In the previous article, Part 1, we looked at the business case for approaching sales opportunity management as a systematic process and how business portal software can help you achieve your goals in this area. We particularly looked at sales opportunities and leads and how they can be generated.

Ok -- so now we have a sales lead and it has been recorded in the system. We know the organisation to which it refers and we also know how we got the lead and what kind of opportunity it represents to us, as well as a whole load of other information that comes with it that we didn’t have to do anything to get; the relationships within the business portal software took care of that.

What now?

Well, that depends on your organisation’s needs and processes. Again, going back to the Hunter/Farmer scenario, you need to be sure that the sales opportunity management processes that you create from now on satisfy both.

Here is the kind of sales opportunity scenario that your out-of-the-box business portal software should be capable of managing.

First, the sales opportunity is normally assigned to a sales person to run it. Hunters will usually have done this already - they guard their prey after all! But leads coming in through a Marketing Department would be allocated based on a set of criteria: perhaps geographically; sector specific; potential value; product type. This is the first Business Rule that we have to identify and deal with -- who gets what.

To assign the sales opportunity, you should simply be able to select the individual’s name from the drop-down box on the transaction. If that can then be routed to that individual’s Home page so that he/she will see it when they log on you will have a major benefit.

After assigning the sales opportunity, you will want to know where it is in the sales process. Every organisation has a sales process –- some of them are very easily defined and some are a bit hazy. But there is always a series of steps/events which, if followed, result in an outcome. It’s these steps/events that you need to sit down and identify for your organisation now.

The following are logical in most circumstances:

• New Opportunity
• In Progress
• Won
• Lost
• Deferred

These are 5 very simple steps in a sales cycle and yet they fit a myriad of sales processes. They are normally followed more or less in sequence. When a new lead is generated, it is recorded as being at step 1. As the sales person takes it through the process he/she will change the step number through the business portal online. It’s simple. But it works!

In this way, you will always know the current step/status of any sales opportunity within your organisation. You will also know which sales person is handling which sales opportunity and, by definition, which sales person converts the most leads to sales. That’s something worth knowing.

Every sales scenario is, of course, different. You should be able to easily customise the profile for a sales opportunity to reflect your sales processes. In high-value sales in particular, there can be very protracted processes with several meetings and presentations at various levels. You should be able to add new steps easily by creating additional fields and adding it to the profile. Sometimes too, deals can be stalled rather than be won or lost and so you may want to track this. It is also possible for you to walk away from business you don’t want -- another possible step that can be recorded in a classification field.

The only limits to this type of sales opportunity management is your imagination –- and the practicalities of managing the process.

In the next article we’ll develop this theme further and look at the key stage -- closing business -- in the sales process.

Chic McSherry
CEO
iport4business Ltd