You want to throw a party. You obviously want it to be the best party ever, right? You already have a guest list and a few activities you think your friends would enjoy. But I have a question for you. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could use a system to know who’s more likely to attend and who’s going to bail? Find out what they like and dislike so you can find ways to keep them entertain them better — or maybe even to gauge how much of a success your party or parties are. Wouldn’t it be cool if such a system existed?
A system like this does exist. Well, not for planning parties, but for managing deals in your sales pipeline. It’s called an opportunity management solution.
Confused? You’re not the only one, and I actually decided to write this article when I was trying to get a clear picture myself. So, let me break it down for you. Opportunity management is a tool that helps you track a sales opportunity as it progresses through your sales pipeline. How does it resonate with planning a party? A party is an opportunity with the main goal of having fun. So, you as the host have to entice people to come to your party and ensure everyone has a good time. Now, in business, when the opportunity to make a huge sale arises, you need a collective of customers who would be interested in purchasing from or signing a contract with you. You also have to ensure these customers won’t lose interest in your sales pipeline process.
In this blog post, I will give you a detailed explanation of what CRM opportunity management is and how a simple tool like this can increase your sales to a whole new level.
What Is CRM Opportunity Management?
CRM opportunity management, also known as sales opportunity management and pipeline management, is the process of managing and tracking sales opportunities. It gives you a better understanding of who’s most likely to make it to the end of your sales pipeline. It also gathers a rich pool of data on your interactions with them to create a better customer experience that would result in trust and loyalty.
CRM opportunity management is essential because it helps you be more efficient with your sales. It also helps you prioritize your efforts towards deals with the highest value and are more likely to go through.
When I first heard about CRM opportunity management, I thought, wait, isn’t that lead management? But as I learned more about it, I found out that there’s a huge difference between the two.
What Is the Difference Between Opportunity Management and Lead Management?
The main reason why you might confuse opportunity management with lead management is that they both track the process of your sales pipeline. Their major difference is that they focus on different factors in the sales pipeline. Lead management focuses on the prospect and all the tasks you can do to turn them into a customer. On the other hand, sales opportunity management only focuses on the sales or deal itself. It revolves around the amount of money you can make by the end of your sales pipeline.
Let me give you an example. You are a wedding photographer negotiating a deal with a soon-to-be husband and wife for a few weeks. They have a limited budget and are interested in your basic package. Through time, you manage to convince them that since their wedding day is the most special day of their lives, your standard plan is a better solution to record more memories of their celebration. Basically, you find the opportunity to offer them a plan that would cost more. They are still the same lead, and you are still moving through the same sales pipeline, but a new opportunity changes the outcome value.
Why Do You Need a CRM Opportunity Management Software?
A CRM opportunity management tool is a software that can track your sales opportunities for you. You know what opportunity management is, but you may still be unsure how it benefits your business. It may sound pretty simple, but if you ever come across any of these struggles when an opportunity arises, you need a sales opportunity management software:
- It’s difficult figuring out which opportunity to offer to your leads.
- You cannot determine the value of your opportunities at any given time.
- You do not have the statistics that would show you how many opportunities are won and how many are lost.
- Opportunities go slow through your sales pipeline.
- The struggle to figure out your next steps takes up a lot of your time.
Opportunity management software clears out all these struggles. That’s why businesses go for a tool to manage their sales opportunities. It doesn’t just sound pretty simple. With the right tools, opportunity management is an easy and seamless process.
How to Manage Sales Opportunities
By managing sales opportunities, your leads will have seamless and fast progress through your sales funnel and turn into high-value customers. The question is, how do you manage sales opportunities? Follow the best practices below to propose the right sales opportunities and ensure that no lead falls out of your sales pipeline.
Know your opportunities
There’s only one way to offer a sales opportunity that both you and your customer can benefit from. Get to know your prospects and understand their requirements so you can offer them opportunities with a higher value. Before approaching your leads, research and gather as much information as possible. This information should include their budget, business objectives, team and company size, and pain points. They may come to you for a plan they think is good for them, but with this information, you can offer them a plan that helps them better and earns more for you. It’s a win-win situation.
