This post is the 3nd 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.
To help track winnability in addition to the standard opportunity completion stages, we set up a single winnability field on the opportunity to track the fit (three stages taking you from 10%
- 30%) and likehood of the prospect buying anything (4 stages taking you from
40% - 90%).
Looking at the winnability ‘fit’ values,
‘client interest’ as a 10% winnability percentage reminded the reps that there
was more work to do. Being in our target market or, if not, scoring more than 20
points on a fit calculator (similar to the simple opportunity scorer
discussed above) got us to 20% winnability.
The third fit question – strong business value – addressed value delivered
to the prospect. We kept this as a
conversation point versus a score sheet but the reps were expected to know why
our solution was materially important to the prospect’s business. You needed to have all three of these fits to
continue working the deal.
We had three winnability ‘why buy
anything’ factors – compelling event (CE), strategic mentor (SM) and budget
created (BC) – that didn’t always happen in the same order or at all.
We could win without a compelling event
or a strategic mentor, but we had less control and those were less predictable
sales cyles. We defined a compelling
event as ‘something bad happens if they don’t do this project by a certain
date’. We defined strategic mentor as
‘someone who can tell you if you really are winning.’
We were often creating demand, so it
wasn’t unusal that we had to manufacture budget for our solution during the
course of the sales cycle. Therefore, it
often happened later in the sales cycle than identifying (or creating) a
compelling event and recruiting a strategic mentor. But not always
- sometimes there was a specific budget when we arrived. So you’ll notice that these three winnability
factors are each worth 20% points and can be selected in any order. All three of these would get us to 80% winnability.
Our opportunity completion cycle and
winnability cycle converged at the same 90% final step – contract redline. Once the prospect spends legal time redlining
your contract, you are close to both completing a sales cycle and winning.
(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)