On-Demand Webinar: Unfiltered take on AI in Account Planning: Meet DemandFarm’s KAM AI 8 Steps of Sales Opportunity Planning
Sales opportunity planning is a complex process that entails following several steps and requires a comprehensive guide. It’s built around a multi-step sales cycle with several stages that include research, qualification, and strategy development. All these stages are aligned to meet the common goal of realizing the full potential of a prospective sales opportunity. The success and future of any sales organization hinge on the cohesive planning and execution of each step, that is collectively known as sales opportunity management. The best and most effective sales opportunity plans are created and aligned around creating value for the buyer. It also enables managers and sales teams strategize, plan, execute, and monitor a multistage sales process. Compared to managing a sales pipeline where metrics like revenue and margin take center stage, opportunity planning is a more complex process that is planned and executed around the customer. To understand the different facets and layers of this strategy, let’s look at the 8 steps of sales opportunity planning. 8 Steps of Sales Opportunity Planning Step 1: Identifying the Opportunity The journey starts with identifying the sales opportunity that is nothing else but a qualified sales lead. By meeting the necessary criteria, this lead presents the opportunity for business potential. You need to ask yourself some pertinent questions in order to identify valuable sales opportunities, such as: Are your existing customers seeking existing services or products that your competitors are not able to provide? Are there any new services or products that you can provide and gain market traction? Are there any customers that you may have not considered that are now available to you? This process plays an important role in qualifying leads and sifting opportunities from dead ends. After identifying a set of opportunities, you can rank them on the basis of cost, potential benefit and complexity to implement. Tools such as organizational charts and product roadmaps can play an important role in prospecting and lead generation. They help you to decode the prospect’s organizational structure and identify key decision-makers and stakeholders. In fact, product roadmaps are a great asset for sales teams to understand a product’s future capabilities and how they can match with the prospect’s needs. Learn More: How to do Opportunity Management in Salesforce CRM Step 2: Understanding the Prospect’s Needs The buyer is the kingpin of the planning sales opportunities and the success of any plan hinges on understanding the prospect’s needs. Sellers must invest all time and energy into this crucial stage by meticulously researching the prospect’s pain points and goals. One way to identify opportunities for value creation is by conducting thorough customer discovery interviews. To gain a clear view of available opportunities, you must document the history with your customer and add possible future ones to the list. Sales teams must invest in tools such as customer strategy maps to align their objectives and initiatives match with capabilities of the solution they are offering. These maps are a repository of the culture of customer organizations, their goals and possible challenges. With this vital information, your sales force can identify potential areas where you can provide value that boosts the customer’s plans. Learn More: What are White Space Opportunities? Step 3: Building the Sales Team The next step in sales opportunity planning is to assess your organization for the business capabilities required to go after the opportunity. This crucial stage involves assembling a cross-functional sales team with the right skills and expertise. Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined within the team and equally important is to ensure clear communication and collaboration among team members. Apart from tracking the activities of your sales team, keep your ear close to the ground to gain insights from other team members. Innovative ideas and solutions may come from their personal insights into potential value for the buyer. A valuable or crucial tip may change the game and help sales teams close a sale, or resolve a difficult issue. Step 4: Crafting the Value Proposition Once you have a clear understanding of the buyer’s needs and your team is in place, you can focus on crafting your solution and building the value case. At this stage, it’s important to create a compelling value proposition that is tailored to the prospect and addresses the prospect’s specific needs and pain points. Another aspect of crafting the value proposition is showcasing the unique selling points and benefits. Ideally, each component of your proposition should be linked to the value it provides for the buyer. These points will help you appeal to the buyer’s needs and create effective value messaging. Another important point to consider at this stage is how you compare with the competition from the buyer’s perspective. Understanding the buyer’s view of your competition will help you create a value proposition that highlights your strengths. Moreover, this value proposition can also cater to buyers that are not serviced well by your competition. Your value proposition can appeal to those needs the buyers that the competition does not service. Step 5: Creating a Customized Sales Strategy We have crossed the half-way mark of the sales opportunity plan and now is the time to develop a detailed sales plan, including timelines and milestones. You need to know the buyer’s buying process and match it to your sales process to create a customized sales strategy. It’s important to gather all valuable insights your team can contribute to formulating a winning sales strategy. Based on their success with customers, sales winners are likely propose winning ideas and also alert you about what does not work. By incorporating insights and inputs, you can create a customized sales strategy to meet specific goals and objectives. Formulating a sales strategy also entails anticipating objections and challenges and preparing response strategies for each. The final action plan must map out the steps you need to take during the entire process to close the sale. Step 6: Presenting the Solution Strategies Planning a winning strategy is one thing but presenting a
Guide: How to do Opportunity Management in Salesforce CRM
