This post is the 4th 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 1st 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.
(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)