Offer #41289 - Opportunity Scorecard

---

HOT - NEW - POPULAR - Money - Health - Relationships - Hobbies - Services - Templates - Physical products - Software

---

Qualifying Sales Opportunities with an Opportunity Scorecard

As a sales professional, your time is your most precious and valued resource. Time is the currency with which you purchase your success. The key of course is deciding where to invest your time by choosing which customers and sales opportunities offer the greatest potential return with the least risk or downside. This is accomplished through sales qualification.

The Importance of Sales Qualification

The purpose of qualifying sales opportunities is to determine the quality or "close-ability" of each deal. When done properly, sales qualification enables you to better prioritize your efforts, more accurately forecast revenue and properly allocate resources. Investing in the most highly qualified opportunities allows us to leverage our time and effort to maximize our sales results.

Despite this being common knowledge for most, many staffing firms are struggling to prioritize their efforts and as a result are spinning their wheels on opportunities that are going nowhere, thus wasting the time of their delivery teams.

There are four main reasons why salespeople don’t win business when working an opportunity or a "a live job order." They include:

Salespeople not investing enough time in understanding the opportunity Salespeople not understanding the key elements to build an effective statement of work (job order) that will get both candidates and recruiters excited about the opportunity Salespeople failing to understand and ask the right qualifying questions Salespeople failing to acknowledge when they should walk away from opportunities

Qualifying sales opportunities is NOT simply a step in the sales process that gets "checked off" as a yes or a no. Sales qualification is the process. Thoroughly qualifying a sales opportunity usually takes multiple conversations with the customer and preferably with multiple people. As conditions change through the sales cycle, an opportunity can be qualified one day and not qualified the next day. It's a fluid situation.

The Opportunity Scorecard

An opportunity scorecard is one of the most valuable tools a salesperson can have. It's an evaluation tool based on a set of specific criteria which can be used to qualify every potential sales opportunity. An opportunity scorecard serves several purposes including:

It provides a set of standard and objective criteria for evaluating each opportunity which enables a scalable, repeatable and systematic approach to sales qualification It helps salespeople determine the likelihood of each opportunity to come to closure so they can more easily prioritize their investment of time and effort (this goes for recruiters too)! It highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each sales opportunity which enables salespeople and sales managers to craft better strategies and it guides their efforts to improve the quality of every deal It offers a method for measuring the probability of sales opportunities which leads to higher sales win rates and more accurate revenue forecasts It gives sales managers a common language with which to strategize and talk about sales opportunities with their sales teams

The opportunity scorecard is made up of 20 criteria in which to evaluate every sales opportunity. The qualification criteria correlates to why the customer would buy and how the customer would buy.

Each criteria is used to score the sales opportunity on a scale of 0-5. When added together they produce a total possible score of 100 that represents an estimate of the probability that the opportunity will close.

This is not an exact science. We know that circumstances and situations can change. We also know that a score of zero on urgency or financial approval can easily offset a high overall score. However, the accuracy of estimating probability with this approach far exceeds the more common system applied by many sales managers, gut instinct.

Qualifying Why Customers Buy

In our sales training programs, we explore how effective qualification goes far beyond the simple question of "when do you want them to start?" That question might be fine in light industrial staffing or some other highly transactional type of sale. But in a more complex selling situation with longer sales cycles and a higher price tag involving multiple influencers and approvers, this question hardly scratches the surface of what we really need to know.

We need to understand why the customer would buy by examining the factors that drive our customer to leave their current state and arrive at their desired future state. Here are the key elements to understanding and qualifying why customers buy.

Relationship/Consideration Current State Desired Future State Compelling Event Urgency/Level of Commitment Consequences (of taking no action) Payback/Return Resources/Budget Risk Solution Fit

Relationship/Consideration

The first question you should be asking yourself when qualifying a new job order or sales opportunity is, is this job order worth pursuing? Here are just a few questions to ask to assess the strength of your relationship and level of consideration with your customer.

Is your customer willing to invest their time in discussing the details of the job order? Is your customer willing to schedule interview time slots upfront, at the time of taking the job order? Is your customer willing to give you effective and timely candidate feedback after submitting candidate resumes and candidate interviews? Are you able to communicate directly with each of the team members who will be interviewing your candidates?

Current State

We all talk about how the staffing industry is "all about the relationships." Well, a vital part of building strong customer relationships is understanding your customer's business. Most customers will not feel comfortable doing business with a salesperson or company that doesn't understand their industry, market and specific challenges they face.

