Theory of Constraints Handbook - James Cox Iii [407]
You may think this is not a major problem in handling opportunities in the funnel because one often knows which projects to focus on, and by that can avoid bad multitasking. In fact, our dear salespeople are smart and often have enough experience to tell early on which opportunity is more interesting to the company (meaning it is real, it will be realized in the short term, it yields good Throughput, and it is not a complicated project that would risk our performance). It is not surprising, therefore, that more attention is given to those opportunities that are experiencing a higher hit ratio and a shorter sales cycle. In our company, I’m convinced, many thought that this was actually a proof that we had managed the bad multitasking because it seemed that we were really focusing on the good opportunities. However, on this point we were terribly wrong. We were completely blind to the negative ramifications the immense number of open opportunities had on the attention given to processing good opportunities, and more importantly, on the attention given to introducing more good opportunities.
FIGURE 21-1a Introducing almost any request into the sales funnel.
The cause-effect diagram (Current Reality Tree [CRT]) in Fig. 21-1a describes the ramifications of introducing almost any request by the client to the funnel.5
Figure 21-1b shows the ramifications on sales support functions such as engineering.
As we can see, a starting point to this CRT (cause-effect diagram) is the phenomenon, “Salespeople fill the funnel with almost any request coming from a client.” Why did we feel the pressure to do so?
Since I believe people in general (and definitely in our company) work with good intentions, there must be a positive need that drives this behavior. As is logically shown in the CRT, the need that drives us to fill the funnel with almost any request coming from a client is, “Ensure enough opportunities.” We assume that to ensure high sales volume, we should take advantage of any opportunity that we have and not limit the funnel. Since the hit ratio was low, we believed that we needed to introduce as many opportunities as possible to the funnel in order to reach the target. We did this even when we were skeptical about the validity or value of the opportunity we introduced. We hoped that some of these bad opportunities would turn good. We hoped that the client would eventually give us good opportunities as long as we interact with him, so we accepted the pseudo-orders he requested. We assumed that to reject a request coming from a client would hurt the relationship. These assumptions are not coming from thin air; they are based on anecdotal instances that we encountered in our engagements with clients. Of course, we also assumed that there are not enough good opportunities around to generate the needed volume. To summarize this point, “In order to ensure enough opportunities in the funnel, we believe we must fill the funnel with almost any request by a client” (Fig. 21-2a). This practice was perceived as a necessary condition in our reality to generate the desired volumes.
FIGURE 21-1b Effect on sales support functions.
We did not pay attention to the negative ramifications of doing so. The fact that flooding the sales funnel with opportunities leads directly to bad multitasking on both salespeople and support functions created a false impression of the funnel and masked priorities. As explained previously, the impression that we are able to focus only on the good opportunities and by that avoid bad multitasking is an illusion. Flooding the funnel unavoidably leads to less attention being paid to bringing in and following