Many sales departments use the so-called sales funnel as a tool to measure the effectiveness of their sales process. The top of this funnel is the in-lead for the leads, the potential deals. The sales manager examines each lead and selects those that seem like to lead to a commercial deal. If the chances for a deal seem very small, he will most probably choose to spend his valuable time on a lead with more potential. The interesting leads drop further into the funnel and get a sequel in the form of a customer call. This call can lead to an offer over being made. If the offer is attractive to the potential customer, the closed deal will drop-out underneath the funnel.
The sales funnel provides insight into how many leads result in a customer call and how many bids actually yield a deal. Ideally, the very first stages are the most critical.
It is better to be critical when selecting customer calls, than to spend a lot of time in writing al lot of quotations that won’t ever make it to a deal.
When the filtering in the early stages is not critical enough, the sales manager would dedicate a lot of his time on proposals with little potential. A waste of time, especially since the time that is wasted on these proposals, will reduce the time he has got left to look for new lead and carefully assess their potential. A sales process is a filtering process and the sales funnel provides insight into how well the filter is working between each successive step in the process. If the early stages are not filtering enough this will create an inefficiency, the later steps will then take disproportionately more time. This will reduce the quality of his proposals and his success rate. When the sales manager tries to compensate this by being less critical in filtering out the worthless deals, he’ll create an vicious circle with more inefficiency due .
The sales funnel provides insight into this mechanism and many organizations use it to control the sales process and make it more efficient.
Within the software , we also have a filtering process, called: Testing. We aim to eliminate errors before they affect the subsequent steps. By being critical at the early stages, we avoid that final stages slurp up all the attention. This would put a lot of pressure on the project and will, just like in the sales process, lead to a vicious circle.
By using the right tools and for example work pair-wise with other disciplines, we can eliminate errors early in the design and in the code. By involving the business early we can avoid that the wrong solution is being implemented. It will also reduce the change on suddenly unexpected findings during late testing phases like the user acceptance test or demo. These measures contribute to a filtering process that is sufficiently critical in the early stages.
The filtering process in the test project can be visualized using a defect funnel. Just like the sales funnel it provides information that allows us to control and improve the test process. The defect funnel provides insight into the steps in the process in which we should be a little more effective in finding defects and identify the stages where we can save time.
Recently I discussed with a customer the efficiency of his testing process. He had started to measure the number of issues that surfaced in production and he compared that with the number of findings in the development phase. Immediately we both recognized the DDP , the defect detection rate, but also noted that the DPP is an abstract concept to stakeholders . Suddenly, we both made a link to the sales funnel. “They most probably should like that,” we concluded simultaneously. ” In this organization the stakeholders are used to think in sales terminology, so this view is consistent with their daily work.” So it might be a clever way to represent the test process.
Maybe, this is nothing new. Could be. Still Google does not yield search result, so it might be a nice and new way to present some old principles. Who cares, I think the defect funnel contributes to a better understanding amongst our stakeholders. In their perceptions the testing process is often elusive . Having a clear picture, thus helps to bridge the gap between business and IT and to work on an efficient development process together. Finally, I believe it is nice to take advantage of knowledge that is available within other disciplines . Google on “sales funnel ” and you will find many Excel templates that are easily converted into a beautiful defective funnel . Thanks to our sales colleagues!
Author: Derk – Jan de Grood
Derk-Jan de Grood works for Valori as senior test manager and product manager. His drive is to improve the visibility of testing in both agile and traditional organizations, by sharing his knowledge and experience by means of training, presentations, workshops and publications. He is a regular speaker at conferences like EuroSTAR, wrote several successful books on software testing and publishes articles for the major testing magazines.
