Can't have too much of a good thing?

 In spite of what so many of us were told as children, you can absolutely have too much of a good thing.  Overproduction, and the damage it causes, have been discussed in plenty of my other blog posts.  The impact of overproduction on sales is another risk that many people overlook.  Your friends working in manufacturing, or those who enjoy studying the science behind it, have likely heard the phrase "choking the release."  It refers to the practice of not releasing work to the floor until a certain time-the buffer-before it's due date.  Too many orders on the floor leads to jams, masks priorities, and disrupts product flow.  This principle applies directly to sales.  Exceedingly high numbers of open projects in sales means that every resource in the sales process is responsible for multiple tasks/actions across multiple projects.  When a resource is overtaxed, poor multitasking is always the direct result.  The resource jumps from one project to another without any meaningful advancement accomplished.  When different resources need the inputs of other resources to complete their assigned tasks, bad multitasking intensifies.  You are left with two or more resources waiting for each other.  Response times grow longer, quality of work is diminished significantly, and the potential for turning an opportunity into an order goes down.  The need to keep the sales funnel filled is the driver, and it's root cause is the mentality of "ensure enough opportunities are ready for us to pursue."  Sales teams tend to do this even when the value of the opportunity being introduced is initially met with great skepticism.  Flooding the funnel makes sales worse.  Focus on priority projects that have a high hit rate.