What are Your Opportunity Management Practices?
Following your sales process helps identify the appropriate conversation to have with your customer. And having a list of activities that you do “when you are at your best” is also a good primer for ideas on best next actions. These 10 questions can also ensure that you are covering all of the bases.
CPS’ Top 10 Questions to Ask Yourself:
Where is your deal in the sales process? How do you know?
What are your customer’s likely alternatives if they go a different direction?
How might this opportunity become urgent?
Who are the key players in the buying process?
What is the business case for your solution?
What must you do to move to the next phase of your sales process?
Who from your team do you need to get engaged?
Have you prepared, in advance, to manage customer objections?
What are your customer’s success criteria and timeline? What are your customer’s business requirements and key reasons to buy?
How can you make this opportunity more attractive for your customer and your company?
CPS’ Best Practices:
Align your selling process to your customer’s buying process. That buying process – what your customers go through to initiate change – has become increasingly complex. A few reasons:
Buyers can easily become knowledgeable about their alternatives without engaging the selling team.
Buying decisions of any magnitude are being made by many stakeholders, not just a few.
The buyer’s alternatives are expanding, and there are more choices as new, innovative products and services become available at a rapid pace.
Make sure you’ve correctly captured your customer’s Gap Assessment and validated it with them, and keep it up to date.
Develop an accountable Action Plan to win the opportunity. Make sure your plan covers all the basics and use it to enroll your team. Then work the plan step by step.