A sales opportunity is not a rumor or an item on someone’s wish list with no budget. It’s a lead that has been qualified and has real potential to move to the quote stage.
One way to ensure your team is qualifying opportunities is to add five questions – the Ws – to your CRM system. Salespeople should ask:
- Who is on the decision team? This will ensure your team is interacting with the right person at the customer.
- Who else is being considered as a potential vendor? Knowing your competition can help you position your product or service more effectively.
- What is the reason you want to purchase this product or service? This helps the salesperson think beyond selling a product and lets the customer know you want to understand the right application.
- When will you need a formal proposal? This will tell you where the customer is in the buying cycle and whether it matches where you think it is in your sales cycle.
- What is the decision process? This will tell you again whether you are interacting with the right people and where they are in the buying cycle.
In most cases, companies are practicing reactive opportunity management. The sales teams are simply documenting opportunities as they stumble across them or discover them in the field. Proactive opportunity management, on the other hand, can uncover opportunities that your customers may not even know are there.
I discuss tools for proactive opportunity management in detail in my book ROI from CRM.
Learn more about proactive opportunity management in the video below:
Brian Gardner is author of ROI from CRMand founder of SalesProcess360, which is focused on helping industrial sales organizations think differently about sales process and get ROI from CRM. Learn more about SalesProcess360 at salesprocess360.com, and contact Gardner at brian.gardner@SalesProcess360.com.
