No matter your position, if you have new business interactions, you need to utilise opportunity management.
Without recognising the need to know precisely how each opportunity is progressing, or how many opportunities are at each stage of your cycle, you can’t accurately provision for success.
Nor can you provide the desired levels of service to wow your potential customers.
Consider your own active opportunities. Could you answer these questions about them?
- How likely are the opportunities in your pipeline are to close?
- Which opportunities should you focus on?
- Which source of opportunities has the highest conversion percentage?
- How quickly do you follow up on opportunities?
- Do you know your win/loss ratio?
If not, you’re likely losing significant volumes of revenue before it can even materialise.
What Is Opportunity Management?
This is where opportunity management comes in.
It allows you to take control of every qualified lead that enters your sales cycle. Therefore, ensuring maximum ROI and a higher chance of closing each opportunity.
So what exactly is it? It is the process of managing and tracking sales opportunities.
Similar to enquiry management, opportunity management enhances your ability to turn great fit prospects, into great fit customers.
“Opportunity management is an evolved version of lead management.”
Leadsquared
It encapsulates the core sections of the buying cycle, from qualified lead through to sale. In other words, from when initial enquiries become opportunities.
When managing and analysing your opportunities, you should look to prioritise either those requiring immediate attention or those most likely to convert.
You also need to ensure that your teams are equipped with the right set of tools to convert interest into revenue.
Why Is Opportunity Management Important?
So why is this important? Where does the value truly lie?
Ultimately, opportunity management helps you to be more efficient with your sales.
“Opportunity management takes time and effort but the payoff is well worth it.”
Method
Used effectively, it allows you to better understand your customers, identify their most commonly occurring needs and prioritise your interactions based on their potential.
It provides vital business intelligence that enables your business to pivot toward, and focus upon, activities which generate the greatest return.
What Does Opportunity Management Consist Of?
Opportunity management is about converting your potential customers into reliable revenue. To achieve this, a sales team alone simply isn’t enough.
Managers need to have the proper system in place to keep track of their opportunities as they progress through the pipeline.
“Well executed opportunity management is all but essential to sustaining successful sales processes.”
Hubspot
It can be a significant, multifaceted asset to your business. For one, it allows you to better understand your potential customers and prioritise your interactions with them based on their business potential.
Furthermore, it helps you determine the best way to approach each project based on the interest they’ve demonstrated and the stage of their relationship with your company.
Finally, it can help expose flaws in your sales processes.
So not only does it consist of aligning opportunities, it facilitates reflection, allowing you to consistently improve how you interact with potential customers.
Benefits Of Adopting Opportunity Management
Using opportunity management for your business has several potential benefits. Here are 4 standout positives…
1 – Optimise Your Pipeline.
You will be able to standardise your sales process and keep your opportunities moving forward.
2 – Increase Win Rate & Revenue.
By seeing what you need to do next in each step, you will be able to apply your established processes to each new opportunity.
3 – Improved Opportunity Intelligence.
It will be much easier to see which opportunities matter the most. Which, by extension, will allow you to identify those activities which reap the greatest rewards.
4 – Measurable ROI.
Tracing opportunity sources, types and cycles allows for continuous optimisation. You can actually see the impact your opportunity optimisation is having on your bottom line.
Ready to explore how Anthill can help enhance your opportunity management and analysis? Schedule a demo today.
Intrigued to learn more? Check out our Insights Hub to keep your business at the cutting edge.
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- December 23rd, 2021