Let’s face it: when we have a steady stream of leads, all we can think is, “The hard part is over, so now we can sit back and relax.”
Even if you don’t believe it, this is where the real hard work begins.
After you get the leads, you need to move them toward the buying process if you want to make real money. To make your sales work pay off, you have to be careful with the leadership opportunities.
So, managing sales opportunities is an important part of the business that you should pay enough attention to. But it’s easier to say than to do how to handle sales opportunities. To turn prospects into paying customers, you have to carefully track their progress through your sales process and give them the right help at every step.
This can only be done if the right tools and methods for managing opportunities are used. With a well-organized system for managing opportunities and clearly defined milestones, you can help prospects move through your sales process.
Let’s talk more about how important it is for your business to have a plan and sales opportunity management software. Before that, let us start learning the basics.
What is Sales Opportunity Management?
A qualified contact or account is what we call a sales opportunity. When a lead shows interest in your product and enters the sales funnel saying that they need your services, it is on its way to becoming an opportunity.
Then you need to get in touch with the lead and find out about their budget, timeline, buying power, etc. Once you’ve found out if the lead is interested and qualified based on the criteria you’ve already set, it becomes a sales opportunity.
Even though opportunities and leads are related, they are not the same.
Lead is a prospect, potential customer, but an opportunity is a group of qualified leads that have a high chance of becoming customers.
What does it mean to manage sales opportunities?
Sales opportunity management is a preset process which will help an organization in keeping track of their sales opportunities. Companies will be able to follow through these opportunities as they pass through the entire pipeline. By managing opportunities well, you can make it much more likely that people will buy from you and make more money.
Opportunity management makes it possible to close more sales by giving sales reps a clear plan to follow. It helps them focus on the most valuable deals and build relationships with clients that will last.
Managing sales opportunities is more than just handling individual deals.
It is a complete plan that looks at the growth and success of your organization as a whole. Opportunity management can help your sales team be more productive and perform better by giving them a plan for improving the sales process and its steps.
The process also makes you aware of any risks and opportunities in your sales pipeline. Having access to such important information helps your sales staff act quickly and give prospects services that meet their needs.
The sales process
The one thing that matters is how these leads are managed properly.
Before looking at the different ways to manage opportunities, it’s important to understand why it’s important to do so in the first place.
If you take a moment to look at your sales process, you will find big problems that make it hard for your team to close deals. Some of these problems include:
- Not knowing how many qualified opportunities are out there right now.
- There is no set way to prioritize high-value leads.
- Follow-ups take too long.
- Not being able to keep track of the most active contacts.
Because of these problems, customers have bad experiences and don’t buy as much.
You need sales opportunity management to deal with these problems and make sure that your sales team meets its goals. It helps you learn more about what customers want and use that information to improve buyer journeys.
When sales opportunities are properly tracked and managed, your bottom line goes up by a lot. When you can see more of the important sales metrics, you can figure out what works well for your business and adjust your sales process to match.
Here are some of the things that your business can get out of the opportunity management process:
- It gives you a better handle on your sales pipeline and helps you keep track of how leads are doing.
- It lets you find potential problems and get rid of them to make your sales process better.
- By making things more personal for the prospects, you can build stronger relationships with them.
- You’ll be able to make better estimates and improve your sales processes in the future.
- It helps you look at the possible risks that come with opportunities and make plans for what to do if something goes wrong.
- It helps you plan out the steps you need to take to build a strong sales process that meets your customers’ needs and your long-term business goals.
- You can better prioritize sales opportunities if you know how big the deal is and how likely it is to close.
- Your sales team can come up with ways to speed up the pipeline.
How to take care of sales chances?
Managing sales opportunities makes sure that qualified leads move quickly through the sales funnel and become paying customers who bring in money. It cuts down on the number of leads that fall through the cracks by making it easier for you to give more consistent and pleasant experiences.
Some of the best ways to keep track of your sales opportunities easily are:
- Find out what you can do.
