Even if your business is profitable, sooner or later you will face the question of how to boost your sales. To achieve this goal, you need to analyze your company’s sales processes and determine exactly what you can do to boost returns.
One of the main things you need to do is identifying sales opportunities. In this review, we’ll talk about examples of sales opportunities, the detailed meaning of this term, and the main benefits you’ll get from properly managing your sales opportunities.
What Is a Sales Opportunity?
To put it simply, a sales opportunity is a qualified sales lead. An opportunity is a certain object that shows a potential deal. However, this deal should meet certain criteria that are important for your business.
In other words, a sales opportunity is a contact or a person that has already entered your sales cycle and wants to work with you. Moreover, you have already contacted this person and know for sure their needs, goals, and demands. Now, you can close this deal. Keep in mind that a sale opportunity is the foundation of each sale.
Know Your Buyer
If your company is buyer-centric, you are probably already putting your customers at the center of absolutely everything. It goes without saying that when you understand your client’s needs, you’ll be able to push up sales. The information about your buyer can be the foundation of future sales processes, main activities, metrics, communications, etc. It’s a simple but highly effective strategy that can help you achieve much better results.
Simple buyer research can help understand the needs of your customers. By gathering insights about your buyer, you’ll be able to understand your client and develop the right marketing campaign. Identifying sales opportunities can help you understand the needs of your customers.
How to Identify Sales Opportunities
There are a few steps you can follow to identify new sales opportunities:
- Find out more about your customer activity data. It’s the main tool that allows you to find the right sales opportunities. To do this, you can use social networks, emails, transaction registers, etc.
- Create a profile of your perfect sales-ready client. Gather more information about your buyers, how they interact with you, etc. You can also contact your sales-ready clients and analyze who buys and who refuses your offer. As a result, you’ll come up with the main buying signals that have the chance to result in successful sales.
- Check the purchase history. When developing a sales-ready profile, you need to consider the general budget of your client and the purchase history. As a result, you’ll find out more about your customer’s capabilities. Check how often they buy, what kind of products they choose, etc.
- Check the current events. When you know more about the current events that are influencing your customer’s life, you’ll be able to determine the quality of this sales opportunity. You can gather this information on your customer community platform’s blogs or forums. You’ll be able to learn what issues affect your buyer, and your product or service will be able to help them tackle that challenge.
How to Analyze Lost Opportunities?
The sales opportunity management process is not always easy. Sometimes, you can lose sales opportunities, but it is not the end of the world. You can analyze your mistakes and do everything to prevent them from happening in the future. Here are the most common mistakes you can discover:
- You don’t understand the needs of your client.
- You identify your target audience incorrectly.
- You haven’t estimated the cost value of your products or services properly.
- You have an ineffective sales pitch.
- You don’t know how to properly close deals.
- You don’t know your product characteristics well enough to persuade customers to buy them.
Analyze your lost sales opportunities and do your best to avoid mistakes in the future.
Finding New Sales Opportunities – Tips to Follow
Identifying sales leads and nurturing them to the condition when they can convert is a time-consuming process. Salespeople spend their precious time and effort on successfully closing these deals. Now, let’s look at the main tips that might help you find new sales opportunities:
- Always act with a goal in mind. Simply put, you need to know why you contacted this particular person and what goal you want to achieve.
- Make sure you understand your buyer’s needs.
- Use social media. Such websites as Facebook or LinkedIn offer a broad selection of new sales opportunities. But before you contact your potential customers, you need to make sure that your profile is complete and includes detailed information about your professional level, your company, etc. You can also join discussion groups related to your niche and participate in them.
- Create a complete eBook describing your company’s products or services.
- Arrange face-to-face meetings. You can definitely use a broad selection of online tools, but you will hardly find a more effective way to develop new sales opportunities than a face-to-face meeting. You can visit local networking groups and meet new people. Remember: they can be your potential customers.
What Is Opportunity Management?
It is sales management that uses the sales pipeline management methodology. With pipeline management, you’ll be provided with a high-quality sales road map that you can use to make your sales even more effective. With this tool, sales managers understand every process and can greatly boost sales.
