meritum

"Proper planning prevents poor performance - QED"

Opportunity development and accurate forecasting are absolutely fundamental to profitable revenue. Every selling company is different with their own set of unique selling points and commercial or market characteristics. It is only natural that for every selling company there should be a unique and tailored sales opportunity scorecard that highlights the key opportunity indicators and describes a prospective customer’s propensity to buy. Meritum describes this as the Prospect Analysis Sales Scorecard (PASS).  

The well trodden quartile analysis of: suspect – opportunity – prospect – customer is too broad an approach for the majority of companies. The prospects simply fall between the gaps because the opportunity isn’t actually mature enough to move to the next level.

“….A 2007 CSO Insight survey tells us that 49.3% of all deals fail to close as originally forecasted. In addition, nearly 20% of all deals result in a “no decision”.  The buyer simply did nothing….” 

A salesperson’s single most important asset is the type and quality of sales questioning. Understanding the key answers you need to know and an appreciation of the questions that will deliver those answers is imperative. I work with sales teams to design tailored Prospect Analysis Sales Scorecards that will rank the opportunity gap statistically from identification to qualification and onward through the buying development phase to agreement or EXIT!  

The statistical outcomes allow you to make better informed sales decisions. 

As each customer contact takes place the opportunity gap is gradually closed as the list of sales and buying unknowns, weaknesses and threats are decreased. The assessment areas I concentrate are as follows: 

• Qualify buyer intent. Status, deadline, budget.
• Establish the buyers need – the practical requirements, the business drivers and the presence of mandatory infrastructure or barriers to entry.
• Develop the buyers “want” – this is the relationship piece that is the intangible of people buy from people. Assuming all other things are relatively equal the customer will buy on emotion – from who they like and trust.