By knowing what your prospects want and why you can focus on opportunities that are worth more. Do your homework before you talk to your prospects. Find out about their budget, business goals, team size, trouble spots, etc. This will help you figure out how much your possible deals are worth and rank them accordingly.
- Effectively screen leads
Lead qualification is an important part of managing business opportunities. It gives you a better view of the opportunities you have right now and helps you make better use of your time and resources.
Depending on what your business needs, you can use any qualifying method. This could be based on different things, like budget, authority, time frame, pain points, etc. If you ask the right questions when qualifying the leads, you’ll be able to close more deals.
The sales team doesn’t have to spend as much time and work on leads that are good. Since you would only focus on leads that have a real chance of turning into customers, your efforts are more likely to pay off.
- Standardize Sales Cycle
Optimizing your sales cycle is a key part of managing opportunities. You should set up a structured sales process to help your team be more accountable and productive. Make sure your sales cycle is short, and give your team a set process to follow.
Outline each stage clearly so that sales reps can figure out where prospects are and easily move them forward. Give your sales reps the right training and documentation to help them understand the sales process better.
- Set up a Sales Pipeline
A Sales pipeline shows the sales cycle visually and helps you keep track of where each lead is in the process.
It makes it easy to see how many leads you have and how much each one is worth. With a well-organized sales pipeline, you can figure out where each prospect is in your sales cycle and what they need to do to move forward. The sales pipeline for each business is different. This depends on the stages of your sales cycle and the criteria for leaving each stage.
A well-thought-out pipeline also lets you figure out where the most sales opportunities are lost and make the necessary changes. You can also use the sales pipeline to track the speed of deals and look for ways to speed them up.
- Tracking the sales pipeline
Your ability to handle your opportunities depends on your ability to remain on top of all of the moving parts associated with them. Always remember what they need from you and you may better tailor your interactions with them.
To better understand a prospect’s requirements and pain spots, it’s helpful to keep a record of all of your communications with them. You may increase your audience participation and win over their confidence in this way. Keeping in touch with leads makes it simple to see when it’s time to advance them.
- Follow up on messages.
To be able to manage your opportunities well, you should stay on top of everything that is going on with them. Know what they want and make sure that you meet those needs in the future.
By keeping track of every interaction you have with prospects, you can better understand their needs and pain points. In turn, this can make you more interesting to them and help you earn their trust. By staying in touch with your prospects, it’s easy to tell when they’re ready to move on to the next step.
- Follow-up in a Good Way
After the fifth touch point, 80% of sales are made.
This shows how important it is to follow up with sales prospects.
Every time you follow up with a prospect, give them content that is both relevant and interesting. To make the most of your follow-ups, you need to keep track of what the prospects like and how they act.
For example, some leads may need more follow-ups and more ways to get in touch with them than others. Take these needs into account when you plan your follow-up strategies.
- Look at how you do things.
Track metrics like pipeline velocity, conversion rate, loss rate, and average response time on a regular basis to see how well your sales opportunity management is working.
It’s important to look over your strategy for managing opportunities on a regular basis to make sure that your pipeline is working at its best. By looking at the sales pipeline, you can find bottlenecks in your sales process and cut down on missed opportunities. Change your pipeline and workflows as needed to increase the number of people who buy from you.
- Getting rid of dead prospects
Leads that haven’t done anything for a long time need to be taken out of the sales funnel. It can be hard to let go of leads, especially if you want to get the most out of each one you bring into the pipeline.
But focusing on prospects who aren’t interested will just waste time and energy of your sales team. It will also hurt how well you take advantage of opportunities. So, it’s better to get rid of dead leads than to try in vain to bring them back to life.
- Learn From Your Mistakes
It goes without saying that you will sometimes miss out on a chance, no matter how hard you try to manage it. But every deal you lose gives you a chance to get better.
Look at what went wrong and try not to make the same mistakes again. Opportunity management is a process that can go wrong in many ways. Sometimes, you might not know what the customer wants, and if that’s the case, you might not be able to target them well or choose the wrong way to close.