Check out a few benefits of sales opportunities management:
- You can make your sales process more effective and keep maximum sales velocity.
- You can control every stage of the buying process.
- You can prioritize opportunities.
If you want to achieve the best possible results, you should choose the sales opportunity management software that can provide you with a broad selection of features.
Why Does Sales Opportunity Management Matter?
Sales opportunity management is a process of tracking sales the moment they move through a pipeline. You can see the main metrics of real sales and closed deals. As a result, you can rest assured that you have everything under control.
Moreover, sales opportunity management allows you to evaluate the risk factors and avoid them. It is the backbone of any successful sales operation.
Sales opportunity management can help you:
- Find out more about your buyers and understand them;
- Uncover all the risks at the initial stage;
- Measure deal progress;
- Find unique business value;
- Develop the most effective strategy;
- Map the relationships with your clients.
How to Manage Your Sales Opportunities
It goes without saying that every sales manager wants to get the most out of every deal. Even if you have a professional sales team, an effective email campaign and a solid list of clients, your general success depends on how well you control your pipeline. Proper sales management allows you to have your contacts and prospects properly organized.
Here are a few tips that allow you to control your sales opportunities and achieve much better results:
- Develop every pipeline stage. Make sure you have a thorough understanding of every stage of your sales processes. Simply put, you need to contact a person, qualify your leads, conduct a sales demo and close your deal. To speed up this process you can use Nimble – the best CRM tool with a wide array of superb functions.
- Optimize your sales processes.
- Categorize your customers. When you deal with many clients simultaneously, it is really hard to keep everything under control. Sales opportunity management allows you to monitor what deals have been closed and which of them have just entered the market.
- Monitor the speed of every deal.
In other words, when you control your sales opportunities, you’ll be able to boost sales and gain an understanding of why a product or service is not in demand.
How to Develop an Evaluation Plan?
To achieve an agreement, you need to create an evaluation plan (or an agreed document between two parties). Process evaluation is the most effective type of evaluation used to develop a sales opportunity procedure. It helps sales managers identify the reasons behind poor results.
A good evaluation plan for your management process usually encompasses the following stages:
- Determining your evaluation audience;
- Creating a list of evaluation questions;
- Developing your monitoring questions;
- Identifying data sources;
- Choosing someone who will be responsible for data collection.
A good evaluation plan will help you ensure that all parties participate in all events. Moreover, you can monitor progress more efficiently.
Important Planning Tips for Those Who Work With Sales Opportunities
If you want to make your work more effective, you need to follow these guidelines:
- Do some research before you contact a potential buyer. Make sure you know everything about the recent changes in the customer’s industry.
- Plan your conversation beforehand. Create a shortlist of specific questions that will help you find out more about the needs of your client.
- When you finish the conversation, you should obtain a commitment from your buyer and can now move on to the next step.
- Document your conversation.
Sales Opportunity Management and Nimble CRM
It is safe to say that this job is impossible without sales opportunity management software. In this case, the use of Nimble CRM might be the best solution. It is an easy-to-use tool that works inside your Office 365. With the help of this solution, sales managers can easily access company insights, control deals and much more!
Overall, Nimble can save your precious time because it can automatically build your contacts, generate targeted contact lists, control your calendar appointments and sales pipeline and work smarter from anywhere in the world.
Nimble is a game-changer for CRM. The software is integrated with social networking sites and makes your relationships with clients much easier. Moreover, opportunity management in CRM is a superb tool that can save your precious time and help you achieve much better results!
If you want to have a multi-featured and reliable opportunity management system, Nimble CRM just might be the right thing!
Nimble CRM Benefits
When using Nimble, you’ll get the following benefits:
- Unify contact data (combine social media connections, inboxes, calendar appointments, communications, etc.).
- Locate contact information in any way.
- Add notes to records and update status.
- Stay organized.
- You won’t forget about an important deal. Just set a reminder on a weekly or monthly basis.
- You can control the tasks of your team.
- You won’t miss any company events or meetings.
If your main goal is to work smarter from anywhere, you simply can’t do without Nimble CRM – your smart solution that can speed up your productivity and control your sales opportunities.
