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Funnel Gap Analysis: when to offer and how to complete

Your guide to identifying opportunities to complete a Funnel Gap Analysis in the sales motion, and knocking it out of the park when you do.

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When do I Conduct a Funnel Gap Analysis?

DURING THE ASSESSMENT

As you conduct an assessment, you may consider running a funnel gap analysis as well as a way to deepen your recommendation and add more value. 

Consider a Funnel Gap Analysis when:

  • A prospect shares about their revenue growth goals on a discovery — especially if they share that their goals are aggressive.
  • When they share on a Discovery that their CEO or leadership team has given them unrealistic goals and they need a way to help their leadership be more realistic in planning.
  • When they share that they need our help with goals and KPI setting.

DURING LATER DEAL STAGES

It may make sense to conduct a Funnel Gap Analysis after the Solutions Recommendation when a prospect asks about ROI of your recommended solutions and investment. 

The Funnel Gap Analysis will help you establish more proof of value — an FGA can be used to demonstrate more of our methodology to more skeptical, data-driven prospects and prove to them that we take a data-driven approach.

How to Conduct a Funnel Gap Analysis

  1. Get funnel data (trailing 12 months) from your prospect. You can ask them for this through email or gain it from their HubSpot portal. 
    What data do we need to know? 
    • Average Monthly Website traffic (trailing 12 months)
    • Visitor-to-lead conversion rate
    • Lead-to-MQL conversion rate
    • MQL-to-SQL conversion rate
    • SQL-to-Opportunity conversion rate
    • Opportunity-to-Customer conversion rate
    • Last year’s total revenue 
    • This year’s revenue target
    • Next year’s revenue target
    • Average deal size
    • Average LTV per customer
  2. Schedule a call to review with your prospect (if you haven’t already).
  3. Create the Funnel Gap Analysis in their Opportunity folder.
    1. Open the prospect's folder in the "Opportunities" section of Google Drive
    2. Select New > Google Sheets > From a Template > Funnel Gap Analysis
    3. Input the company’s revenue goals in cells D3-D5
    4. Input the company’s conversion rates in the appropriate cells in Column E
  4. Analyze! Jump to Understanding Types of Funnel Gaps section below for support. 
    1. Explain lifecycle stages and conversion rates: How is there funnel performing today? What is working, and where are they missing out? 
    2. Interpret/analyze data and benchmark comparison: Where are the biggest opportunities? What is causing the gaps we're seeing? What does that tell us? 
    3. Create a Funnel Gap Analysis presentation for your prospect to review your analysis and conclusions
  5. Review with your prospect. Remember to:
    1. Set clear expectations. Don't make promises, but explain where we can help and make an impact. 
    2. Work through hypotheticals. Storytelling is the best way to put things into context for your prospects. to do this, you can manipulate the numbers in the calculator on the call and walk your POCs through different scenarios and demonstrate how improvement in various areas could influence revenue.
    3. Tie your analysis to New Breed Solutions. Keep your end game in mind here, this step of the process should be used to build trust, gain buy-in, and queue you up for an effective solutions pitch. Make signing the dotted line an easy decision!
  6. Follow up and add value. Send the deck and the completed Funnel Gap Analysis to your prospect after the call. They can then manipulate the template on their own as they think through their marketing plan and efforts. 

🔑 Include your manager or an Inbound Strategist on these calls, especially if there are C-suite members or higher-level decision-makers attending the call. 

Funnel Gap Analysis FAQs

Where do the benchmarks come from? Sirius Decisions reporting.

Can New Breed commit to ROI based on these numbers? No, these are projections.

EXAMPLE TALK TRACK: 

So many components of your marketing activities influence performance in these areas — New Breed will own some, but your team’s efforts independent of ours will also contribute. We don’t feel comfortable guaranteeing these results since we don’t own all marketing activities. That said, we’ll help guide your team’s focus and activities and report often on this together to ensure we’re making an influence on these conversion rates.

Understanding Types of Funnel Gaps

Visitors

If you have a low volume of visitors coming to your website, and your website is the primary way for prospective buyers to get in touch with you about your products or services, you are missing a critical component of your revenue strategy. A website is your digital storefront. 

What does this gap represent?

  • Lack of traffic and visibility
  • Ineffective SEO / Paid strategy
  • Insufficient brand awareness

What is the impact on revenue?

  • Low traffic volume equates to lower potential/actual volume of leads (aka fewer visitors = fewer leads generated!)
  • Minimal brand recognition

Where should the prospect focus?

  • On-page SEO + backlinking
  • Blog content
  • Social Media
  • Paid Search / Paid Social

What does New Breed offer to support this?

  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Paid Advertising
  • Content Strategy

Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate

If prospects are visiting your website but your subscriber-to-lead rate is dismal, gaps are occuring at the top of your marketing and sales funnel. While you might be experiencing ample site traffic, but none of those visitors are actually converting into leads that you can follow-up with. This is a sign that your site is lacking in conversion opportunities.

