Are you in sales? If so, your principal objective is to convert opportunities into successful deals. Here, opportunities management acts as the differentiator between an effective sales team and an ineffective one, that wastes resources and time.
By developing an opportunity management strategy in your CRM, you can ensure that you’re translating business scopes into sales and revenue. It enables you to decide the ideal way to approach every project, depending on the interest it generates among customers. It can also help you look at the flaws in the sales process and rectify them in time, so that it doesn’t lead to any major loss.
In this article, we will discuss opportunity management, its relevance, and the advantages it has for your sales team.
Understanding Opportunity Management
Opportunity management (OM) is all about organizing and managing your probable sales. It is an effective feature in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software to prioritize all your initiatives around the deals that are of high value and can enable your business to recognize, track, and prioritize potential deals throughout the sales process. One of the best ways to recognize sales opportunities is through the sales funnel.
When used effectively, it helps you have a better understanding of customers and recognize their common requirements. Furthermore, it offers business intelligence, which allows your organization to concentrate on activities that are profitable.
The Relevance of Opportunity Management
Are you wondering why OM is essential? Today, no one wants to waste precious time on leads that yield nothing. The objective of any sales team is to concentrate on the correct leads and convert the ones on the fence to customers who pay. Sales managers typically govern the opportunity management process and use a wide range of tools. Some still use a spreadsheet, but that demands ample work.
Do you want to stay on top of your sales process without toiling hard? If so, using opportunity management is crucial. If not, you will be moving in the dark. There will be several leads that might appear useful in theory but might not convert in reality and might make you lose out on crucial business revenue.
Prolifq states that leading names specializing in OM help sales representatives recognize and engage with the correct people of the correct accounts. They also help to discover white space in an account. It refers to the ideal scope for new business development so that sales teams can plan and prioritize their approach better.
The Advantages of Opportunity Management in Sales
There are several benefits to implementing opportunity management in CRM software that can help your business attain a competitive edge over other market players. The crucial advantages include:
Better Visibility in the Sales Pipeline
Businesses that use opportunity management in their CRM software have improved visibility in their sales pipeline. It helps them to check how the deals are progressing from the first point of contact to the closing of the sale. It helps businesses understand their sales scopes better, recognize probable bottlenecks, and arrive at informed decisions concerning resource strategy and allocation.
Technology solutions providers can use CRM opportunity management to check how multiple deals are progressing in real time. With these solutions, sales cycle can be shortened, leading to an increase in deal closures.
Accurate Sales Forecasting
By making the most of OM in the CRM software, a company can attain useful insights into the sales pipeline. As a result, it leads to precise sales forecasting. When your sales team has a clear and better understanding of the deals in the pipeline and their value, they make data-driven decisions for sales initiatives. It helps them allocate the resources accordingly and prioritize useful opportunities only.
Improved Sales Team Collaboration
OM can foster collaboration within the sales team by offering a shared platform for managing and tracking sales scopes. When all the vital data gets consolidated inside the CRM system, the sales teams are perfectly aligned and can close deals. Such a collaborative approach helps businesses enhance their sales performance and generate growth.
The sales team at Delta Pharmaceuticals was often siloed by region, which led to erratic sales practices. With CRM opportunity management in place, the regional team began sharing client feedback and successful data within the platform. It resulted in the development of a collaborative culture and a unified approach, which maximized global sales.
Strong Customer Relationships
By making the most of OM, businesses can understand the needs, preferences, and pain points of their customers better. This data can be used for customizing services and products to ensure that specific customer concerns are addressed. It helps to develop a strong bond with customers that makes them speak well about your brand. It leads to favorable word-of-mouth publicity and repeat business.
Bella Home Interiors implemented OM to have an in-depth understanding of their customer bonds. They studied earlier purchases made by clients and took note of their preferences. It helped sales representatives arrive at customized recommendations for their new home décor collections. As a result, there was a 30% boost in repeat customer sales and increased client satisfaction.
In conclusion, every business aims to make good sales and profits. But they should be mindful of the business scopes they are eyeing and working towards. Even though initial mistakes are bound to happen, it’s not wise to waste time and resources on leads that wouldn’t convert into paying customers. Here, opportunity management comes in handy. It allows the sales team to focus better on objectives that have a value attached to them.