Higher sales rates and revenue increase are the holy grail of IT product and services organizations, and thoughtful sales forecasting contributes a lot to it. with Salesforce Opportunity Management, they can structure their processes, enhance customer communication, and more. Opportunity management in the sales cloud offers all the necessary tools to close the biggest deals from anywhere. With intelligent alerts, teams can provide requisite attention by gaining insight into every deal and adjust forecast levels to reflect the new normal. With a sales path, teams can stay informed of where they are in the sales cycle, get tips on how to push deals forward, and easily view all open items in recent activities at every stage. Quick view simplifies the management of what is being done and what’s next – so that sales team members can stay on top of recent developments with a quick view, which makes it easier to collaborate with the larger team so everyone has what they need to close the deal. Tasks can be managed along with rich notes from existing workspace too. What is Opportunity Management in Salesforce? Details of a sales deal between the product/service provider and customer are captured in Salesforce Opportunity Management. The data helps sales teams manage all the deals with Salesforce, while being connected to stakeholders. Team members can access and share the information needed to close the sale, from anywhere. Existing information about completed sales is also present in Opportunity Management, which can provide insights into improving the processes so that future potential sales can be conducted more efficiently. Learn More: The 2023 Practical Guide to Sales Opportunity Management Start with: Setting up opportunities Opportunities can be created for existing accounts or through a lead conversion process. Not only this helps users to track changes in deal size, but also allows for the closing of dates with the help of Opportunity deal change highlights. Hovering over a highlighted opportunity gives more details about the updates, and updates can be visualized for opportunity amounts through the Opportunities List view and Kanban-view. Some of the key fields that help in tracking updates are made to an opportunity are: 1. Stage: This required field allows for opportunity tracking. A standard drop-down list of set values provided by Salesforce makes the selection easy, and they can be modified to suit the needs of the business. 2. Close date: Close date is a required field, and is crucial for forecasting. It is updated to the date when the opportunity is closed automatically. 3. Amount: This field displays the total cost of the opportunity under consideration. The sum total of opportunity products are shown, after they’re added to an opportunity. 4. Probability: The likelihood of the opportunity being converted, is reflected here. There is a default probability to close for each stage, going from a scale of 100% for a closed deal and 0% for a lost one. 5. Expected revenue: This read-only field is automatically generated by multiplying the probability with the amount. It can be a useful metric to use, while reporting the efficiency of the sales pipeline. Learn More: 8 Steps of Sales Opportunity Planning Moving to configurations Effective tracking and closure of opportunities can happen once the configurations are set according to the needs. Here are some configurations that can be set up: Update reminders can be leveraged by managers to send open opportunity reports to team members according to the hierarchy of defined roles. This ensures accurate and updated opportunities driven by precise forecasts. Big deal alerts are automatically sent as emails to customers, whenever an opportunity reaches a threshold amount and probability. Users can configure the ‘from’ Similar opportunities help in finding closed-won opportunities that match current opportunities for quick and simplified information access. Fields are configured in similar opportunities related lists so that users can see them easily. Utilizing opportunity-related objects Opportunity-related objects help in providing details about key stakeholders that are involved in a deal. They can be entered and tracked using opportunity’s related list items like track competitors, partners, and others who have a say in the deal closure. These related lists can be leveraged according to the business requirements: Opportunity teams help in leveraging members of different departments while working on deals. Team members can be designated as ‘internal’ or ‘partner’, with designated roles and access levels. Opportunity splits facilitate revenue sharing from opportunities and provide adequate credit to team members for their part in closing deals. Individual sales credits can be rolled into sales team member quota, and reports can be pipelined for an entire team. Partners simplify association of existing accounts to opportunities. Primary partners appear on the opportunity report, speeding up the mode of action that should be tailored to the specific requirement. Competitors’ fields can be leveraged to track market progress in the opportunity sphere. The list can be chosen from existing competitor names, or new ones can be added. Contact roles describe the role of every lead or touch point in converting the opportunity. By defining contact roles, sales team members can ensure everyone knows who to contact on the customer side. Field History Tracking comes into picture when users modify tracked opportunity fields, be it standard or custom. The change adds a new entry to the related list in Opportunity Field History. Details of changes to all entries are included, along with the details of the one making the change. Stage History adds a new entry when a user changes the stage, probability, close date fields, or the amount of an opportunity. The two lists together aid in the tracking of opportunity – as one chronicles field history, and the other keeps note of the changes to opportunity stages. Creating and managing opportunities The process of creating and managing opportunities on Salesforce is a feature-rich one, and these steps show how that can be achieved. Here’s a sequence that shows how opportunities with designated key accounts can be managed: Log into your Salesforce account and navigate
The 2025 Practical Guide to Sales Opportunity Management
