This is the fourth post in a series called “Lifecycle Management – what’s in it for me?” , which shows how to audit and transform your process at every stage of the sales cycle.
Link to the first article – Introduction
Link to the second article – Prospect or Suspect Stage
Link to the third article – Lead Stage
Today, we will cover the Opportunity stage.
By this point in the sales process, your Business Development team has collected enough information to decide whether there is an actual opportunity with this company. You should have a more accurate budget and timeline so you can create the Opportunity and include it in your Sales Pipeline reporting.
This is where the BDR will refine the service or product offering and price. Arguably, this is where you want your BDR team to spend most of their time – in consultative selling. Each interaction should be moving the Lead closer toward signing a deal.
Your CRM may have several Opportunity or Deal stages that engage internal teams and departments such as pricing, operations, finance, and legal. Done manually, this process can be highly time intensive, though necessary, to rally all the teams who play a role in successfully closing an Opportunity. However, you can automate this notification process and save everybody time.
Opportunity Number 3 for Automation – Automate Pricing, Opportunity Priority, Internal Notifications
Converting a Lead into an Opportunity is one of the goals of all BDRs. They should spend most of their time focused on Opportunities and building positive momentum to motivate Leads to sign on the dotted line.
Each Opportunity may be prioritized differently, and may have different revenue and value. You can simplify this by using specific fields and parameters to categorize those differences. For some organizations, you may be able to automate pricing or proposals based on specific parameters.
Eventually, the customer will make the decision to move forward with you or not. And with the update of the closed/won or closed/lost field, automation can take over.
Here are some other examples of technology or processes that are a good fit for records in the opportunity stage
- Price book functionality
- CPQ – configure, price, quote
- QTC – quote to cash
- Project management tools to kick off any internal reviews
- Personal outreach from your CxO or Sales Leaders for important deals
- Sales engagement platforms that enable reps to coordinate outreach to stakeholders involved in the purchase decision
- Sales enablement platforms that deliver criteria-based content to the sales rep for use in their outreach
- Personalized video creation apps your reps can use to create one-off video introductions to send with their outreach.
In the next post, we will cover opportunities for automation for Closed-Won business.
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