Today I was ordered by my boss to become a funnel hawk, so I dropped the generation of a stage gate review for a new program, dropped a statement of work for a potentially lucrative upgrade program for a series of large customers, and started hounding sales engineers one by one to try to scrape up revenue for the third quarter.

I feel dirty, and I may not ever go back to work.

The CSE’s position in the guest post above, unfortunately, sets up a strong negative feedback loop, which will greatly amplify (and spread) the behavior of a funnel hawk.

I am in the uncomfortable position of needing to break a peer’s ‘hawk-like’ behavior, something that is hard enough when they report to me, but she has been trained over the last 2 years that you have to call and pester the individual sales engineers DAILY to keep an opportunity on track.

Of course, we have lazy SE’s who will not push, wait until the 11th hours (last week of the quarter) and then cry that they need obscene discounts to “close” the business. I am sure that NONE of this audience has a sales force that is in this category (snort).

I think Gander has a point. With a clearly published (or accessible) funnel report in the CRM system and a sales management team that is open to communication, this problem can be minimized.

In the end, like virtually every other problem, it comes down to having aligned objectives across teams and people who are measured, compensated and rewarded for working as a team and not in their own little political or functional silos.

Lastly you begin missing your plan 2 or 3 quarters, and BAM, you have created a funnel hawk. Unfortunately, sales refuses to accept any blame for the situation.

Sadly, replacing sales mgmt with better leaders isn’t enough to fix it, it usually requires executive intervention.