When you get in front of your customer you should be asking questions that help you understand their perspective. Your objective is to start conversations so that you can ask more questions. What you are looking for is a situation that you customer wants to change. The idea is to lead a discovery conversation in the direction of a disparity between where they are now and where they would like the business to be in the future. The less comfortable your customer is with their current state, the more likely they are to buy what they need to change it.

Sample questions to uncover your customers current state and why they would want to buy include:

How happy and content are you with the quality of your product and/or service? What challenges are you trying to resolve to improve the quality of your product/service? What is your level of satisfaction regarding your team’s performance and their results? What is your level of satisfaction regarding the progress of your projects?

Desired Future State

It can't be overstated for how important and essential it is for salespeople to clearly understand what business results their customer is trying to achieve. You can't properly position your service offering including your candidate or team of candidates (consultants) without first having a clear understanding of the business results your customer is trying to achieve. Ultimately, you want to paint a better picture of a better future that they can create using your product or service or partnering with your company.

To get your customer to talk about their desired future state you can use these sample questions.

What goals and objectives are you trying to achieve? How are you measuring success? What changes would you like to see for the better of your team, project, customers, department or company? What improvements do you wish to see in your team, projects, department, products and services?

They key is to get your customer talking about how their current state could be improved and what their desired future state would look like.

Compelling Event

Once you have identified your customers current state and desired future state you need to understand and qualify their motive or compelling event driving their behavior to buy. The purpose of qualifying the customers compelling event is to uncover WHY they would make the investment of time, energy, resources and money to leave their current state and arrive at their future state.

A Compelling event is a direct response to moving away from a business pressure or problem that has an economic value associated with taking no action to resolve the issue. The action taken to resolve the problem or arrive at their desired future state is expected to deliver a significant business result that is quantifiable such as money saved or an increase in revenue or profitability. If your client can’t articulate to you the pain or problem they need resolved and how NOT resolving the problem would negatively impact them financially, then the likelihood of the customer making the investment to solve the problem is unlikely.

Sample questions to qualify your customers compelling event:

What would compel you and your organization to take action on this and address this issue? What is the compelling event driving the need to resolve this issue, hire this consultant or achieve this goal?

Urgency

One of the most important action drivers that moves your client to buy is urgency. To gauge your customer's level of urgency ask questions like:

"When do you need to start seeing results on this project?" "By what date is your client expecting to see results?" "By when is your CFO expecting to see an ROI?" "By when do you need to have this problem solved?"

If your customer doesn't have much urgency to move forward than it is likely because they have not yet clearly defined their desired future state that offers enough payback or justifies the investment. Without a buyer who has the urgency, your opportunity can drag on for months and even longer.

Level of Commitment

The decision of “do we have to buy now” is by far the most important decision your customer must make because if they can’t arrive at a decision none of the other decisions they must make matter. Top down initiatives being driven from board or C-suite- begin here. And because every buying decision ends here, determining if your customer must buy now is the single most important thing you must uncover about your customer when qualifying sales opportunities or job orders.

If the customer is not personally committed to taking action by leaving their current state and doing what needs to be done to arrive at their desired future state then everything you have discovered thus far is meaningless. The customer has to personally commit to achieving the goal or solving the issue and implementing the solution. Talk is cheap.

Your customers are no different and are assessing whether or not they and others who will be impacted by the solution are committed to making the change and leaving the status quo. They have to consider whether or not they can commit to implementing the solution and can get other stakeholders to buy in and commit to the change as well as begin to coordinate the process for working with you and your firm and hiring a consultant. Doing that all requires time and energy. This is why you need to qualify your customers level of commitment.

Sample questions to qualify your customers level of commitment include:

How long has this been an issue? What steps have you taken thus far to resolve the issue? Have you and your boss and the other stakeholders committed to taking action and solving this? What steps and action items are you and your team committed to talking?

Consequences of Taking No Action

Even a customer who has a clear vision of their desired future state and has a strong compelling event to get there will put off making any purchase until they absolutely have to. As part of your qualification process you should always look for a consequence that would drive your customer to take action within a certain time frame.

Consequence questions allow you to take your customer’s goal, objective, problem and/or compelling event that you’ve already diagnosed and qualified and explore its effects or consequences. The purpose of consequence questions is to make the customer eager for a solution. Smart consequence questions make the customer and salesperson identify for themselves the effect and impact of that problem going unresolved.

