Defining Opportunity is a Key to Success

December 5, 2009

This week’s learning from the November 4th salesforce.com visit is to have a very clear definition of a qualified opportunity.

Have a very clear definition of a qualified opportunity.
This becomes especially important when you separate the role of lead qualification and sales, which salesforce.com and several of our portfolio companies do. Having this definition agreed on by all stake holders – managers, lead qualifiers, and sales rep – will improve the quality of your pipeline, the accuracy of your forecast, and increase your sales reps productivity. This can also allow you to better quantify and track inbound marketing efforts and contribution to your pipeline.

The definition of an opportunity will vary from company to company. Here are some good ideas for what to use as a good starting point:

1. Time frame for decision is within XX days
2. Decision maker is identified
3. Prospect is comfortable with pricing
4. Prospect is interested in next step
5. Prospect has taken a free trial
6. Prospect has attended webinar

The right definition for your company is probably a combination of some of these.

Another thing this allows the folks over at salesforce.com to do is add a quality control step in the qualification process that allows sales reps to send an opportunity back to the qualifiers when the criteria are not met. In addition to keeping the sales reps productive, this will keep the lead qualifiers honest to make sure they do not stray away from the agreed upon definition and clog the pipeline with premature opportunities.

You can further implement and integrate this definition into your process by adding the criteria as fields in your CRM/SFA system, and creating a validation rule that will not let an opportunity be created without having those fields filled out.

VP, Sales

Ori Yankelev is Vice President, Sales at <a href="https://www.ownbackup.com/">Own Backup</a>. He was previously a Sales and Marketing Associate for OpenView.