What does this gap represent?

  • Wrong audience (buyers/ICPs)
  • Disjointed conversion paths
  • Unclear call to action
  • Lack conversion opportunities

What is the impact on revenue?

  • Poor fit customers → impact retention and expansion potential 
  • Missed revenue opportunities
  • Low customer lifetime value

Where should the prospect focus?

  • Persona and ICP refinement
  • Conversion optimization
  • Premium content offers (PCOs)
  • Paid search / paid social
  • Lead flows

What does New Breed offer to support this?

  • Growth Strategy
  • Paid Advertising
  • Content Strategy
  • Website Optimization

Lead-to-MQL Conversion Rate

If you’re generating a ton of leads, but none of them are converting into MQLs, this could be a sign that your content is drawing in prospects that don’t align with your buyer personas. Ideally, your content should attract only qualified leads.

What does this gap represent?

  • Wrong audience (ICPs/buyers)
  • Gaps in content strategy
  • Gaps in SEO strategy
  • Lack of process to segment leads effectively

What is the impact on revenue?

  • Poor fit customers → impact retention and expansion potential
  • Low pipeline creation
  • Low customer lifetime value

Where should the prospect focus?

  • Persona and ICP refinement
  • Content audit / strategy
  • SEO
  • Database segmentation
  • Re-engagement tactics

What does New Breed offer to support this?

  • Growth Strategy
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Paid Advertising
  • Content Strategy
  • Inbound Strategy

MQL-to-SQL Conversion Rate

If your MQLs aren’t converting into SQLs, this could be a sign that your Marketing and Sales teams are not aligned around what a qualified lead is supposed to look like or Sales are lacking critical lead intelligence needed to qualify.

What does this gap represent?

  • There’s a breakdown between Marketing and Sales
  • Leads are being routed to sales prematurely
  • Misguided lead scoring and/or qualification criteria

What is the impact on revenue?

  • Sales can’t rely on marketing-generated leads
  • Sales is spending time filling their own pipeline
  • Cost of customer acquisition increases

Where should the prospect focus?

  • Marketing and Sales alignment
  • Lead qualification process
  • Lead handoff and notification process
  • Sales enablement
  • Sales operations

What does New Breed offer to support this?

  • Inbound Strategy
  • Revenue Operations

SQL-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate

If Sales is accepting leads as SQLs but struggling to convert them into opportunities, this could be a sign that both parties - Sales and the prospect - may be misaligned in terms of fit or interest. It’s possible that the Sales team is prematurely qualifying Leads that haven't been nurtured long enough to stimulate an appropriate amount of interest.

What does this gap represent?

  • Invalid qualification criteria
  • Leads qualified prematurely
  • Lack time and/or resources to engage SQLs
  • Ineffective, or lack thereof, sales enablement

What is the impact on revenue?

  • Missed revenue opportunities based on lack of follow up
  • Sales is spending time filling their own pipeline
  • Higher customer acquisition costs (CAC)

Where should the prospect focus?

  • Sales operations
  • Sales enablement
  • Sales playbooks
  • Sequences

What does New Breed offer to support this?

  • Inbound Strategy
  • Revenue Operations
  • Content Strategy

Opportunity-to-Customer Conversion Rate

If the opportunity is qualified according to your buyer persona criteria and your team is still struggling to close, this could mean that you need to reevaluate your overall buyer persona strategy or your sales enablement strategy.

What does this gap represent?

  • Opportunity to revisit lead handoff and qualification criteria
  • Too much friction in the sales process
  • Not articulating the value or impact effectively

What is the impact on revenue?

  • Higher customer acquisition costs (CAC)
  • Missed quota
  • Missed revenue opportunities (focused on poor-fit opportunities)

Where should the prospect focus?

  • Sales operations
  • Attribution reporting
  • Case studies
  • Testimonials

What does New Breed offer to support this?

  • Inbound Strategy
  • Revenue Operations
  • Content Strategy

Customer Retention

Customer retention is a direct representation of your business’s health. Low or declining retention rates indicate you have a problem with your customer service, customer data, or product.

What does this gap represent?

  • Lack of product adoption
  • Lack of results or value from services or products purchased
  • Lack of bandwidth based on portfolio size
  • Lack of customer feedback loops

What is the impact on revenue?

  • Missed lifetime value (LTV)
  • Higher customer acquisition costs (CAC)
  • Low activation of referral channels

Where should the prospect focus?

  • Revenue operations and closed-loop revenue reporting
  • Customer service (i.e. Helpdesk, Knowledge Base, Customer Satisfaction Surveys)
  • Customer marketing

What does New Breed offer to support this?

  • Inbound Strategy
  • Revenue Operations
  • Content Strategy 

UPDATED 11/15/2022                                                                                                                         BACK TO TOP