If you’re in sales, you know that one of your main goals is to turn leads into opportunities into deals won. Opportunity management is often the great divide between a successful and effective sales team and one that wastes time and resources.
By creating an opportunity management strategy and system within your CRM, you’ll make sure you’re converting opportunities into sales — and revenue — in the best way possible. monday sales CRM gives you the chance to process your sales opportunity data, understand where the issues lie, and more.
In this blog, we’ll dive into opportunity management as part of sales strategy and how to use your CRM software to support it.
What is opportunity management?
Opportunity management simply put is the process of organizing and keeping track of the deals that are part of your sales pipeline.
Some organizations call opportunity management pipeline management. Opportunity management makes sure that you’re keeping track or all of the leads in your pipeline to make sure they are moving along the sales funnel as you hoped and/or anticipated.
Why do you need opportunity management?
No one wants to waste time on leads that are dead-ends. The goal of any sales team is to focus on the right leads and convert those that are on the fence into paying customers. By having a systematic approach to dealing with opportunities, sales teams become more efficient and more successful.
Sales managers usually are in charge of opportunity management using a wide range of tools. Sure, you can use a spreadsheet but that requires a lot of work. The more advanced systems use a CRM as the base of their opportunity management.
If you want to stay on top of your sales process, opportunity management is a must. Why? Without it, you’re basically swimming in the dark. You have a bunch of leads, that are in theory potential opportunities, and potential paying customers. Without a strategic method in place, these leads get lost and never convert, wasting your sales team’s time and effort and costing the business valuable revenue.
What is the difference between lead management and opportunity management?
It’s critical to remember that opportunity management is not lead management. Lead management deals with managing the various leads in your pipeline. This is part of opportunity management but not all of it.
This method will also help you to understand which opportunities are worth focusing on as opposed to others.
5 opportunity management best practices
Opportunity management is handled differently in different companies with different needs. We’ve rounded up a few of the general best practices for implementing opportunity management.
Understand your opportunities
Dive into each opportunity to understand what they are looking for. This includes researching the prospect even before discussing closing a deal including budget, the person’s position in the company, their purchasing process, etc. This method allows sales teams to focus on the biggest potential deals to put the most effort into them.
Create clear stages throughout your sales process
Most sales aren’t quick and involve multiple stages. These stages should be clearly marked along your sales crm pipeline. As opportunities move along the sales pipeline, you’ll be able to plan your next steps to try and guarantee that the opportunity turns into a paying customer. You’ll also be able to understand where opportunities are getting stuck in the pipeline and which phases you should focus on moving forward.
Track all communication
Track every communication you have with your opportunities as part of your opportunity management. Not only does this help you stay on top of things, but it can also help optimize your sales process and pipeline.
Tracking communication also helps sales teams create a solid follow-up policy. As most sales require multiple conversations, demos, etc., making sure you follow up on a regular basis is important.
Remove dead-end leads
Is a lead going nowhere? Remove them from your sales funnel and pipeline and stay focused on the real opportunities. When you waste time on a lead that is going nowhere, it is naturally taking away from your time with a lead that brings in significant money to your business.
Use an opportunity management tool
Sure, you can create your own docs to track leads and opportunities on your own. But why work so hard when amazing platforms already exist to help you in your quest to optimize your opportunity management? CRM tools exist to help you track wins, losses, and opportunities along the way just for this reason.
Should you manage opportunities in a CRM?
Your CRM is the key to rounding up all of your business opportunities in a single platform. It’s the basis for creating long-lasting relationships with customers and having a high-level view of what’s going on within your sales team.
That’s why it only makes sense to use your CRM for opportunity management as well. A CRM makes it easy to understand which opportunities are significant, which are less so, and which you should focus on converting at every step of the way.
The benefits are far-reaching. With a CRM you’ll be able to prioritize opportunities, track your progress along the way, get a clear overview of what’s going on in your pipeline, and all of this while boosting your team’s productivity.
monday sales CRM makes sure you’re on the right track with every opportunity
With monday sales CRM, you can stay focused on the right opportunities throughout your sales pipeline. With our customizable solution, you’ll gain visibility into your sales pipeline to keep you focused on the right opportunities and boost your productivity.
Looking to communicate directly with opportunities from your CRM? monday sales CRM gives you the chance to centralize client communication so you can stay organized on top of every contact.
If your sales team knows that it needs opportunity management but doesn’t know how to implement it, monday.com is here to help. You’ll be able to add in your opportunity information and get access to practical dashboards and insights at the click of button. With customizable dashboards and data, you’ll make sure to stay on top of every opportunity.
Frequently asked questions
What is opportunity management in sales?
Opportunity management is when an organization tracks all of its sales opportunities across the sales pipeline in an effort to identify which they can convert into paying customers. As not all opportunities are created equal, opportunity management helps sales teams understand what to focus on at any given time.
What is opportunity management in CRM?
Using a CRM for opportunity management makes life easy for sales teams by gathering all opportunity data in one place. With a holistic view of your sales pipeline, you’ll gain valuable insights into your opportunities, from the initial lead to a closed deal.
Turn opportunities into revenue with monday.com
Now’s the time to make sure that you’re making the most of your opportunities to bring in maximum revenue. With monday sales CRM you’ll enjoy a birdseye view of your sales pipeline including detailed information about each opportunity. That way you can make sure to give each opportunity exactly what it needs and is looking for to become a paying customer.
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