Opportunity Assessment

Opportunity Assessment - Part 1 

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Since the days of the caveman, or more likely the advent of selling, sellers have been confronted with the challenges of finding, working with, and closing sales opportunities. The ‘forces’ that sellers face during the race-to-the-finish include:

· The client

· The competition

· No Decision

· Their Manager

· QUOTA

Because of these ‘forces’, sellers sometimes have great difficulty discerning the good opportunities from the bad. If every salesperson were equally experienced and adept at assessing the quality of their pursuits, there would be no such thing as “Happy Ears”. After hours, days, and weeks of prospecting some suspect finally says: “maybe”. Oddly, the salesperson, in spite of extensive rejection, is the most optimistic person in the company. A “maybe” sounds a lot like a “yes” and our salesperson is on the attack like a dog on a frisbee.

For this very reason, High Performance Sales Environments must depend on the objective, skilled, and surgical Opportunity Assessment of sales managers. Rigorous Opportunity Assessment leads to:

· Identification of gaps, or holes, in an opportunity that, if left unresolved, can come back to haunt the seller down the road after a significant investment of time, effort, and internal resources,

· Agreement to pursue between the manager and seller.

· With that agreement, the manager is then in a position to assign the appropriate milestone, or stage, for the opportunity based on objectivity, not the subjectivity of a seller,

· Identification of very discreet selling-skill difficulties that the seller has. If a skill has been identified as an area for improvement, a plan should then be put in place to drive measurable change. This all assumes there is a well defined sales process in place to manage and measure against.

Conducting high quality Opportunity Assessments not only helps the seller and manager understand the qualification/disqualification level of an opportunity, but if done well, is an opportunity for the manager to model the questioning process that sellers should be having with their prospects.