Look at what you did wrong and try not to make the same mistakes again.
- Use the Right Instrument
Investing in the right software for opportunity management is just as important as having a well-thought-out plan for management.
Sales CRM for Opportunity Management
A CRM tool can help you set up and manage your sales pipeline so you can keep track of sales opportunities. It lets you customize interactions, set up meetings, and track the progress of leads. You can also use the CRM tool to automate some tasks that are done over and over again and make your sales staff more productive.
Let’s talk more about how using CRM to track opportunities can help your business.
Do you need CRM to handle opportunities?
CRM basically puts all of your business data and processes on a single platform. This can help prospects and customers have more interesting conversations with you. CRM makes customers happier and keeps them around longer by making sales, marketing, and customer service work better together.
But how does a tool made for building relationships with customers change the way sales opportunities are managed?
A lot of information is shared around marketing and sales teams regarding the leads. . All of this information can be stored in a strong sales CRM opportunity management system and used in the best way possible with the right features.
With a flexible CRM that can track the sales pipeline, analyze data, and automate tasks, your sales team will never lose track of important deals and will be in a better position to help leads decide to buy.
Here are some of the most important reasons to Some of the benefits that businesses get by using a CRM tool for opportunity management:
Lead Management Gets Better
CRM helps you manage leads for your business better by keeping all of the information in one place and making it easy for team members to find. It gets leads from different places, like web forms, surveys, etc., and stores them in one place.
The 360-degree view of lead data lets your sales team customize interactions with prospects and reach out to them at the best time. You can sort your leads into groups and send them to the right sales reps with CRM.
Gives more information about the sales pipeline
CRM tools give you a better view of your sales pipeline and the processes that go with it. This lets you see where opportunities stand in real-time and decide how to rank them. By analyzing the data, you can stay up-to-date and make better business decisions. You can also use the suggestions and insights that come from CRM data to improve your business offerings and make them more relevant to your target market.
Repeated tasks are done automatically
With a good CRM system, you can automate time-consuming tasks like entering data, making appointments, routing leads, sending reminders and emails, and scheduling appointments. Your sales team will be more productive at work because they don’t have to do as much work by hand.
Automation also gets rid of manual mistakes and inconsistencies, which helps businesses do better. It also helps cut costs and make work processes more uniform. At different points in the sales cycle, you can set up triggers to do things automatically. This cuts down on unnecessary delays and makes things better for customers.
Ensures that everyone is on the same page
Smart suggestions and real-time alerts can help your salespeople focus on the right opportunity at the right time. These insights can also help them think more carefully about the opportunities and improve their chances of making the sale.
With alerts and notifications that happen in real-time, everyone on the team can stay up to date on any changes or new developments in the sales pipeline.
With email integration, you can get everything in one place.
Integration of email can help you stay on top of all communications, which can help you manage opportunities better. All the interactions and information about them are kept in one central place. This makes outreach more effective and tailored to each person.
You can easily find emails you’ve already sent or received, and you can make notes for each contact to keep your interactions uniform. You can also use templates that have already been made and set up automated delivery to connect with opportunities at the right time.
How to Use CRM for Effective Opportunity Management?
For your CRM solution to work well, it needs to give your sales team all the information they need about a customer to close a deal.
For example, if you’re trying to sell your goods or services to a business, your sales staff needs to know who makes the decisions at that business. Also, they will need to know whether or not any contact has already been made.
All of this and much more can be done with the help of a CRM.
But there’s a lot more to managing sales opportunities with CRM software than just picking an app and running with it. Long before you actually start using the CRM solution, you need to do some planning to make sure it works the way you want it to.
If you put in enough work before the implementation, this process shouldn’t be too hard if you use the right CRM and do it right.
Here are some ways that CRM can be used to improve opportunity management:
To get the best results, you need to know where the lead is in the sales funnel. It gives your salespeople the knowledge and confidence they need to talk to every customer with ease. So, you need to set up a sales funnel with clear steps that leave no room for confusion and make the process consistent for your sales team.
