Opportunity Management: how it speeds sales

Opportunity management leads B2B salespeople to close better deals, faster.

Contacting people who downloaded research is a waste of time. In general, those people are just looking for a free education. Not only is there no clear intent to buy; there is little evidence they could buy.

Opportunity Management Roadmap

Sales opportunity management starts with identifying the companies that can afford and succeed with your product. First, you create an Ideal Customer Profile, then you collect the names of companies that fit. However, you can’t grow exponentially if you don’t have an opportunity management system.

Recent research from Forrester found that over 80% of buying decisions are made by a buying group of more than three people. When building connections within your ideal accounts, your salespeople should be asking about teams that need information. By empathizing with contacts about the challenges of the buying process, your salespeople can find a way to help them.

Traditional CRM applications help track people. Recent innovations drive the sales staff’s attention to opportunities. Once an opportunity has been qualified, then salespeople can network to find all members of the buying committee. Sales opportunity management delivers the right focus to both marketing and sales staff. Your people should all have key performance indicators that address finding and closing opportunities.

It’s clear that the time for transformation to an opportunity-centric revenue process is now. We still market to individuals, and we still align to accounts as targets for our solutions. But the real transformational gains are made when we move beyond individuals and accounts to focus on the opportunities that are represented by groups of people within these accounts. This opportunity-centric approach represents a seismic shift in the alignment between sales and marketing and significantly improves the way marketing and sales plan and execute the revenue process.

Forrester: An Opportunity-Centric Revenue Process, 2022-Apr-14 by Terry Flaherty