I’m a firm believer in opportunity assessment – perhaps the most important function frontline sales managers should perform.
What is opportunity assessment? It’s a very deliberate process of evaluating a seller’s opportunities against six key qualifiers. This evaluation will help sales teams proactively identify and rectify problems, both with the opportunity itself and with the seller’s skills, and assign the opportunity to the correct stage in the sales process.
Opportunity assessment should be performed as early as possible and periodically thereafter. Here are a number of key benefits you’ll get when you practice opportunity assessment.
As a sales manager, how do you properly assess an opportunity? Here are the six key questions you should ask.
These six qualifiers can be summarized in a simple equation sales managers should teach their salespeople:
Sale = CBI x Solution x Proof x Power x Value x Plan
Consequently, if any of these qualifiers gets a low score, so, too, does the seller’s probability of winning that opportunity. Whenever a qualifier is low, the appropriate action or actions should be identified for the seller to take with the buyer, and there are two possible outcomes:
So, in my view, consistent opportunity assessment is critical. It is key to winning more opportunities, shortening sales cycles, uncovering and resolving skill deficiencies among salespeople, maintaining a clean sales pipeline, and forecasting accurately.
Today’s post is by Bob Junke, founder and CEO of Adventace®. He is also the author of the bestselling book, Create the High Performance Sales Environment® and creator of the Adventace Sales Management System™, a Salesforce-based application that enables a high-performance sales environment. Contact him at bob.junke@adventace.com.
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