Benjamin Franklin is credited with first coining the phrase “time is money” and if your sales pipeline contains significant opportunities, you will understand this more than most.
So, in order to make the most of your selling time, you might want to ensure you have these three key dates fully under control
The date you started working on the deal
All organisations have an average sales cycle. You might protest that for your company, your product or for the particular deal you are working on right now the term average sales cycle does not apply.
You might protest, but you would be wrong. If you forget about the one or two deals that took forever to close and dismiss the one or two deals that landed on your doorstep with undue haste, everything else will fall into your organisation’s average sales cycle.
So, check how long you have been working on your significant opportunities: Are any of them far in excess of your average sales cycle time? If they are and you don’t know why, it could mean that something fundamental has changed from your original qualification of the opportunity and you don’t know what it is!
The date you last reviewed your significant opportunity plan
If you are really serious about winning your significant opportunity you will (no doubt) be running a professional and competitive sales campaign, including a significant opportunity plan.
This plan will ensure you understand the compelling event driving your customer’s decision to spend a significant amount of money with you (or your competition) and the timescales associated with it. It will also ensure you (and the rest of your team) understand the motivations of the people you are selling to, how well you have qualified the opportunity and (most important of all) what you need to do to win.
All this stuff is great, but if the last time you reviewed, challenged and amended your significant opportunity plan was three months ago, you might find your chances of having the right winning strategy disappearing as the time slides by.
The date you are forecasting the deal to close
If you want to forecast your significant opportunities accurately then you have to really understand the customers decision making process AND their buying process cycle.
The main reason significant opportunities “slip” on sales forecasts is a lack of expert qualification and a lack of validation of the information you “think” you have qualified.
An understanding of what has to happen in the time between your customer saying “Yes” and an order or contract being placed in your hand is of paramount importance. In addition, this period of time is the one during which most loss recovery plans are put into place by the competitors you “think” you have beaten. So don’t forget to qualify this key date and validate your information on the customers buying process cycle with a reliable source.
If you get these three key dates under control, you will be managing your significant opportunities better than most of your competitors. If you don’t, it’s not just time you’re likely to lose, as Benjamin Franklin predicted, it will be money as well.
