity and build a strategy on a page. That is embedded here in KF Sell. The issue we've got is that, for a lot of opportunities, it may not warrant or need that level of investment from the seller, so what the scorecard does is it allows us to very quickly just analyze what would be some primary components of a strategy and determine same thing, as you said, "Can we win this fast?" fast being relative to the sales cycle, relative to the buying process: "but can we efficiently and effectively get to a successful close?" That can be accomplished in a scorecard without a long, you know, large strategy being built. Sometimes, the scorecard may drive us to build a full strategy. We might decide that this is important enough, the deal is big enough and the scorecard is pointing to need enough that wanna sit down and we wanna really dig in and build a full strategy on this, but for the most part, a lotta those opportunities that aren't blue-sheet necessary, the scorecard accomplishes our goal. Now, your second question... Remind me again, Purbita: the second question was?

Purbita: You answered it: "Is a high score good and a low score bad?"

Jamey: Yeah, that's... The scorecard, it's going to evolve over time, and what I tell managers when I work with them is "high scores are great, but if you've got a seller and he or she is producing a high score at the very early stages of an opportunity pursuit, that at times can be just as concerning to me as somebody that's got a low score at a very late stage." We should see the score migrate and grow as more information is gathered as engagement continues through the process, so I wouldn't just immediately throw a deal out with a low score if it's in the early stages, I would not forecast a deal in late stages with a low score, though.

Purbita: Well said, so that brings me to my final question, the manager's role in the process. So how does the manager use this to coach their teams?

Jamey: It's my favorite part of this. I think this is a tool that can really change the manager's life and how she engages with their sellers, how he or she coaches and guides her sellers, and it really comes from another tab that we now have embedded in salesforce.com, which is called the KF Sell Funnel. And if I click over here, what I now have is a graphic view of all of the deals in my team. I'm able to filter this down, I could see just in individuals, or I could see the entire teams, but I have all of the deals lined up, tied to our sales stages. Now, these are customized, obviously, to whatever sales stages an organization has built into Salesforce. And then at each of these stages, I see the opportunities that are in that stage in bubble form. And a couple things to point out here. The color of the bubble indicates whether or not a Blue Sheet has been created, so black obviously means no Blue Sheet. Blue means there is. The size of the bubble represents the dollar amount of the opportunity, and the position of the bubble represents the score along the bottom axis, so if I look here up here in the prospecting, I've got three deals in prospecting. I'm able, as a manager, to come in and just hover over each of these deals. I've got one here in this sandbox that's been in stage for 463 days at $750,000. I've got another deal over here, in stage for 466 days at $85,000. If I wanna know a little bit more about this Global Ascent opportunity, I can single-click on it, and to the right, I now get a win-probability score, and I get the basics of this opportunity: "When was it opened? What was the projected close date?" We're well past that in this sandbox. "Who have we identified? Who are we talking to from a buying-influence perspective?" If I wanted to take a deeper dive from here, I can simply take another click, and now I'm going to go straight into the strategy that this person has built for this opportunity, so from that perspective, as a manager, I'm able to very quickly come in, hover over, analyze deals inside my funnel. And this is, again, I think, where the game changes some for leaders: if we customize a scorecard, we work with you all day long to build what are the right questions to ask. And then we work, you know, just as hard to determine what's the right weight that each of those questions should have. Once we've completed constructing a scorecard, we don't just say, "Here you go, Purbita. Congratulations. There's your scorecard." We test it. We run a lot of won deals through the scorecard system. We run a lotta lost deals through the scorecard system. The beauty of that process is, every single time we do this, what we find is a very unique crossover line for each organization. I did one not long ago with an organization. We built our scorecard. We built our weights. We tested it, and what we found was their line was 63. 95% of the deals that scored higher than a 63 they won. 95% of the deals that scored lower than a 63 they lost. So from a manager's perspective, I'm now able to come in, and I'm able to kinda look at that 63 mark and draw my line up and deals that are to the right of that, what we would say is they have all the ingredients for success. As a leader, my conversation with the seller is "what do you need from me to get this deal closed? The ingredients are there. It looks good." These deals that are floating around the 63, what we would say is "they're at risk. There's some concern here. How can I help you improve our position, improve our score, and give a greater level of confidence that this is a winnable deal that we can forecast?" And then sadly, sometimes, you're gonna have deals deep in there that are gonna be way to the left. Now I have a different conversation, and now that conversation becomes "the data's not working out for you. This is not a winnable deal, based on our scorecard system. We need to go ahead and find something for you to work on that is actually gonna produce." So the scorecard from a manager's perspective allows me now to determine how confident can I be in my forecast and where is my coaching effort going to go.

Purbita: That was a great overview. Thank you, Jamey, for joining me today on this topic. I have so many additional questions around the shape of the funnel, and so on. I think that might be a great topic for another conversation, and I do hope that our listeners are going to find a lot of value from leveraging some of these concepts in their selling process, and if you wanna know more about KF Sell and how Miller Heiman methodology can be incorporated into your sales process, please, reach out to us. Thank you so much for listening.