Qualify leads effectively
You can’t go around offering more expensive products or services to every lead in your lead management list. To manage opportunities, you first need to qualify leads. You need the information you gathered in the previous step to choose qualified leads to approach with a sales opportunity. Qualifying leads can save your sales team time and effort by targeting the leads that have the potential to become high-value customers.
Create a sales opportunity pipeline
A sales pipeline is the funnel that leads go through to become customers. A sales opportunity pipeline is the funnel that qualified leads go through to become higher-value customers. With an opportunity, you have a goal value to hit. Knowing where a lead is on a sales pipeline allows you to approach your lead with enough information and manage to successfully convert them to opportunities. You have to create your opportunity pipeline to track your leads’ progress towards your opportunity goal. RunSensible is a business management software that offers an intuitive opportunity management tool. With RunSensible, you can create different opportunity pipelines based on different leads and offers. What’s cool about RunSensible’s opportunity pipeline is that it shows you how close to hitting your goal your leads are in percentages. This way, you will have a statistically clear idea of sales opportunity success possibilities.
Track communication
You need to stay in touch with your opportunities (qualified leads) throughout your opportunity process. This will help solidify your relationship with them and ensure they don’t fall out of your funnel. It will also help you know them better and understand their concerns, pain points, and budget. Based on your communications with your opportunities, you can assure them that you are offering them the opportunity to get the best of your products or services. You can track every communication via email, call, or text message from the opportunity management feature on RunSensible.
Disqualify lost prospects
You need to disqualify leads that have been inactive and not engaged in your sales pipeline. I know it’s hard to let go of leads. Still, you need to do so because focusing on prospects that are not interested or have lost interest in your business takes time and effort away from those that have the potential to seal the deal.
Use the right tool
Investing in the right CRM opportunity management software is crucial in successfully managing opportunities. The best software should help you create and track sales pipelines, offer CRM and lead tracking, allow personalization and customization, schedule appointments, email marketing, and invoice and contract building. Thankfully, you don’t need to go bother Google right now. RunSensible offers all those plus workflow automation that basically saves time and makes your life much easier.
Benefits of Opportunity Management Tool
I’ve already given you a few examples of how an opportunity management tool helps increase sales. If you still need more reasons to invest in a CRM opportunity management software, take a look at these points:
Improves lead management
A CRM opportunity management tool like RunSensible is not just focused on opportunities. The software will gather and organize your leads so your team can have access to them. Each lead will have a profile containing all the information you need. You can have personalized interaction with your leads to assess and qualify them for a sale opportunity.
Automate repetitive processes
Automation is a great feature of a CRM opportunity management software that basically handles all your repetitive and time-consuming tasks. The tasks you can automate with RunSensible are:
- Data entry.
- Appointment scheduling.
- Sending reminders and follow-ups.
- Sending emails and text messages.
- Assigning tasks to team members like sales reps.
Keep everyone on the same page
By giving access to your team members, every one of your sales reps will be able to focus on the right opportunity. Status updates and real-time alerts can help your team members approach opportunities more strategically and increase the chance of them successfully closing a deal.
Get everything in one place with integration
With RunSensible, you can integrate your emails, import your documents, and manage all your communications from the same dashboard. This reduces the hassle of managing different software all at once. Email integration allows you to link your tool to Gmail and Outlook and have all your previous emails in one place. You can also create customized email templates to manage communication with your opportunities in a more personalized manner.
Recap: You Need RunSensible to Manage Opportunities
If you plan to earn a certain amount of money in a certain period of time, an opportunity management process is what you need. CRM opportunity management software are tools that will take care of managing and tracking your opportunities until you hit your goal. RunSensible is a great CRM opportunity management tool that offers all of the features we covered in this blog and so much more. You get a powerful CRM feature alongside opportunity management, online booking schedule, email marketing, and other features that benefit your opportunity management process. Everything on RunSensible can be automated and customized. Want to hear a cool fact? You get all of that at an affordable price!
FAQ
What are CRM opportunity management software?
A sales opportunity management software is a tool that manages and tracks sales opportunities.
How do I choose the best Sales opportunity management tool?
You have to consider factors like price, ease of use, customization, and integration.
What are the stages of opportunity management?
Qualification, finding pain points, identifying key decision-makers, drafting and sending quotes, and finally, closing the deal.
