Sales Opportunity Management

S ales opportunity management is the structured process of working with a potential customer to purchase your products or service. It can be simple or complex, and can include support for communication, record keeping, analyzing, planning, strategizing, and executing to help you win the opportunity. The process should guide you throughout the sales engagement until the business is either won, lost, or abandoned by choice.

Sales opportunity management should help you associate individuals, activities, relationships, and product solutions in a comprehensive way that increases your competitiveness.

Why Opportunity Management Process

Having an opportunity management process and methodology provides many benefits. It standardizes best practices for winning competitive deals to ensure all opportunities are addressed in the best possible way. Forecasting and pipeline reviews are much more effective when they are performed and managed against a proven, repeatable process. Setting strategy, assigning roles, and monitoring progress are much easier to do within a successful structure.

A good opportunity management process will help you link your sales process and the customers buying process together more effectively. It also helps you consider and address all of the key issues that need to be thought through as you progress with your customer.

A well thought out and structured sales opportunity management process will help your sales people sell more effectively and it will help you be a better sales manager.

Components of Opportunity Management

There is no single best way to manage a competitive opportunity. There are many variations and commercially available opportunity management processes and sales training courses, but the key is to create or tailor a process that works for your unique business requirements. There are five key areas to consider when strategizing, planning for, and executing your engagement during a competitive sales opportunity. Those four areas are:

• Business Issues and Drivers
• People Politics and Key Stakeholders
• Competitive Considerations
• Solution and Value
• Process Tools and Infrastructure

Let's look at each one in more detail below.

Business Issues and Opportunity Drivers

The first part of any opportunity management process should be an opportunity assessment You need to thoroughly understand the critical aspects of the opportunity. How the opportunity was developed and why it is important for your customer are key issues to address. In addition, a good knowledge of your customers business is ctitical. Be certain you know what's working well and what key business issues your prospect is managing. Below are some areas you should consider when trying to discover the people and business issues that are driving an opportunity.

• A qualifying process or set of questions that helps you determine where you are in the process and where you are competitively. Qualifying is not a do it once and be done with it process. Qualifying should be done continually right up to the close of your opportunity.
• Discover what is broken, or what needs to be changed about a company to help solve their business issue. Think about how you will discover the customer's business issues, and what the impact of those issues is in terms of people, operations, achieving business goals, and financially.
• Determine what is driving the customer to act now, if at all. If you are competing for a real opportunity, there will be a genuine compelling business reason for them to act immediately. Work to understand how your opportunity was created, why, who owns it and why it is compelling.
• Identify the real sponsor with the power and budget to get the job done. We'll talk more about the people aspect in the political section below, but identifying who owns the initiative and who owns the budget is key to managing your sales opportunity.

People Politics and Key Stakeholders

In a complex sales opportunity, there will be a number of players who have an impact on deciding who wins the business. Those individuals have different roles in the buying process and different interests and reasons for wanting the initiative completed. They make their decisions differently based on their position within the company and their experience.

Some of the individuals are more important to you than others. Some will be more respected and powerful within their organization than others. Each individual will be more or less supportive of you depending upon their experience and their personal and business agendas. To be competitive, it is important that you analyze the people involved, and the political landscape as it relates to your opportunity to gain political alignment . A good opportunity management process will help you:

• Identify all the players who will impact the decision for each opportunity.
• Identify the people who have the real power to make the decisions regarding who wins each opportunity.
• Capture the characteristics and attributes for each of the critical individuals.
• Understand each individual's role and decision criteria.
• Try to determine their personal and business agendas as they relate to this opportunity
• Review your current relationships and determine which ones you need to enhance to be successful in winning each opportunity
• Consider the culture of the prospect's business. People like to do business in the way they conduct business.

Competitive Considerations

A good opportunity management process helps you analyze and consider how to sell against the competition. Your competitive objectives include creating roadblocks and speed bumps to slow down the competition and make them less effective. Here are the competitive issues you need to address:

• Identify your key competitors and analyze their strengths and weaknesses.
• Understand how your competitors normally sell, and strategize how you can weaken their approach.
• Think about your competitor's personality and culture and how well they fit into the customers buying opportunity.
• Determine what things your competition does not want your customer to know, and those areas where they don't want to compete.
• Put together a formal competitive strategy to help you sell against competitors.

Solution and Value

Your proposed solution and the perceived business value it brings to your customers is the major determinant as to whether your customer will buy your product or buy your competitors.

Remember, your solution is usually just a piece of the puzzle that will solve the customer's business issue. The customer will see the value of your proposal as it relates to, and integrates into their total business solution. A good opportunity management process helps you build and present a solution that accentuates your unique business value to the appropriate people. It addresses their key business issues and opportunity drivers. Here are a number of issues you shold consider:

• Ensure that you link your solution to each of the relevant business issues and pains you have discovered during your engagement with the customer.
• When putting together your solutions consider the reasons why businesses buy a product or service. Those are:
  • Quality
  • Productivity
  • Versatility
  • Reliability
  • Convenience
  • Entertainment
  • Security
  • Economics
  • Market impact
  • Image
• Consider where the customer and company are choosing to invest. Those areas might be:
  • Plant and equipment - fixed assets
  • Intangible assets - image and awareness
  • Financial investments
  • Operations and product - Opex
  • Capital - Capex
  • People
• Your solution presentation should provide a higher perceived business and political value than your competitors. Address all the components of value. Those components include benefits, costs, risks, and both positive and negative consequences.

Process, Tools, and Infrastructure

Every good opportunity management process and methodology requires supporting tools, templates, and infrastructure to make it complete. A structured and formalized opportunity plan is one of those components. But, there are many others that will help you be competitive and increase your rate of success.

• Develop an opportunity management plan that best supports your type of business. The plan can be short and simple or long and involved. The key to an opportunity management plan and process is to use it. Get the sale as efficiently as possible and don't use the plan as a mandate to fill out forms and create busy work.
• Decide on the governance of your plan. Decide how it will be implemented and updated and by whom.
• Track action items and responsibilities, and review commitment completion with follow on actions.
• Opportunity plans need to be living documents that are reviewed and updated as frequently as necessary. Decide where your plan will reside, and who will have access to viewing and adding information to the plan. This may involve a CRM system, a sales portal, or simply shared files.
• Determine what tools, plans, and templates you will need to support your opportunity management process. These might include:
  • Discovery maps
  • Solution map
  • Political maps
  • Presentation planners
  • Call planners
  • Account plans
  • Relationship plans
  • Seller's quick reference guides
  • Commitment trackers

Conclusion

Having an effective sales opportunity management process and methodology, has many benefits for the sales operation and organization.It allows everyone on the team to be more competitive and a better sales person. It shares best practices at the proper time, helps communications, focuses your efforts around competitive issues, and enhances forecast accuracy and pipeline management.

Proper sales opportunity management comes in many different shapes and sizes and formats. The key is to create one that works well for your organization, which incorporates the key aspects of your go to market sales requirements and your customer's buying processes.

If you'd like help putting the other your own sales opportunity management process, or if you have questions or comments about this article please contact:

Lynn Shively, Principal at Sales Management Insight lynn@Sales-Management-Insight.com or 206-395-4388

Related Articles

• Opportunity Assessment
• Opportunity Plan
• Business Value
• Key Business Issues
• Political Alignment
• Solution Presentation
• Sales Funnel

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