Last week, I hosted an online CRM best practices roundtable in partnership with the Measurement, Control and Automation Association (MCAA). We covered a variety of topics, but tracking opportunities on the front end of the sales cycle was a dominant theme. Below, I’ve compiled a few opportunity management tips from the session for those who weren’t able to attend this members-only roundtable. If you’d like me to conduct a free digital roundtable for your association, please email me or complete the contact form on my speaker page.
Here are three steps you can take for better opportunity management:
- Record every opportunity that you want to pursue.
Difficulty laying down concrete rules for what counts as an opportunity can prevent sales teams from consistently tracking opportunities in a CRM. Instead of getting bogged down in details like whether an opportunity has an active project or specific dollar amount associated with it, I recommend sales teams record initial notes and a next action for anything that has the potential to become a future order, no matter at what stage it falls in the sales cycle.
- Set a monthly opportunity load input goal, and use it as a leading indicator.
To determine how many new opportunities you’ll need to bring in each month to meet your sales goals, a number I call the “new load input,” just plug your existing sales goal, base business dollars and average quote hit rate into the following formula. Or, visit my downloads page for a free load input calculator. Track this new load input goal against your past load input to measure your progress.
Sales Goal = Base Business + (New Load Input X Hit Rate)
- Drill down on your data to identify areas of opportunity.
Which sales reps are finding the most new opportunities, and what are they doing differently? Which products are on track to meet sales goals, and which aren’t? You can find the answers to these questions and others by viewing your actual load input against your load input goal by company, salesperson, manufacturer, product/service, etc. Set up CRM dashboards to easily access this information.
The next MCAA members-only roundtable is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 23 (more details here). Not an MCAA member? Email me or complete the contact form on my speaker page if you’d like me to conduct a free digital roundtable for your association, and I will work with your group to set something up.