Sample questions to qualify consequences include:

What would happen if things just stayed the same and you took no action? Why not just keep doing things the way you're currently doing them? What if you put this hire off another 30 days? 60 days? What would the financial impact be if you took no action on this and let the position go unfilled?

Payback/Return on Investment

Another major factor that affects your customer's willingness to invest in a solution is the potential payback or return on their investment. If your customer believes they stand to earn a substantial profit from their investment they are more likely to buy. Asking questions like "how many hours could you save each month if..." "What if you could accelerate your time to market by 90 days, how would that impact your revenue stream?" Asking questions like this helps you qualify whether or not your customer really understands and appreciates the potential return, not just the investment.

Resources/Budget

No matter how strong your customer's sense of urgency and level of commitment, your customer can't buy if they don't have the money. Your customer must have the money to buy your solution, and the resources to support (train, onboard, manage) your solution in order to achieve their desired future state.

To qualify your customer for resources and budget you can ask questions that look like this:

How would you go about staffing a project like this? Who would be involved in approving something like this? Who and what would be involved in getting funding approved for something like this? What sort of investment are you prepared to make in order to solve the challenges and achieve your project goals?

Risk

Excessive risk is another common reason why customers don't buy. If your customer thinks that the results they will achieve by arriving at their desired future state are not worth the risks in getting there, they will probably stick with the status quo. It is important that salespeople ask questions like:

What is the downside of starting this project right now? What are your perceived risks of moving forward with this project/candidate? What do you see as some of the risks if you were to hire my candidate?

You may not like the answers you get to these questions but that is the point. Asking questions that uncover the customers perceived risks help you reveal concerns that your customer might not have shared with you otherwise. If we know they have concerns or perceived risks, at least we can collaborate with them to work out a plan.

Solution Fit

Another key criteria for gauging the probability for closing a sales opportunity is solution fit. Your solution is not going to be a perfect fit for every situation. You always need to be asking your customer to share with you their vision of the ideal solution. It's not your opinion of how well your solution fits but your customer's perception that matters.

If you ask the right questions your customer might tell you exactly how to position your product or service to be the perfect fit. They could also describe a solution that is completely wrong or that resembles a competitor's offering.

Sample questions you can ask your customer include:

What kind of company would you like to partner with on this project? What are the characteristics of the types of companies you like to do business with? What elements of value are most important to you when evaluating a new partner? What are the things that matter most to you in your vendors? If you could waive a magic wand, what would the perfect solution entail?

The Opportunity Scorecard Best Practices

To effectively use an opportunity scorecard for qualifying sales opportunities, it's important to follow best practices:

Capture Relevant Data:

Gather information about each sales opportunity using thorough conversations with customers. Capture data related to each qualification element such as relationship/consideration, current state, desired future state, compelling event, urgency/level of commitment, consequences, payback/return on investment, resources/budget, risk, and solution fit.

Analyze Data:

Evaluate each qualification element based on its relevance and importance in determining whether an opportunity should be pursued.Analyze scores for each element individually as well as overall score for each opportunity.Determine thresholds for minimum acceptable scores based on company-specific criteria.Evaluate opportunities based on scores against thresholds.Prioritize efforts based on highest-scoring opportunities.Create strategies based on strengths and weaknesses identified through scorecard analysis.Maintain flexibility as conditions change throughout sales cycle.

Foster Collaboration:

Promote open communication between salespeople, sales managers, and other stakeholders regarding qualification criteria.Create a common language for discussing sales opportunities using scorecard terminology.Collaborate on strategies for improving scores on weak areas identified through scorecard analysis.

Incorporate Continuous Improvement:

Evaluate effectiveness of scorecard criteria periodically based on real-world results.Maintain flexibility in adjusting criteria as needed based on changing market conditions or company goals.

Promote Training:

Educate sales teams on best practices for using scorecards effectively.Incorporate scorecard training into new hire onboarding process.

Maintain Consistency:

Create standardized templates for scorecards across all sales teams within an organization.Promote consistent use of scorecards throughout entire sales process from initial qualification through deal closure.

Infoproducts :: Make better decisions — and make them faster. The Opportunity Scorecard is your secret weapon for making informed decisions, one choice at a time, so you can confidently tackle invitations and projects that truly matter, now and in the future.

Released on Sunday 1st December 2024 - Total : $0 - Past 30 days : $0 (1st tier : 30% - 2nd tier : 0%)

(Click here to get all the details in a new window)