Your CRM should also have information about your leads, like what technologies they use, what they’re looking for, what’s bothering them, and when they’re likely to buy. Any information about the customer’s past that is known can be used to improve the chances of making a sale. Make sure you ask your leads for useful information and store this information in your CRM system.
Your sales team can use the detailed reports about specific leads to fully understand what drives a CRM lead opportunity to become a customer. Having this information at your fingertips makes it more likely that your interactions with leads will be productive and helpful.
Because CRM programs put all of a lead’s information in one place, your sales team can respond quickly to any questions, needs, or requests as soon as a lead shows interest. Even before the sale is made, this kind of service makes a good impression on leads and makes it easier to turn them into loyal customers.
When using CRM to track opportunities, one of the most important things to do is to keep the data clean. Make sure your CRM data is correct and useful for your business by checking it regularly. These kinds of reviews can help you keep your CRM system up-to-date and help you use it better.
A powerful CRM software solution has a big impact on how your sales team handles leads and how much ROI they end up making. Because CRM software automates a big part of marketing and can be set up to notify your sales team when qualified leads become available, your sales team can stay on top of every sales opportunity.
The Top 6 Methods for Managing New Opportunities
In the business world, each company has its own methods. Nonetheless, there are certain broad guidelines that may be used for efficient opportunity pipeline management.
#1.Follow up on your leads after doing some research
However, both lead management and opportunity management may be traced back to the first point of contact, the lead. Upon a visitor’s entry into your sales funnel, you should gather as much information as possible about them.
- How much is their spending cap?
- What is their official title in the firm?
- How rapid is their reaction time?
- At what level does their firm make decisions, and who makes those decisions?
- How does it work when they make a purchase from them?
- If they previously had a vendor, who were they?
Although it’s quite improbable that you’ll have all this data at your disposal from the get-go, it’s nevertheless important to gather it. An opportunity or casual browser? This tool will tell you.
#2. Lay the groundwork for each breakthrough
Leads go through the pipeline from one stage to the next as you get more information about them and they gain familiarity with your company. Something resembling a board game. As your pieces go toward the finish line, they’ll face new tests and objectives.
Opportunities may be brought closer to a sale if each step is well defined. One step may be labeled “Determine who will make decisions,” for instance. This is the next move the sales team should make before moving on to the other pieces on the board. Once the contact information for the relevant decision-maker has been obtained, the transaction may proceed to the next phase.
#3. Direct your energy where it will have the most impact
There is value in every possibility for your business. It makes sense to prioritize high-value possibilities, but remember that value may take many forms. There are additional variables that may be used to zero in on the best opportunity.
Let’s pretend you have three potential sales leads in your pipeline. To help you determine which to prioritize, we’ve broken out a few of the potential considerations below.
Considering the above, which possibility would you pursue first? You’d have to rely on your gut feeling if you didn’t have access to any further information. However, intuition isn’t always accurate.
But the difficulty with additional information is that it requires analysis. To add insult to injury, sifting through copious amounts of data may take up a lot of time.
Tools for opportunity management are helpful in this situation. These systems’ data-processing capacity allows you to zero in on the most promising avenues for expansion.
#4. Program the routine tasks to occur automatically
Reducing the time it takes to close a deal by automating the opportunity management process. Automation features in pipeline software and other platforms eliminate mundane tasks.
Some ways in which automation may be used to expedite the process of opportunity management are shown below:
- Prospects will be automatically emailed with follow-up messages.
- Eliminate time-consuming manual sales prospecting processes and immediately access relevant data.
- Sales appointments may be automatically scheduled using dedicated applications.
- Capabilities included inside the pipeline that mechanically advance prospects through the various stages
The opportunity pipeline may be automated in a number of ways. The secret is to delegate the most tedious work to the program so you can concentrate on the specifics of each lead’s situation.
#5. Don’t stop being tracked; avoid vanishing from view
Modern customers are very busy. In other words, the optimum moment to reach out is when you know they are contemplating doing so. Do not procrastinate responding to leads, and once an opportunity has advanced to the next stage, do not let it go away.
