Official skill · Strategy

Sales funnel roles and stage metrics

v1.0.1 · Updated 4 November 2026

Lays out a B2B revenue process as marketing, inside sales, field sales, and customer success stages with handoff rules, conversion, time, and capacity, then finds the bottleneck and 3 fixes. Use it when you're splitting sales into inside sales and field sales and need stage definitions.

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When to use it

You're splitting sales into inside sales and field sales and need stage definitions
Marketing and sales disagree about lead quality or handoffs
Revenue misses target and nobody knows at which stage

What you give it

Current stages and their owners
Counts per stage for one period
Time per stage and capacity per person
The target for next period

What you get

Handoff definitions, a stage table with owner, entry and exit criteria, conversion, time and capacity, a work-back from the target, the bottleneck, and 3 fixes with owners.

How it works

List the stages and owners Use the company's own words, then map each to one of the four roles: marketing (creates leads), inside sales (qualifies and creates opportunities, by phone, email, or video), field sales (runs opportunities to a close), customer success (adoption and renewal). One owner per stage. If one person spans two stages, say so; it limits the split.
Write entry and exit criteria as observable facts Each handoff is a definition both sides sign: "a marketing-qualified lead is a contact at a company of [size] in [segment] who [action]"; "an opportunity is a lead where [the buyer, the need, and a next meeting] are confirmed". Common labels are MQL (a lead marketing judges likely to buy) and SQL (a lead ready to talk to sales); use them only if the company does, and define them either way. Add what happens to rejected handoffs: returned with a reason, never dropped.
Fill the stage table from the counts For each stage: count in, count out, conversion rate (out ÷ in), and the time metric. Compute every rate from the input; show the math once. Missing counts stay "[check: ...]" and the rate stays blank.
Add capacity For each stage: people × what one person handles in the period = capacity. Compare with the volume that arrived. A stage where arrivals exceed capacity drops work silently; look for leads never contacted, opportunities without a next step, or renewals reached late.
Work backward from the target Divide the target by each conversion rate, stage by stage, to get the volume each stage needs. Put needed volume next to actual volume and capacity.
Name the bottleneck The bottleneck is the one stage that limits output most: where needed volume exceeds capacity, or where work is dropped or waiting longest. Pick one stage and give the evidence. Low conversion alone isn't proof; check whether the input to that stage changed first.
Propose 3 fixes for the bottleneck One for the handoff definition or rule, one for capacity or time (who does what, response-time agreement), and one for measurement (what gets reported weekly). Each fix names the metric it should move, the owner, and when to check it. Don't invent benchmark rates from other companies; compare with the company's own history or target.
Set the weekly review One shared table, reviewed by all stage owners together, with the handoff rejections and their reasons. The split works only if the teams look at the same numbers.

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