Hello, I’m your Customer Success Specialist Sevgi, and I’d like to share my experiences with you on the issues that our customers face in their CRM journey, shedding light on them. In this context, the topic I will discuss this week is: How immersed are you in the game?
Opportunities, aside from individual or company sales, essentially indicate how you manage your business. This is precisely where your team’s sales skills will truly come to the forefront.
Your sales team uses this module to track what potential customers expect from the deal and how much revenue they will generate. As the status of opportunities is updated in the pipeline (sales process), you can easily observe which paths have been taken for that opportunity, at which stage it is, and how much time has been spent at that stage. This will be a great way to keep your sales team in the game at different stages of your process.
In this long and enjoyable sales journey, you can update all the details and pipeline steps that should be included in the opportunity over time, according to the needs created by your workflow.
So, should a separate opportunity be opened for every product the customer is interested in?
This entirely depends on your sales process and strategy, but summarizing it with a few examples:
Let’s assume that two different departments of the same company are interested in the same product. For example, let’s say the human resources department and the payroll department want to take an Excel training. The processes of two different departments will progress differently. Even the people you talk to will differ. Although they seem to want the same training at a basic level, their expectations from that training will definitely differ. Therefore, my recommendation is to define 2 opportunities for the same company. This way, it will be easier for your sales team to manage the flow. Additionally, by the end of the day, understanding the processes of different departments in companies and working with similar departments in the next sales will make the flow more predictable.
For another example; let’s say your customer is interested in your product X, and at the same time, they want a presentation and a price quote for product Y. Should you define these as one opportunity or two separate opportunities in CRM? Does your customer not choosing product Y at the end mean you lost that opportunity? Can lost opportunities give us ideas about where we went wrong and where we need to improve in business management? Of course, yes! Actually, with the structure you create here, since all steps and details are recorded, you can get more reliable reports about your sales. This way, it shows you where there are bottlenecks in the workflow, where more thought needs to be given, and what the most important factor in losing an opportunity is, even if it’s a lost opportunity at the end of the day.
In my opinion, in this example, if the customer is focused on product X but also asks about product Y, and at the end of the day, a sale for product Y is not realized, it does not mean that this opportunity is lost.
However,
Let’s say your sales team also added product Y as a second opportunity under the same company roof. Does winning the opportunity that includes product X and losing the opportunity that includes product Y be called a failure for the salesperson?
As I mentioned above, the way opportunities are defined is entirely related to the sales strategies and company culture of companies. At the end of the day, when reports are created, the success of the sales team may not be related to how many opportunities they won. It is related to how they managed the whole process of those opportunities, what lessons they learned from lost opportunities, and how much they could be a part of the game.
Wishing you to always stay in the game…
