2009 January

This post is the 4^th in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  This was for a solution with a higher average selling price.

This sales cycle was a high ticket (ASP > $1M) create demand sales cycle where we needed to be smart about continually assessing fit and winnability because it was a long and resource intensive sales cycle: creative, technical and client services people were needed in every sales cycle in addition to an executive sponsor and the sales people themselves.

We had enough reps but not enough of these other folks (who also had day jobs outside of the sales cycle) to work all the opportunities.  We needed a fair and generally understood way of disqualifying opportunities because the ad hoc refereeing of resources at the sales meeting was not working well.

We tracked 2 phases of fit in a simple spreadsheet with this sales resource prioritizer.

This post is the 3^nd in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  Here we had a medium average selling price and this scorer is integrated into Goldmine.

I used a simpler approach to ‘winnability’ tracking with a sales force that hadn’t been using opportunities to track deals.   They were selling into an emerging market so a combination of solution fit and the ‘desire to buy anything’ was a good proxy for ‘winnability’ -- our competition was prospect inaction vs. specific competitors.

Many of the reps came from relationship sales backgrounds (versus solution selling backgrounds) so once they had client interest, standard operating procedure was to send out a quote and hope for the best while they used a combination of charm and persistence to try and forge a friendship.

But in fact, they were often engaged in a ‘create demand’ sale with multiple buying influences and a product that had an implementation period of a few months. Placing all their chips on a typically low-level friend in the account wasn’t helping drive the opportunities and so there were many stalled accounts. To win more consistently, they needed to add more value during the buying process and also qualify opportunities better by asking the right questions and talking to the right people.

This post is the 2^nd in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities.  Here we had a low average selling price and were using salesforce.com.

There is logic to this approach but it is one-dimensional.  You may be at an early stage with a prospect who has bought from you at their previous company and have a high likelihood of winning or be at a later stage in 3^rd place with a very low probability of winning. 

Stage completion probabilities also suffer a timing problem when used for pipelines and forecasts– what happens when you have completed most of the opportunity stages – say you’re 80% complete  -- and although you are confident you will win, there is a good chance the deal will roll into next period?

This post is the 1st in a series of 5 posts highlighting best practice tools to measure winnable opportunities. This tool was developed for a low average selling price solution ($30K) on its way to a medium average selling price ($100K+).

  Getting your sales team to focus on winnable opportunities can be a challenge. 

I’ve spent my career selling technology but had an interesting conversation on the topic of focusing on attractive and winnable opportunities with a friend outside the industry the other day. 

He works at a mid-sized engineering firm and several folks – including the founders – are responsible for selling new business.  It turns out that only one of the new business folks (a non-founder) sells profitable projects.  Even though it costs $25K+ to work up a bid, no discipline is used to figure out where their firm adds the most value and where they are most likely to win.  So they ‘quote and hope’ and lose a lot of proposals and win a lot of unprofitable business.  But they don't know any other way.