Don’t lose contact with a lead, even if you’re certain they’ll remain around, since every period of your absence gives them a chance to look elsewhere. Maintaining control of contacts with prospective clients in the face of overwhelming activity requires setting up a defined sequence of activities and automating chores.
#6. Keep tabs on your progress
Measure the success of your opportunity management strategy using data from your CRM. Taking a look at the numbers may tell you a lot about your clients and your sales process. As a result, you’ll be in a stronger position to plan more fruitful procedures going forward.
Opportunity pipelines won’t automatically lead to more closed transactions just because you start using them. The key is to incorporate it smoothly into your process, and then to monitor, plan, and fine-tune that process on a quarterly basis. Sooner or later, patterns will develop that provide more insight into the causal relationship between your actions and the consequences you see.
Remember that the resources you use, like as your contact management software, will significantly affect the effectiveness of your opportunity tracking and assessment. Making the process more intuitive and, therefore, increasing the possibility that it will have a productive effect, is largely dependent on the quality of the user interface.
Why Should I PickOffice24by7?
To get the most out of opportunity management, you need to spend money on a robust CRM system that includes everything. This will help you organize your sales data and keep your sales processes on track.
Even though there are a lot of CRM tools out there, you need to choose one that is flexible and scalable.Office24by7 is a tool that does well in both of these areas.
UsingOffice24by7 as your business’s opportunity management software gives you a lot of benefits, such as:
Access to all data in one place
With the tool’s powerful contact management and tracking features, you can stay in order. Office24by7 lets you see all the important information on a single dashboard, including contact information, social media accounts, past conversations, and other notes.
You don’t have to switch between different platforms to find all the information you need. This can help make the buyer’s journey more personalized.
Task Tracking & Reminders
If you miss important deadlines, you might miss out on money-making opportunities. With Office24by7, you can keep track of tasks, give them to team members, and keep an eye on how they’re doing. You can also use it to set reminders so that you don’t forget to do important things. Office24by7 has both team and individual calendar views that make it easy to see what tasks are coming up and what information you need to know about them.
You can work anywhere
Office24by7 can make a big difference in how productive your company is by letting team members work from any device at any time. By letting sales executives work on the go, mobile access to important data can improve the efficiency of an organization.
Change the CRM
Office24by7 is very easy to change. This gives you the freedom to tailor the sales opportunity management software to the needs of your business. You can change fields, workflows, layouts, views, and other modules with this tool. This gives you the power to get the most out of implementing CRM. You can use the tool to make a custom sales pipeline, store the most important data in custom fields, and make reports with custom filters.
Better Insights
With the help of data-driven analytics, Office24by7 lets you make better business decisions. You can pull reports to keep track of how well your opportunity management is working and find any problems.
The tool has templates for reports that have already been made, which can save time and effort. It also lets you add your own filters to your reports. You can also easily export or save these reports so you can use them again later.
Integrations that work well
Office24by7 lets you do so much more with powerful integrations like Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Zendesk, etc. With these integrations, you can manage your customer data, support tickets, marketing campaigns, accounting, and other business tasks from a single platform. This can help you streamline your work and make your business run better.
Simple to use
Lastly, the tool’s interface is easy to understand and use. This can help you work faster and better without wasting time. Also,Office24by7 has quick and reliable customer service. This can help you get around any possible problems and make sure the tool always fits your needs.
To sum up, how you handle your sales opportunities affects how much money you make.
Managing sales opportunities well can help you make the most money possible and get the most out of every lead in your sales cycle. You can make big changes to your sales results by using best practices for the sales process and the right technology for opportunity management.
And a CRM tool can be a big help in this process. With sales CRM software like Office24by7, you can be more responsive and consistent with your services, which will help you gain the trust of your prospects.
It can help you improve your follow-ups, deal with possible objections, and give prospects personalized experiences. All of these things lead to more sales and faster growth.
