Sales Resource Prioritizer

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.

Phase I ranked early sales cycle information that could be figured out through research and a 1^st call.  Here we ranked things like vertical market attractiveness, alignment with CEO initiatives (determined from annual reports or transcripts from investor calls), size of marketing budget, year over year sales growth (we had better success selling to greed than fear and so winners were more likely to buy our solution),  and our internal coach’s level in the prospect organization.

Phase II was the gate to delivering a full solution presentation to an account.  It ranked information that could be gleaned through a discovery phase.  It included where our solution fit priority-wise for our line-of-business VP, how strong the solution fit was, how many competitors and how committed the prospect was to a joint evaluation process.

This is a good approach to qualifying resource-intensive sales opportunities and efficiently focusing sales-support resources on the most winnable deals.



(Index of the 5 posts on opportunity scoring)

• Simple Opportunity Scoring (medium average selling price (ASP), spreadsheet)
• Winnability Scoring #1 (low ASP, Salesforce.com)
• Winnability Scoring #2 (medium ASP, Goldmine)
• Sales Resource Prioritizer (high  ASP, spreadsheet)
• Client Success Scoring (high ASP, spreadsheet)