Sales success is crucial for B2B software products, as it not only brings in revenue but also helps build long-term partnerships with prospects. Managing the sales cycles of prospects is important to ensure that the right opportunities are selected and nurtured, leading to successful closures. Sales team members, however, have to be ready at all times – every conversation with a potential customer is the possibility of a contract in their case. While it seems all pervasive, sales opportunity management is usually referred to the stage in the sales pipeline where sales qualified leads transition to paying customers. Considering that in sales, no deal is a done deal unless payment has been made, it becomes necessary for sales reps to be able to identify and nurture sales opportunities that are more likely to pay for the product or service. What is sales opportunity management? Sales opportunity management is the process of identifying sales opportunities qualifying deals worth chasing and nurturing them that improves the chances of winning them. It involves selecting the right opportunities to pursue and understanding the prospect’s organization structure better in order to close the sale. This includes analyzing the prospect’s current needs, as well as identifying any potential future needs that the software product can address. The management of the customer from identifying the opportunity to closing or losing a deal maximizes the opportunity, and product sales teams introduce their product in front of the prospect, with favourable communication that leads to a purchase. Sales teams identify the right people to interact with, identify the issues they are currently facing, zero in on the messaging that need to be communicated, and showcase products in such a way that it leads to a quick decision to purchase. Guide: How to do Opportunity Management in Salesforce CRM Why is sales opportunity management important? Sales opportunity management processes allow accounts teams in product organizations to gain valuable insights into their prospects through whitespace analysis. From areas where they can expand their product offerings to customer pain points that can be addressed, this highlights areas that can increase revenue potential. Additionally, by understanding the prospect’s organization structure and future potential, organizations can build stronger partnerships and increase the likelihood of long-term success. An up-to-date org chart enables sales team members to tailor their messaging and communication approach to maximize results. Learn More: 8 Steps of Sales Opportunity Planning Making opportunity-specific strategies Common Sales Opportunity Management Strategies include utilizing organizational charts and product roadmaps. Understanding the prospect’s organizational structure and decision-making processes can help sales teams identify key stakeholders and decision-makers, making it easier to tailor messages and close the sale. Additionally, utilizing product roadmaps can help sales teams understand the product’s future capabilities and how they align with the prospect’s needs. Including sales teams in roadmap-led discussions can allow product organizations to craft customer-centric ways forward that keep in line with the product vision. Read Now: Opportunity Planner by DemandFarm boosts tracking capabilities in 65+ opportunities for Dairy MAX Strategizing based on emerging trends In the coming year, we are likely to see more companies using artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate and streamline their sales processes. Additionally, there is an increasing focus on customer experience, with companies placing a greater emphasis on understanding and meeting the needs of their prospects. Having a deeper understanding of upcoming changes is as important as understanding buyer’s decision-makers. 1. AI and ML: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being used to automate and optimize various aspects of the sales process, such as lead scoring and forecasting. AI can analyze past sales data and identify patterns that can predict future sales opportunities. This can help sales teams prioritize the most promising leads and opportunities. Various data points can be analyzed to assign a score to each lead, indicating the likelihood of them becoming a customer. This can help sales teams focus their efforts on the most valuable leads. Sales teams can quickly and accurately qualify leads by analyzing data points such as company size, industry, and budget, while creating personalized sales messages and recommendations for each lead. Their repetitive tasks such as data entry and lead follow-up can be automated, freeing up sales teams to focus on more high-value activities. AI can analyze historical data to predict future sales performance, helping sales teams set realistic targets and allocate resources accordingly. With AI and ML, Sales teams can identify and prioritize the most promising opportunities, increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales efforts, and make better-informed decisions. 2. Data and analytics: Sales teams are increasingly using data and analytics to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, and to identify new sales opportunities. By analyzing customer data, such as demographics, purchase history, and online behavior, businesses can segment their customer base into different groups with similar characteristics. This allows them to tailor their sales approach to specific segments and increase the chances of closing deals. Their lead scoring efforts get a boost too, with the ability to assign a score to each lead based on their likelihood of becoming a customer. This allows sales teams to prioritize leads and focus on the most promising opportunities. Predictive analytics are used to identify patterns and check the veracity of decisions about future sales opportunities. They can plan ahead and proactively target potential customers. Customer sentiment analysis through feedback, reviews, and social media posts gives businesses insights into how customers feel about their products and services – paving the way to address any issues and improve customer satisfaction. Messages and the product can be personalized to the specific needs and preferences of each customer, increasing the chances of closing deals. 3. Social selling: This process involves using social media platforms to connect with potential customers and build relationships, and is becoming more popular. It allows salespeople to connect with potential customers and build relationships through social media platforms. This can help salespeople identify potential leads, establish credibility and trust, and stay top-of-mind with
